Today is the 4th anniversary of my law school graduation. I figured there was no better time to start talking about my experience. If you read my About Me, you’d know that I am a recovering attorney. Short version: I graduated law school in June of 2013, passed the NY and NJ Bar, worked for a mid-size civil defense litigation firm for 11 very long months and quit. Never to look back. I haven’t practiced law in 2 years, 10 months and 20 days. That’s 1,055 days. Which is equivalent to 1,519,200 minutes. Or 91,152,000 seconds. But who’s counting.
Things I used to be able to say: I work at a law firm in the financial district. Technically I get 10 days of vacation per year, but no one takes them. And I still have to bill 180 hours/month so why bother. I drink every day. I cry when I leave work. A homeless man with tattoos on his face gave me a bottle of the water on the subway today because I was crying and he told me “things would get better.”
Things I can say now: My job does not own me. I don’t check my work email from Friday at 5 pm until Monday at 9 am. I get 20 days of vacation, plus all Jewish holidays and Federal Holidays, so basically 45 days/year. I regularly sign off on my emails with “Mazel Tov” or “Shabbat Shalom.” I know there is a such thing as a holiday that celebrates cheesecake. I hyperlink words in my blog posts to articles in Ha’aretz.
Thing I used to do and still can do: Sign my complaint emails to my leasing office/airlines/hotels/Uber/anything customer service related, with three magic letters: ESQ.
That last part is crucial. But was it worth $100K in loans? I’ve gotten a lot of money back from Delta, but the answer is still “probably not.” The American Bar Association literally published a paper entitled “The Value Proposition of Attending Law School,” which basically tells people law school is a financial burden that is often not worth the time or benefit, and that most expected salaries will not support the expected debt. More on student loans another time, though.
Have I convinced you not to go yet? If I haven’t, maybe someone else will. Nowadays, you can find someone telling you not to go to law school on almost every website. A quick google search of “don’t go to law school” will bring back “about 26,100,000 results,” not like I have done this or anything. In 2013, Business Insider published a flow chart specifically designed to convince you not to go to law school. Unfortunately, I graduated in 2013, so it was too little too late. The Boston Globe wrote about it. Even Huffington Post (Tucker Max) talked about it. Above the Law talks about it all the time. In 2015, they started a piece with “I’m a lawyer. I hate it. what now?” Unfortunately, this is more common than you would think. Judging from a very small sample size of people I went to law school with (graduating class of 478), I can tell you that I personally know 3 people who actually enjoy what they do. The rest of them? Well, they get to enjoy at least one of the only 2 great parts of being a lawyer: (1) saying you’re a lawyer, and (2) a big paycheck. Those who actually like their jobs (probably because they are “making a difference” or “helping people”) do not actually get to enjoy the money part. I probably make more money than they did when they started, and none of them get a 2-day cheesecake holiday off of work.
When I tell people that I quit law, the first thing they do (without fail) is say that they, too, know somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody, who did the exact same thing. This is not surprising, considering everything I said above. The Atlantic published an article the same month I quit my job at the firm about how the legal industry is one of the only fields that has a sub-industry helping people quit. As I read that article back in 2014 (which I rediscovered surprisingly easily with another google search), the line that stuck out to me was that a “law-firm associate consistently ranks at the top of unhappy-professions lists despite starting salaries of $160,000,” and that “law firms experience significant yearly associate attrition.” The attrition part did not surprise me at all. When I left my firm after less than a year, I was the 16th associate to put in notice in the time that I was there. I had a list of them that I kept in plain sight on my desk, asking myself every day if I was going to be the next name on the list. My firm (which will remain nameless) was known to have a revolving door, and since it was not big law, they didn’t have to pay big law money but they expected big law hours. The problem with that was, associates would leave to go anywhere else for more money since they were already putting in the time.
I learned through the grapevine that my firm was notorious. Unfortunately, my real “come to god” moment about this terrible place came from Glassdoor reviews, the first of which was posted 2 months after I quit. THANKS FOR NOTHING. But really, it did make me feel a little bit better to know that I was not alone. My firm’s average rating is currently 1.5 out of 5. A mere fourteen percent would recommend to a friend. When I quit, I put on alerts so that I would get an email every time someone posted a new review. Over the years, these have provided me with much-needed comic relief. Some of my favorite review titles include “slavery for low pay makes me cranky,” or “Are you kidding me?” or “Avoid at all costs,” or the very honest “Horrible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (there are really 15 exclamation points). But my all-time favorite title is “Run”. Short, sweet, leaves no room for misinterpretation. That doesn’t even touch the tip of iceberg of the actual content of the reviews. A few highlights: “Cons: Associates are overworked, underpaid, and generally miserable.” “Pros: It’s close to the train station.” “Pros: There are no pros to this place.”
My firm may have been particularly bad, but as they say, one bad apple spoils the barrel, and I wasn’t about to try my luck with another law firm and just hope that it was different. Again, I only speak from my own experience, but as you can see from all of the articles above, I am not alone. I recently had a conversation with my boyfriend about how likely it is that I will return to the legal field. I said 90% no way. He said “that’s crazy high, that’s 1 in ten chance that you will go back. I would have put it at 97% or 98%.” He is probably right. Why would I put myself through that again? I may return to the legal field someday, but most likely not as a lawyer.
I can talk about those miserable 11 months all day long, but if you are currently working for a firm, you have probably already wasted .3 hours of your billable time reading this (if you round up!), so I will save the story of why I went to law school in the first place for another time. The answer is complicated, and it’s embedded in a very complicated throne of lies that were fed to me for years. If you have gotten through this whole post and you are still considering going to law school, you are hopeless. Go spend some time on Glassdoor and google “don’t go to law school” some more. Do not pass go and do not collect $200 (or $200,000 in loans).