Be Proud Of Your 'Mediocre' Career

So many lawyers have been the “foot soldiers,” the “grunts,” slogging through the thicket of individual clients and businesses.

When people ask me what is the best part about writing columns, oops, blogs, for Above the Law, the answer is easy, it’s my readers. Lawyers and non-lawyers from all over the world email me about what I’ve written, whether to praise me or bury me, so to speak. That people take the time not only to read, but to write and share their thoughts delights my ATL editors and me.

So it has been with last’s week post on Looking Back on a ‘Mediocre’ Career. I’ll share some of the comments. The consensus: just because fame, fortune, and other material accoutrements don’t cloak every lawyer, that doesn’t mean that “blue-collar” lawyers have been any less successful or had less meaningful careers as practicing lawyers.

One woman lawyer asked if the comment about being on the downside of a mediocre career came from a man and if so, he should be drawn, quartered, and shot at dawn. Yup, it was a man and yes, so stipulated.

She said that she got a late start in practicing law and so didn’t have the opportunity to partake of fame and fortune. However, she remembers:

[T]he clients who have truly appreciated how much I helped them. I wouldn’t trade all the awards in the world for the genuine thanks I’ve received from some of my clients. More money, of course, would have been nice. And I would have loved to have made good law at least once in my career. But again, I did really help some people, and that counts for a lot, at least in my book.

Try to match the eloquence of this next lawyer’s response:

My father and I are lawyers. My father, since 1978, has been practicing nonstop until now. He didn’t always get what he wanted out of lawyering financially and professionally, but whenever he looks back he would always say that he helped many, many people and, for him, that’s surely enough.

I’m always at awe at my father’s simple outlook of a lawyer’s success and joy, unlike the current view now when everything is measured by extremes-how fat a lawyer had gotten his bank account, how big he billed this past year, how powerful his connections are to government and high society, how intelligent one was during law school or how he ranked in the bar exams.   

Which is sad because a lawyer’s purpose — helping other people — gets lost in the glory or its pursuit. The nameless lawyers who lack these qualities are not celebrated, their efforts unrecognized. [I’m reminded of] how beautiful this profession is and why I fell in love with it in the first place.

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Another reader:

Thanks for your words about lives well lived in service. I’m a solo renting space in an old mansion full of solos-criminal defense, domestic relations, complex litigation, and general civil. We do the work that matters to real people.  

[My] practice itself is public interest. Because my cases are mostly contingent, for working people who can’t afford to pay. Because I take lots of calls from people who have been wronged that the law can’t help, and from the few that I can. Wrongful discharge, wage-hour, discrimination, harassment. I do my part to keep corporate America’s Super Lawyers in business and their billings high

Okay, Biglaw and others, thank this lawyer and all others similarly situated who help to keep you busy and billing.

Another lawyer commented, “Not every deal requires leaving no stone unturned and sometimes we just do the best we can to advise our clients and help them assess the risks they’re facing.” So much of what we do is risk assessment; while clients make the decisions, they look to us for guidance and whether the juice is worth the squeeze.

Another dinosaur lawyer commented:

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I do sincerely believe that I have truly helped hundreds (thousands?) Of people when they were in a very difficult time of their lives (bankruptcy, probate, family law)….but that is so easy to forget!

From yet another:

I haven’t won any awards, but I like to think I made a difference in my community as a government attorney, and then as a referee. I, too, have seen a steady stream of lawyers move through the ranks, the older ones getting tired and cranky, and the younger ones feeling entitled and smarter. Not all, of course, but enough of them to allow me to tell the difference, to see the change.

He thinks that attention must be paid to “mediocre” lawyers. He wants to remind those who are retiring that both the why and what they have done have mattered. “They deserve that much.”

One more dinosaur lawyer comment and then I’ll stop:

Putting modest aside, I am a big deal. I am a Super Lawyer, I have been on the cover of a magazine, I have a raft of awards — they’re home in the attic, if you care to see them. And that doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that I love what I do, I work with marvelous colleagues who refrain from telling Old jokes, at least most of the time, and I have loyal clients whose problems I love solving. It is not a mediocre career at all — it is a joy to be part of what I still consider a noble profession — when was the last time you heard that phrase?

Well, when was it?

So many lawyers have been the “foot soldiers,” the “grunts,” slogging through the thicket of individual clients and businesses. If “mediocre” includes representing people who don’t have ready “access to justice” (everyone’s favorite buzz words), then I think all these lawyers would plead guilty.

Many of us dinosaurs entered the profession at a time when big money was not on the table, not even for Biglaw. We wanted to be lawyers (especially growing up and coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement, feminism, Vietnam, Watergate) to make a difference. We have made a difference, one client at a time. We just need to remind ourselves and each other of that