The Final Verdict on the Legal Profession
I promise there are no other legal puns in this post
From time to time, a man needs to realize when it is time to move on.
The sunk-cost fallacy is the idea that it would be a waste of time and resources to abandon something one has already invested significant time and resources into, even if abandoning the thing is beneficial. Speaking from experience, I certainly felt that about my career as a lawyer. I never enjoyed it, not even in law school. It didn't take long—first semester civil procedure, in fact—for me to have an actual panic attack and realize that this was not the place for me, not the course I wanted to set my life on for the next forty or so working years. Red alarm lights flashed, every instinct telling me to “get out” as my professor went on and on about pendant jurisdiction or whatever, but . . . I stayed. I'm not a quitter, right?
And so, like the vast majority of attorneys, I hated my job and was always looking for a way out. It's was hard—not too many people want to hire middle-aged white guys1—but I finally found my exit.
“But why, Alexander? Why did you hate practicing law so much? Surely, it can't be that bad?” I will put it to you in a trendy, edgy, Internet-savvy way for you all: My ancestors used to tame the land, fight wars, conquer enemies, found empires. I spent hours upon hours arguing about redactions.
Redactions.
That's right: the covering up of certain information in an Adobe PDF with those indelible black bars. In the old days, we used to have to manually redact documents with a black Sharpie, which ran the risk of getting you high as a kite, which you needed to survive such drudgery. Yes indeed, this arts and crafts stuff, as I used to term it, really made me appreciate the brutal three-years it took to get through law school, and then the months of studying for the bar, to make much less than what I had been making at a temp job between undergrad and law school, and orders of magnitude less than what friends who majored in something smart like computer science or business or whatever made right out of undergrad.
But this post isn't a complaint; I'm done writing those. This post is about observations.
Work is strange. Work gives us meaning. We all work, but the work that pays the bills, that puts food on the table, is often work we hate. They say that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I’d love to experience that. They also say, rather contradictorily, that even if you do something you love for work, it will eventually feel like a chore. (A) I doubt that, and (B) I’d love to experience that as well.
But basically, you are what you do. So what happens if you hate what you do . . . and then stop doing it?
At some point, you just need to move on. I did. The thing is, I spent 15 years doing a certain thing as my day job, so it’s hard not to feel like my identity is bound up in this.
Conventional wisdom says that the average American spends about 30 percent of their life working. Going by an average American male’s life expectancy of 76.33 years, or 668,650.8 hours, that’s 200,595.24 hours. Fifteen years is 131,400 hours (8,760 hours per year x 15). That’s “only” the equivalent of 360 days officially spent at work (assuming an eight-hour workday and excluding overtime, weekend work, unpaid extra work, etc.). It sure feels a lot longer than that. But basically that’s a year of my life so far spent working at my particular vocation.
The point is, it’s not so easy to just turn that off. But I’m trying.
We wear several hats in life, of course. Being a husband and a father are both full-time jobs with no financial remuneration, but other, richer, rewards. I also enjoy writing and music and other things that aren’t my actual job but are more of a calling—I’m a true amateur because I do those things out of love. Some of us are lucky that what we love overlaps with what we do for 40-plus hours per week.
Basically, most people have multiple identities.
We are what we do.
Sadly, work doesn’t give the same meaning it used to, particularly in the corporate sector. “Quiet quitting” is an awful term, but the phenomenon is real. If you’re under 40 and male, though I’m sure females feel this too, there’s not much for you in the wonderful world of working for someone else. It’s difficult because we need based people in key organizations and in key professions, but at the same time we want people to do well and be well.
As
points out, there is importance in high-status, low-paying jobs, which many legal positions classify as. A part of me worries I am losing status in my move, but at the end of the day I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Now, if you’re a young based person who reads this and still insists on going to law school, first, don’t. Second, if to do, don’t blame me. But third, if you do, don’t have any illusions about the profession.And now what you’ve been waiting for, some thoughts and observations about the legal profession . . .
The Type
Lawyers are high-performers. You have to be reasonably smart to (a) get into law school, (b) graduate law school, (c) pass the bar, and (d) actually practice law. So you are surrounded by the best and brightest, though with some universities2 and states relaxing the requirements to get desired outcomes, I don’t know for how long that’s going to be the case.
