Old Lady Lawyer: Who Are The Best And The Brightest?

Columnist Jill Switzer on supporting those in the legal profession without elite backgrounds.

In 1972, David Halberstam (Google him) wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Best and the Brightest (affiliate link), about the fiasco that was the Vietnam War (look that up) for the United States.

Halberstam’s thesis was that those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who were the brainiacs led us into a war we couldn’t win and didn’t win. Using the term “best and the brightest” in a complimentary way misses Halberstam’s pointed irony that the best and the brightest knew less about the reality of that war than the grunts in the war machine, who knew the war was not winnable.

There seems to be an unwarranted emphasis on the “best and the brightest” in the legal profession, as if the only things worth having in law school are positions on law review and Order of the Coif, followed by a “cushy” Biglaw associate position fueled by enough money to start paying down that enormous student debt. Just because you graduated at the top of your class, on Law Review, Order of the Coif, and have nailed that primo job doesn’t mean you know how to practice law or how to be a lawyer.

While the allure of those things certainly entices, they have nothing to do with the “boots on the ground” practice of law. Those who go to law school at night or part-time, those who enroll in unaccredited law schools as we have here in California, or even worse, matriculate at a (gasp) on-line distance learning law school are considered in many corners to be the lawyer equivalent of pond scum. They are looked down upon by those in the elite law schools and those who graduated from them. They certainly won’t be hired by any of the Biglaw firms. In my book, though, those lawyers who make it through deserve applause, rather than disdain.

Kudos to anyone who’s graduated from night law school, having spent all day working, and then spending evenings in class three or four nights a week and studying all weekend. In most cases, those students are older, more mature, highly motivated and understand the sacrifices being made.

Kudos to anyone who is willing to enroll in an unaccredited law school where bar passage rates tend to be dismal, but students are willing to take the risk. Their college grades may have been dreadful, their LSATs unimpressive, but they want to be lawyers and are willing to roll the dice. Those unaccredited law schools are in parts of the state unserved by any other law school and way less expensive than the elite schools.

Kudos to those students, who may be anywhere in the world, whether in the military or not, who want to be lawyers, and distance learning provides them that opportunity.

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California State Bar President David Pasternak has said:

[W]e we need to make sure that anyone who has the desire, the intellectual capacity and the good moral character to be a lawyer has the opportunity to do so.

Precisely my point.

Why are we lawyers so condescending toward those who take non-elite paths to become lawyers? The world considers our profession elitist in the extreme as it is. Should we close the doors to all those with mediocre grades and minimal LSAT scores, but who have the desire and the intellectual capacity, as well as the good moral character? Really, how well do test scores predict law school success? Does that mean that someone might graduate in the middle of the class, rather than at the top? That will kill the chances of working in Biglaw, but it doesn’t mean that the student will be anything less than a good, competent lawyer in practice. Not everyone can be numero uno.

Everyone in the profession talks about “access to justice,” but what about the average middle-class American who can barely afford to keep her family afloat, let alone pay for a lawyer to draft an estate plan, set up a new business, handle a custody matter or whatever the bread and butter issue might be?

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That’s where the legal profession wastes time on trivialities, e.g. law school pedigree, class rank, and all those other things that mean nothing to anyone, especially prospective clients, except to other lawyers. It’s not where lawyers went to law school; if they passed the bar, the playing field is even (except perhaps for those few who seek and obtain jobs in Biglaw and/or prestigious clerkships, and granted that some students have complained about the lack of transparency in bar passage statistics, but that’s a topic for another column).

The profession needs to pay substantive attention elsewhere. It’s the non-traditional providers of legal services that are competing for and winning a lot of the bread and butter business that many lawyers rely upon for sustenance. We may disdain those providers, but we ignore them at our peril.

Those providers are, in many ways, eating our lunch. In a recent Altman Weil survey of Biglaw, more than sixty percent of Biglaw firms see non-traditional providers of legal services as either taking business from the firms now or viewed as potential threats.

I know that sometimes (not always) lawyers have to redo/undo the work the non-traditional providers of legal services have done, but they’re providing services that our profession doesn’t seem to want to supply. Those providers see a gaping hole they are driving a semi through.

The profession is undergoing massive, systemic, no-turning-back changes. The people who are the “boots on the ground” are part of those changes. Maybe they are the best and the brightest. No irony there.


Jill Switzer is closing in on 40 (not a typo) years as a active member of the State Bar of California. Yes, folks, California, that state west of the Sierra Nevada, which everyone likes to diss. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see old lawyers, young lawyers, and those in-between interact — it’s not always pretty. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.