On-Campus With Elie: 3L Sues Firm For Being Elitist

Just because it's unfair doesn't make it illegal.

Ed. note: This will be my weekly, non-Redline column for Above the Law. The way I see it, law school applications might be down 37% since 2010, but that just means there are still 40,000 people who need me.

Every law student needs to make an important cognitive leap during their three years of legal training. At some point, you have to stop asking what’s “fair” and start asking what’s “legal.” That’s the first step to “thinking like a lawyer.” That’s what separates lawyers from the heathen philosophers and ethicists who pontificate about morality like it springs forth from their own navels.

Not everybody gets there. A bad or disingenuous lawyer (any 1L, Nancy Grace, Antonin Scalia, me) will decide what he or she wants the world to look like, then try to twist or manipulate laws to fit with that world view. That’s fine, if you want to get on television. But law school is supposed to teach you the difference between sophistry and lawyering.

There’s a 3L making news this week who hasn’t learned what he should have during law school. He’s suing law firms because they do something that I’m sure is very unfair. But it’s certainly not illegal. And arguing that it is or should be illegal in his pro se complaint just makes him sound like an idiot.

It makes him sound like exactly the kind of idiot who justifies the law firms’ unfair practices….

Drexel Law 3L William Hanrahan is suing Dechert and other Biglaw firms in and around Philadelphia for disability discrimination. His theory of the case is convoluted, so I’m going to use bullet points:

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  • The LSAT discriminates against disabled people.
  • U.S. News heavily considers the LSAT when ranking law schools.
  • People with poor LSAT scores end up at law schools U.S. News considers bad.
  • Law firms like Dechert only want to hire people from good law schools.
  • By — and this part gets really weird — merely considering U.S. News rankings, law firms engage in discriminatory hiring practices against the disabled.
  • I can haz Biglaw now?

I made up that last part. The rest is accurate. Concurring Opinions reports that Hanrahan suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. He claims that he finished 4th in his class at Drexel, but didn’t get a job at Dechert, Blank Rome, or Pepper Hamilton. If Hanrahan was a regular reader of Above the Law, he might have known that people from Drexel don’t generally get jobs at Dechert, Blank Rome, or Pepper Hamilton, and he might have considered that before going to freaking Drexel if all he wanted to do was work in Biglaw. Then again, my posts on Above the Law tend to discriminate against people suffering from Special Snowflake Head-In-Ass Syndrome (a.k.a. “Cooleyitis”), which makes it difficult for those people to see three years in front of their faces.

Look, I think it’s unfair too. I think it’s unfair that Biglaw firms hire only the best and brightest as largely defined by a test they took three or four years before anybody tried to hire them. I’m a DEMOCRAT, damn it. I believe everybody has worth (except rich white people), and that under-performing on a stupid standardized test is not really an indication of intelligence, work ethic, or general ability. I had a friend in Biglaw who went to Pace and he told me that walking around with his Pace diploma gave him new insights into what it must be like to be black. The casual, everyday prejudices felt by lawyers with crappy law degrees is real and is, truly, unfair.

But, the professional disrespect of people with low LSAT scores is in fact a BUSINESS REASON to avoid hiring those people. Having a poor LSAT score doesn’t make you a protected class. And therefore an employer is well within its rights to say, “I really like you Willie, but that damn LSAT. It’s kind of gross. I think you’d make the other lawyers and clients here feel uncomfortable. Maybe you’d be better suited to working in the mail room.” That sucks, but that’s legal. Hanrahan isn’t arguing that Dechert and Blank Rome and Pepper discriminated against him because he’s disabled, he’s arguing that they discriminated against him because he has a crappy LSAT score. That’s legal. It’s legal to discriminate against people with crappy test scores. Life is a bitch, and then you die.

Of course, you might have noticed that even getting to that point involved accepting a lot of ridiculous and generally unsupported premises in this guy’s complaint:

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1. I accepted the premise that the LSAT discriminates against disabled people. But that is a pretty tough argument to make, let alone prove.
2. I accepted the premise that U.S. News unfairly weighs the LSAT. But the way a private magazine comes up with its proprietary methodology is hardly a cause of action.
3. I accepted the premise that U.S. News is the only relevant law school ranking. WHICH I DON’T BELIEVE (please, check out the Above the Law Rankings, which don’t even look at LSAT score. Also, give me money somehow.).
4. I accepted the premise that law firms only use U.S. News to make their hiring decision. Which is patently false.
5. Critically, I accepted the premise that there is no meaningful difference between the quality of law schools that might matter to an employer. I mean, we can debate how and why a person ends up at Drexel as opposed to Penn. And we can argue about our methods for assessing the relative quality of a Penn education from a Drexel education. But Jesus, at some point, we’re just going to get back to a place where we most of us agree that Penn is a better school than Drexel for law. Likely, even Hanrahan would have gone to Penn instead of Drexel if he had been accepted (who’s discriminatory now???). Some things are just better. Coke is better than Pepsi. The PS4 is better than the Xbox One. Summer is better than the freezing hellscape most of us are living through. The truth is out there, folks.

Feeling butthurt that nobody in Biglaw respects your law school is not a cause of action. Drexel should have taught him that.