Anyway, there’s definitely a certain type. Detail-oriented. Loves to argue. Seeing risks everywhere and how to avoid or mitigate them. Game-planning possible outcomes. Autistic. Operating in gray areas where nothing is certain. That sort of thing.
If this sounds fun to you, great!
But there’s another aspect of lawyering which involves not making decisions, but advising someone who will. If this sounds fun to you, also great! But know that legal is often blamed because if things go awry, well, “Legal said it was okay.”
If you’re not too keen on being blamed for the results of decisions you didn’t even make, this might not be the job for you.
Constant Conflict
There is a certain lawyer type: autistic people who enjoy conflict. And I'm talking about conflict that the lawyer does not have a personal stake in. You have to get worked up on behalf of other people. You have to be ready to flip the asshole switch at a moment’s notice. You are a suit people pay to do the fighting on their behalf. You're either a mercenary or a whore, depending on your perspective on things. You have to enjoy butting heads and feeling your fight-or-flight response kick in on a near daily basis on behalf of, once again, other people. It is vicarious combat; almost voyeuristic.
You have to be careful with what you say and write. All the time. Everything is evidence and is discoverable, with some exceptions. It’s very Stalin-esque in a way with the caveat that the cover-up is often just as bad, or worse, than the bad decision. You learn to sort of be honest (don’t laugh)3 and forthright. Everything—every single thing—is a potential legal battle. Plan from the start.
It’s exhausting.
Debate Club
You've heard it a million times: “Oh, so-and-so is so good at arguing and loves to debate. They’d a make a great lawyer.” No. People who like to debate and argue should most certainly not go to law school, as they will find it grossly unfulfilling.
Any debate and argument in law has to be confined to the very narrow factual and procedural aspects of a given case, and even then it can be further limited to what the judge allows to be within the scope of the case. There's not much room for creativity. What there is, is room for trickery.
Being clever. Making novel arguments, even when they have no hope of success, in the off-chance that they do. Law is, in large part, the domain of foxes, using words as a substitute for physical prowess. The triumph of the physically weak over the physically strong.4 It’s about overwhelming your opponent with bullshit so they get frustrated and make mistakes.
Case in point: No, literally—I'm talking about cases. If you’ve ever seen a legal procedural, you know lawyers like to cite case names like a preacher slinging Bible verses. But unlike case law, the Bible is at least (a) true and (b) full of eternal wisdom. With case law, you can find cases in support of just about any proposition you need at any given time.5 What’s more, if you can’t, you can just say the case supports your point and cite it, even if it doesn’t. Because attorneys rarely just cite one or two cases that are actually on point; no, lawyers like to cite an entire block of cases that they're banking opposing counsel— or the judge—won’t read. Because who has time for that?
Oh, but I did. I certainly did. I read every cited case.6 Do you want to know what I found? I found that many did not stand for the proposition cited in support of a legal point. I also found that many stood for the opposite point. My conclusion was that lawyers will go into Westlaw or whatever other research tool, run a search for cases that feature a certain keyword or legal theory, do a CTRL+F search to find said keyword, and then say “Screw it, put it in the filing” regardless of context. This means that I, person who actually reads the cases, has to go through every single case and waste my time refuting or distinguishing every single case. It is a waste of life that I deeply resent, even if these other attorneys were just “doing their job.”
The thing is, the “job” is being a middleman. A “facilitator.” In reality, it's more like being a roadblock, an obstacle. I know l've shared this story before, but I had a copyrights professor who said something akin to, “I knew I'd never be a creative person, but as an attorney I could at least sit at the feet of creative people and help them do their thing.”
That's great if that's your thing. But if you’re remotely creative or if you want to be the person actually doing stuff, a career in the law is not for you.
Misery Loves Company
I interned at a firm where an older Greek attorney took a liking to me. He was a very bitter, caustic (but funny) guy who clearly regretted his chosen vocation. They all did at that firm, actually, but the Greek attorney was the most dour. He told me something that sticks with me: “All lawyers do is deal with shit. You're at the bottom of a hill and people just roll their shit on to you and you have to deal with it.” And he was 100 percent right.
