What's in a Lawyer

I’ve experienced this question in many forms. This is the most recent iteration that comes to mind. I think the question is driven by a cornucopia of factors, among which are public perception, media stereotypes, elitism among some attorneys, and the fact that lawyers are frequently compared to medical professionals. I’ve never gone to the doctor’s office and hoped to hear the physician tell me that they needed to do some research and they’d get back to me in a week or two give or take. I want answers. Immediately. We all do. And surely, once we are in the position of being asked for answers, there’s a pressure to meet the expectation in order to preserve the perception of being a source for answers. The thing is, sound lawyering simply does not jive with this approach.

Let’s walk through the lawyering process. Once law school is finished, hypotheticals are replaced by real people with real issues, priorities, and agendas. People know what they want, and they come to you because they believe that you are looking for a lawyer who can help them get what they want. Should you take them on as a client, your responsibilities extend far beyond just getting someone what they want. You actually need to understand their wants, their needs, their priorities, and their ultimate end goal as it applies to the attorney-client relationship you’re engaging in. Doing just one of the activities in the above sentence well requires extensive intellectual effort and professional skill; sustaining each of these activities over a prolonged period of time for multiple clients requires compassion, commitment, and drive over the long haul. Does a lawyer who does these things sound to you like an answer-person? They don’t sound that way to me.

Here is one way to respond to the question:

A lawyer’s job is to understand what a client needs, and help their client achieve their needs and therefore protect and facilitate their client’s interests in a way that is consistent with the law.

A client who comes to an attorney thinking that all they want is an answer and nothing more is really asking for a tremendous amount of work on the part of their attorney. They are asking their attorney to understand them, ensure their needs are met, identify their often conflicting priorities, protect their interests, and to do so while regularly responding to questions and concerns that the client voices throughout the attorney-client relationship. The client is asking the attorney to unwrap, unravel, dissect, and analyze the issue(s), research and apply the appropriate legal standards and precedent, and then provide direction and instruction for the client designed to uphold the law and further the client’s objectives.

It’s not a lawyer’s job to have the answers. It’s a lawyer’s job to find the intersection between a client’s agenda and the law. That’s part of what law-yer’s do. Law-yer, not Answer-yer.

Unemployment

Facing unemployment is a deep challenge. Whether personal finances are secure or unstable, lacking regular cash flow inevitably presents a challenge. That challenge is even more significant when you have not had the opportunity to accumulate some sort of savings in advance i.e. when you are seeking a job immediately following completion of a professional, graduate, or undergraduate degree.

Part of the challenge comes from your knowledge that your career skills are largely untested in your field of choice. Using myself as an example, I remember when I was completing my 3L year in law school. The push to find a job was on, and it was clear that the legal hiring market was severely constricted. But I did not begin my job search with this fact in mind. Which meant that I began my job search without having sufficiently educated myself on the state of the job market I was seeking to break into. This is one of the most significant mistakes I made, and I hope that you can benefit from my sharing it with you. In retrospect, making this particular mistake is more than a little ironic, given that I hold three higher education degrees. I was under the impression that once I educated myself academically, there was no need to educate myself about the job market – meaning that I anticipated that everything would magically fall into place because I’d applied the time and effort required to earn my Juris Doctor degree. Information did not magically fall into place in my coursework, even though I’d been privileged to sit in classrooms where most professors continually dropped crumbs of knowledge in front of me, were willing to engage in challenging intellectual discussions, and taught me how to think like a lawyer. If it takes effort to learn in a context designed to help me succeed, why on earth wouldn’t it take substantial effort to learn the employment landscape?

Looking back, it’s pretty clear to me that I expected my Career Services Office to do for me what my professors did. This is not a reasonable expectation, and I graduated from a school with great Career Services personnel who continue to help me as an alumni. (I had multiple meetings with different advisors who provided feedback on my resume, how to structure my job search, the importance of networking, what steps I should take to secure a clerkship and much, much more). To put it bluntly, I did not want for career services advice. My error was in believing that it was anyone’s responsibility but my own to learn about the employment landscape I was about to enter. It is my responsibility to take the resources offered to me by Career Services and then apply them to my unique experience. For example, I wanted to secure a clerkship post-graduation. Career Services offered mountains, upon mountains of information on how I could go about achieving this objective. This information was helpful, and provided guidance on how I could take “internal” information (from my law school) and apply it to the “external” work world. Going to Career Services is not enough.

My job, my responsibility, is to bridge the gap between Career Services and the job market by educating myself on how I can use the tools I have to get the job I want. It is my belief that the difficulties I encountered in finding a job post-graduation stem largely from factors outside my educational institution. The declining economy, the collapse of the old law firm business model, the influx of experienced lawyers onto the job market, the shifting clerkship model, the swelling student loan crisis, the hiring freezes, skepticism, and the glut of qualified graduates on the market were all factors I should have considered when thinking about how to develop my employment strategy. Instead, I internalized the stress, and pummeled myself when I was unable to find that elusive position. The pummeling took place in my head. And the brain is a powerful, powerful thing.

Lawyers Thrive

The more I look at my experiences during this stage in my life and compare it with my law school experiences, the more I realize just how stressed out, insecure, and uncertain I felt during law school. I also realize that I feel pretty stressed out, insecure, and uncertain after law school. Law school information-asymmetry didn't just disappear after graduation. Now I face licensed attorney information-asymmetry.

I still have many questions. Questions like: How do I live a personally satisfying life in the midst of a crazy job market? How do I leverage the experiences I have into a job that I love? Why didn't someone tell me about the factors that should go into choosing a law school before law school? Why didn't I ask? How can I plan for my professional future when the outlook seems so bleak? What about family? What on earth am I supposed to do about paying back my student loans?

Every lawyer has questions, and we all need a place we can look to for support, clarification, and resources to help us live a thriving life. Lawyers Thrive is designed to reduce the effect of information asymmetry before, during, and after law school. Lawyers Thrive fills the gap between intellect, capability, and professional life. 

Let us hear from you. What would it take for you to start thriving instead of surviving?