Every couple of months, an anti-law school or “being a lawyer sucks” article will come out that will get bounced around the legal blogosphere a bit. If you’ve been keeping up, you may have read or heard about the latest one, penned by Susan Estrich, a partner at Quinn Emanuel. Don’t go to law school. Written for creative.com, featured here on Above the Law, and a bunch of other sites. It’s like a voice calling from the grave: don’t do what I did…
I’m sure way more people read the headline than the article. The second part of the sentence was left off the title. Right at the start, she says, “Don’t go to law school unless you actually want to be a lawyer.” Hard to argue that logic. What is it about our profession anyway, that people want to get our professional degree but then not practice our profession? I’ve never met anyone who went to medical school who didn’t want to practice medicine in some capacity. Or decided to get an architecture degree just because they were fond of buildings but wanted to teach Spanish for a living. Maybe law school is more useful than we thought, if folks who don’t even want to be lawyers routinely burn off three years and go six figures into debt to get a law degree and then not practice law.
There are definitely other things you can do if you just care about a certain end result. Here are a few:
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• If you just want money, be a janitor, like this guy in Vermont who amassed $8 million. One good thing about a janitor career: no $200,000 barrier to entry.
• If you just want to be famous, consider a career in plumbing. Who doesn’t remember Joe the Plumber?
• If all you care about is sex, be a schoolteacher. (Way too many examples, but here’s one from last month.)
• If all you really want to do is serve your community, be a priest. Or a drug dealer. Or better yet, a drug-dealing priest.
But if for some crazy reason you actually want to be a lawyer, go to freaking law school!!
Even Ms. Estrich somewhat grudgingly admits some people love practicing law, and that it can be a wonderful life. She may or may not be talking about her fellow Biglaw colleagues. (We know Ms. Estrich does actually still practice law, since she posted her column at 3:30 in the morning.) After all, not everyone in Biglaw is miserable. It’s only been a couple of weeks since I named a few things that I miss about Biglaw. In Biglaw though, there’s a lot that’s beyond your control.
Whereas in SmallLaw, you control just about everything. Your firm name, your office, your working environment, the dress code, etc. If you like being your own boss, serving others, and making some good money to boot, SmallLaw is the place to be. It’s a challenge to carve out your own path, but it’s exciting, exhilarating, rewarding, and just about every other adjective one can think of, except dull. I’ve had more than one person tell me not making partner in Biglaw was the best thing that ever happened to him.
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There’s a lot of law outside of Biglaw, which leads me to a defense of unaccredited law schools. If someone knows they want to be a lawyer, and knows exactly where they’re going to fit into the profession, maybe steering clear of a school with a $200,000 price tag isn’t a bad idea. Nashville School of Law, formerly known as Nashville YMCA Night School, is, of course, in Nashville, where I used to live. The school isn’t accredited by the ABA, but is accredited by the state, so graduates can sit for the Tennessee bar exam and practice in Tennessee (one of our best states). The school feeds the local courts to a much greater extent than, say, Vanderbilt. I was a social worker in Nashville, and was involved in one court case. Every single attorney on the case — the defense attorney, the prosecutor, and the judge — had gone to Nashville School of Law. It made me forever skeptical of the notion that anyone who doesn’t go to a T14 school is automatically facing a lifetime of unemployment.
Know who else went to Nashville School of Law, back during its YMCA days? Al Gore, Sr., who went on to become a three-term U.S. Senator and left a good enough impression on folks in the state that his son became a senator too (you may have heard of him). Things seem to have worked out for him. Maybe they’ll work out for others too.
Gary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and compliance matters for investment funds, small businesses, and non-profits, occasionally dabbling in litigation. You can reach Gary by email at [email protected].