Of course, this was a litigation firm. But speaking from experience, even non-litigation work involves people coming to you with their problems and asking you to solve them. Often, it’s people who want to do something they know they shouldn’t but are looking for legal cover, or people who want you to decide the course of action so they can wash their hands of it. But sometimes it’s people who are honestly stumped; these are the clients I enjoyed working with the most.
Critical Thinking
Because I’m a warm-and-fuzzy kind of guy, I’ll mention a good point about legal training: it helped a wild, undisciplined, passionate thinker like me to slow down, step back, and demand evidence for any allegation, not just from others but from myself. Learning the law is also about learning how to research, to confirm, to corroborate, to consider one’s source, to find multiple sources, to not just take people’s word for it. You also learn to be precise and demand—nay, require—precision from everyone, not just yourself.
Of course, in personal relations, these aren’t always good things,7 but as I’ll describe later, being a lawyer is different than being a human being.
You also learn to structure your written arguments in a clear, logical manner, but this leaves one with difficulty in recognizing the beauty of the English language and not just its brutal efficiency.
Man, see, even when I’m trying to praise the law, I can’t help but bury it.
What, Me Worry?
I found the legal profession to be a never-ending exercise in looking over your shoulder, of worrying that you violated some procedural rule or inadvertently said something out of turn that could torpedo your whole case. Of failing to cite some line of cases that your argument hinged upon. Of accidentally violating a law or regulation and being personally liable.
There was an omnipresent, burning knot in my stomach. Literal “it kept me up at night” stuff. Of feeling less than human because the profession does not let you act, think, or speak like a human.
And now . . . it’s gone. That knot is untied. I’m so unused to not always worrying about something, about being constantly busy and inundated with stuff that needs to be done immediately, I almost don’t know what to do with myself.
Almost.
I think I’m going to enjoy feeling like a human being again. You are what you do.
So the LSAT is now optional for Harvard. Man, I sure wish I could’ve just used my GRE scores instead. Fun fact: back in 2005 when I was applying to law schools, prior to the DEI revolution, the essay question for Harvard, and I am not joking, was “Explain how your ethnic heritage can add to Harvard.” I had to bullshit paragraph after paragraph about being Greek like I had a fucking chance of getting in.
Okay, laugh.
Bringing back dueling or some other sort of controlled violence for solving disputes might make society less litigious and better behaved. Just a thought.
The Anglo-American jurisprudential tradition of stare decisis, i.e., that precedent controls, is kind of dumb, because bad precedent often controls. But it wouldn’t be as bad if the Supreme Court didn’t invent the idea of judicial review—that the judiciary has final say about what the law means—out of whole cloth. It’s a usurpation of the legislative branch’s power and is nowhere in the Constitution (for all the Constitution matters anymore). It literally allows judges to legislate from the bench. And you can’t do annyrhing about that because it’s legal. Why? Because the Supreme Court said so, that’s why, and that’s literally the only reason needed. Jefferson should have had John Marshall hanged. Also: conservatives are pussies and should support judges who agree with them legislating from the bench 24/7. The other side has no compunctions against it. Why unilaterally disarm yourself? But I digress.
I like to think all other lawyers do too.
In fact, it’s a net negative that makes interpersonal relationships very, very difficult.
Excellent piece. Entirely opposite to my experience, but then I am a barrister in England & Wales (and a bunch more places if I fill in a forn) so my experience and practce are different.
I am beyond middle age. I am "aging out" of the barrister game, as it were and I find it heart-breaking. I love it. You don't, so good for you. It takes balls. A good man knows when to pull the trigger. Your family will benefit to no end is my prediction.
Well done & God bless.
Overworked, dishonest, incompetent, or all three . . . damn man that applies to many professions!
Regarding regret, I’m almost certain life would have turned out better had I either not gone to law school, or had just dropped out. There were other things I wanted to go to school for that might not have been as “high status,” for what that matters, but I would’ve probably excelled in because I cared about them instead of stagnating in a field I do not care about for 15 years. I live with this regret every day. I’m in my 40s and feel like I’m in the same plane I was in my 20s, just with more stress, responsibility, and debt.