Lawyers Do Good (Really)
Even if you’re stuck in Biglaw, there are plenty of opportunities to see your work as good. So go forth, and do good.
Gary J. Ross
As I write this, I’m a little worn out from all the good I’ve been doing lately. You might ask, have you been feeding the needy? No way, runners like to eat, there’s never anything left over. Planting trees? Um, that would mean leaving the office. Teaching underprivileged kids? I don’t know how interested they would be in venture capital or securities law. No, I don’t have time for any of that. I’ve been doing good as a lawyer, that’s what I’ve been doing.
Lawyers do good work. Take any particular transaction: Someone has to draft the contract. Someone has to negotiate it, and then someone else later has to interpret it, and then there may be a need for additional people to ensure both sides comply with the contract. Whoever fills these roles has to be smart, able to stay sharp — or at least awake — while reading dense texts (unless it’s one of my contracts, which hum along like a Hemingway novel), and be able to recognize any legal ramifications coming out of the deal.
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That’s our role. It’s good. (And yes, we should be compensated appropriately, because really, not everyone can do this.) To the extent you can, see your work as good. The day goes by faster, and the sun shines a bit brighter when I know I’m doing good — which is just about every day at work. (My weekends are for doing bad. If you consider napping on the sofa bad.) I’m reminded of Bill Clinton talking about private equity, that he didn’t “think that we ought to get into the position where we say this is bad work. This is good work.” Of course, people went bananas because he said a non-hateful thing about someone on the other side, but he had a point, and as lawyers, we shouldn’t have to look too hard to see the good in what we’re doing.
I’m not talking about pro bono. Say you do pro bono 20% of the time. (A high figure in Biglaw, or any law, really.) If you hate what you’re doing the other 80%, you’re probably not going to be a fount of joviality. You don’t need pro bono to feel good about your job. (And not every pro bono client is an angel, a fact the junior attorneys out there will soon find out.)
The better balance is to have the 80% represent work you feel good about. You should be able to grind through the other 20% of your work life (e.g., evicting elderly ladies, negotiating Kanye West media appearances, etc.).
One thing that’s helped me is that in SmallLaw, it’s easier to see the fruits of my labors. Sometimes I’ll email a client something like a convertible note and less than two minutes later, I’m copied on the client’s email sending the note out to the portfolio company. Whereas in Biglaw, I’d draft something for Morgan Stanley or someone like that and it’d go up the food chain at the law firm until someone said it was okay to send over, and then over at Morgan it’d go up their food chain, and days later it would finally go out. It wasn’t quite the same.
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In SmallLaw, if you want you can even confine yourself to only taking clearly sympathetic “good” clients like, I guess maybe nuns or community organizers, and then you could enjoy living in your cramped studio apartment and eating PB&Js for lunch everyday. Maybe if you want to upgrade to a one-bedroom one day, and maybe splurge on an occasional pizza, you could expand your definition of what “good” is to include everyday people or everyday businesses that you can help save money on taxes or have a more efficient corporate structure so they can hire more people or reward their current employers or shareholders.
Even if you’re still stuck in Biglaw, there are plenty of opportunities to see your work as good. Think about when GM sued NBC. NBC had strapped explosives on the side of a GM car, sideswiped the car on a Dateline episode, triggering the explosives, and then told the audience the resulting explosion was because of a problem with the car. I bet the Biglaw attorneys who worked on that complaint felt they were doing good.
So go forth, and do good.
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 securities matters for startups, large and small businesses, private equity funds, and investors in each, and also has a number of non-profit clients. You can reach Gary by email at Gary.Ross@JacksonRossLaw.com.
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