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EVERY FALL AT LAW schools across America, a process occurs called on-campus interviewing, or OCI, as it’s commonly known. The more elite the law school, the more prestigious the crop of law firms that visit, each offering the promise of large salaries to brilliant, mostly young minds. Only students with excellent grades or editorial positions on the school’s law review are selected to interview for summer internships.
Like nearly all graduate schools, law school comes with an expensive price tag, leaving many students with large amounts of debt. Because law students are nearly always type-A personalities and because law firm recruiting is a zero-sum game—there are many more applicants than spots, with even fewer spots at prestigious, well-paying firms—law school tends to engender extreme competitiveness and jealousy. In the pre-internet era, there were legendary stories of pages torn from books to thwart other students’ success.
In the 15 years since I graduated from law school, I’ve noticed an interesting trend. Very few of my peers who began as law firm associates stayed to make partner. Many left to become in-house counsel at corporations. Others became law professors, government attorneys and judges. Long hours, high pressure and unfulfilling work lead many attorneys to tap out of the law firm life, and opt instead for careers that are much less stressful and arguably more rewarding.
Law school is by no means the only graduate school where the most intelligent alumni chase prestige and money, only to end up mired in soul-sucking work. Many top-tier business school graduates head to Wall Street. The best medical students often become plastic surgeons. Some of our brightest computer science minds create technology that negatively impacts countless lives.
A lot of attention is paid to where someone goes to graduate school and what they do after graduation. Not nearly enough emphasis is placed on whether that career will bring them the type of happiness that can’t come from money or titles. For those students approaching these life choices, it’s worth remembering the words of the philosopher Lao Tzu, who centuries ago in the Tao Te Ching wrote the following words:
Better stop short than fill to the brim.
Over-sharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt.
Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it.
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow.
Retire when the work is done.
This is the way of heaven.
My husband graduated from a top-25 law school in 1994, second in his class. He was hired by a very prestigious firm after doing the traditional summer internship with them between his second and third year.
I was a young college professor going up for tenure that year, and we had a five-year-old and an infant. On his first day with the firm, they assigned him for several months to a case several hours away from where we lived. They didn’t put him up in a hotel, so he had to leave at 6:30 a.m. to drive to the other city, work all day, and drive back, getting home after 9 p.m. That was five days a week for months, while I was juggling my own career and two small children.
We literally started talking that very first night about getting him OUT of that job because we didn’t want to live like that. The baby was calling strangers in Burger King or the supermarket “Daddy” because she so rarely saw her own father.
It took two years, but he got a state government job. Yes, the long-term financial payoff was much less than if he’d stayed where he was and made partner (and he probably would have, according to his former boss), but with both of us working, we had more than enough to get by, and the kids had two parents. He was through the door every night by 6 p.m. and never had to work nights or weekends. No regrets whatsoever.
The full circle of that story is that over 20 years he rose to the top of the government agency he worked for and became chief counsel. He retired at exactly 20 years of service with a pension and full medical benefits for himself and me—and went back into the private sector, working for a Big Four accountancy firm, advising clients on their state tax problems, which he’s a well-connected expert on because of his government job. Between his salary and pension, we’re adding to the nest egg in our final years of working. So the happy ending is that we made a lifestyle decision all those years ago and came out just fine financially.
>> The baby was calling strangers in Burger King or the supermarket “Daddy” because she so rarely saw her own father.
Some kids do that. Ours went through a phase where he called most women mama, even though of course she was always there. Really annoying.
John, great article. Your description of the interview/recruitment process in your time matches very closely the process from my time in law school 45 years ago.
I wasn’t a brilliant student so was never courted by those topnotch high flyin’ firms, but I had a good friend and classmate who was. About a year after we graduated and began working, we compared notes on our jobs. When he told me that if he needed to visit the restroom he had to log it on his time sheet as “.3 hr.—personal”, I was glad I hadn’t been in the top tier.
Thank you, Andrew! I think maybe I either forgot to add it or it landed on the editing room floor (mine or Jonathan’s), but yea, I was a very mediocre law student who knew he was going back in the army, so OCI never applied to me thankfully. In the years since, I’ve reflected on the pointless drama and competition that it engenders. I think having a great law school mind has little to do with one’s worth both at work, but more importantly, outside it (though lots of lawyers conflate the concepts).
Candidly, I think the same could be said of the law school one attends, but again, that is heresy in big law firm culture. I firmly believe that with the exception of certain appellate judicial positions and law professor gigs where a certain type of legal mind is required, most law and legal skills can be learned through experience far better than through school. We sink or swim in the real world.