Being A Public Interest Lawyer

Should a non-traditional student go to law school to be a public interest lawyer?

It’s been a year since my first post at Above the Law — don’t you feel lucky?! — and I figure the occasion calls for some reflection. Not reflection about student loan debt or legal aid funding or systemic racism or some cause du jour, but about public interest lawyering writ large. And, lucky me, last week I received an email asking for just such a reflection.  

Here’s the email, lightly edited to remove some personal details and otherwise trim here and there:

I found your column while going down the rabbit hole of the internet — and I’m on my way to asking you, a complete stranger, for life advice.

I have spent the last decade-plus working in another field. But life has changed and my interests have changed. In my mid-thirties, I’m not a spring chicken but that doesn’t mean I’m not full of idealistic grit. Recently, my attention has turned to law school.

As a lawyer, I feel I will have a chance to be a good citizen, fight the good fight, make changes, make a difference. I am no stranger to hard work and long hours but — the question I want to pose to you — am I setting myself up for discouragement and burnout, for frustration and disillusionment?

As a self described “dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer,” you might be the exact person to help me extract the positive parts of the job. And, side note, I have NO IDEA what the work of public interest lawyers even looks like (except from my many internet searches) — so if you feel up to it, could you fill me in on what my options would even be after law school?

So how about it, folks?  For those of you who are public interest lawyers, do you feel like you’re good citizens, fighting the good fight, making changes, and making a difference? Or is the life of a public interest lawyer one of discouragement and burnout, frustration and disillusionment? Or perhaps some mix of the two? I’ll supply my own answers, but I hope others will provide their own earnest thoughts in the comments as well.

When I was a legal aid lawyer, I felt like I was being a good citizen and fighting the good fight, but not making changes and mostly not making a difference except occasionally in the life of an individual. There is value in filling an essential societal role — being the person who’s there for someone who’s hit rock bottom — and some people thrive on that. Most of my former coworkers are still doing legal aid work (and the next biggest set probably would be, too, but for layoffs). But for me, making a difference only in the lives of individuals and not on some broader scale wasn’t enough to stave off frustration. I knew pretty early on that I wouldn’t be a legal aid lawyer forever.

I would caution that my experience with legal aid was working heavy and steady dockets requiring me to be in court every day, often with more than ten clients to represent in courthouse-hallway negotiations and formal hearings. There’s not a lot of room for creative thinking in that setup, and there are plenty of legal aid lawyers doing work with the potential for more systemic benefits.

When I was a municipal lawyer, I felt like I was being a good citizen, fighting the good fight, making changes, and making a difference. I was actually surprised that I left that job not at all disillusioned about the good and often ambitious work my colleagues in the city legal department were doing (city government overall was more of a mixed bag). My workload was varied — I worked on plaintiff- and defense-side litigation, advised the city on discrete legal issues, and did some investigation for lawsuits the city was thinking of bringing. The overall thrust of the position was that the city had progressive goals, and I tried to help it achieve those goals by legal means. Obviously not all municipal legal departments are like that — but I would happily have stayed at the one I worked in if something even better hadn’t come along.

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And that brings me to now. I work for an issue-specific nonprofit and have a mixed slate of litigation and policy work, the latter ranging from lobbying to serving government advisory bodies to working with coalitions to find broad solutions to problems. I definitely feel like a good citizen, fighting the good fight, making changes, and making a difference. And, though I’ve been with my current employer for years now, I generally don’t feel discouragement and burnout or frustration and disillusionment, except with respect to specific issues from time to time. For example, I’ve realized that, though litigation is an important tool, I don’t love the nuts and bolts of it — and there are a lot of nuts and bolts. So it’s certainly possible to get burned out on a particular lawsuit. But, lucky for me, my position is built to balance litigation with more freewheeling policy work.

Once again, it’s important to highlight that these are just my experiences, and they present only a very limited cross-section of all public interest work. Legal aid organizations, and even attorney jobs within a single organization, can vary greatly. Municipalities certainly aren’t all alike. The same goes for advocacy-oriented nonprofits. And I haven’t even touched on other common public interest jobs that I write about from time to time, like criminal defense and prosecution. For a broader cross-section, I’d look first at Harvard’s public interest law career guides, which I’ve always found useful in discussing specific options within the various subfields of public interest law.  

And, as I’ve counselled before in broad terms, I’d be very cautious about incurring law school debt unless you attend a school with a truly excellent loan repayment assistance program. Not only can it be tough to hold down a $40,000-a-year legal aid job while paying off a six-figure student loan, but the calculus gets even worse when you’re unemployed. And I’ve supervised stellar interns in the past who’ve had great difficulty finding any work at all.

But if the question comes down to this — is it possible to carve out a really satisfying career as a public interest lawyer? — then the answer is an unequivocal yes. The job market is tough, the salaries aren’t great, and the work can be frustrating, to be sure. But it really is tough to beat being paid first to learn as much as possible about a problem that’s begging to be solved and then to go out into the world and do your best to solve it.


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Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.