Public Interest

Do You Really Want To Be A Public Interest Lawyer?

If you're committed to serving the public, have you ever considered that the law may not be the best area for your talents?

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questionheadIt’s that time of year when our nation’s brightest young minds are all mulling over the same deep questions, namely: Which law school should I attend? Is an improvement of ten spots in the U.S. News rankings worth an extra hundred thousand dollars of debt? And, for that matter, should I even attend law school at all?

For those of you interested in public interest law, this post tackles that last question: Should you even attend law school at all?

Once upon a time, I wrote about what I deemed The Single Most Important Piece of Advice for Aspiring Public Interest Lawyers. In that post, I led off with a few assumptions, the first of which was this: you do in fact want to be a public interest lawyer. I explained my thinking on that assumption, placing emphasis on the “public interest” part (e.g., if you’re planning on working in a big firm first to pay down your law school debt, my advice probably isn’t for you). Today, though, I want to focus on the “lawyer” part. Which is to say, sure, you’re committed to working in the public interest, but do you really want to be a lawyer?

Being a lawyer in the public interest world definitely has its benefits. For one thing, there’s plenty of work you can only do if you get a law degree and pass the bar first. Legal aid and indigent criminal defense are off limits unless you’re a lawyer. So is litigation, an unmatched tool for twisting the arms of the powerful to achieve change. And, believe it or not, an “Esquire” after your name brings a certain cachet in coalition work: you may be a 25-year-old with no real-world experience to speak of, but people in organizations aligned with yours will still likely be interested in what you have to say (or at least they’ll pretend to).

But each of these benefits has its less desirable doppelgänger. As I’ve covered week after week in this column, legal aid and indigent criminal defense are plagued by underfunding, understaffing, and overwork. If you want to help the indigent with their most pressing, sometimes life-or-death problems, you’ll have to be prepared to do it for little pay and on the fly — perhaps not even meeting your clients until they respond when you call out their name in the courtroom hallway. And you’ll have to be prepared to be laid off when the legislature slashes funding again next year.

And as for litigation, yes, only lawyers can be litigators. But other public interest organizations can serve as clients for public interest lawyers and have a say in strategy without having to deal with the tedious nuts and bolts of discovery and motion practice. At its best, litigation can be a chess match; at its worst, it is mindless but potentially high-stakes drudgery.

Finally, the cachet that comes with your law degree and bar admission also brings with it demands on your time. That coalition partner who solicited your advice on an issue of mutual interest also wants you to attend her series of fourteen Saturday-morning brown-bag working group sessions — and maybe add some free legal advice or, better yet, get involved with a decades-old controversy that’s been in litigation three or four times with no resolution in sight.

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There are some other issues to keep in mind too: If the pay for some public interest law jobs looks decent compared to the broader nonprofit sector, remember to factor in the monthly payments on the educational debt you accumulate (if you do, in fact, accumulate educational debt!) — and then check out the statistics on legal job-seekers and assess your chances of actually getting one of those jobs.

If you’ve read through all this and thought: “I like thinking on my feet! Meeting a new client on the day of a hearing sounds exhilarating. It’s fun to go head-to-head with an opponent in a setting full of arcane rules, even if it involves plenty of tedium, and I actually like Saturday-morning working groups. Besides, putting up with all this will allow me to make a real difference in the world.” Well, then, congratulations, you really do want to be a public interest lawyer! (And don’t take all the cynicism too seriously: public interest law really can be an intellectually rich and deeply rewarding career.) Now good luck choosing a law school.

Earlier: The Single Most Important Piece of Advice for Aspiring Public Interest Lawyers

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 [email protected].

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