What I Wish I'd Known

Or more accurately - what I wish someone would have told me

Starting Law School + Getting a Job

I was 20 when I started law school. There were no lawyers in my family, and I didn’t know a single lawyer well. I didn’t know any law students either.

I was lucky enough to do well in my first semester of 1L, and that meant that I had a few interviews for the rare 1L jobs at big firms. Of course, I had no idea how that process worked, let alone what any of these firms were like. At most, I probably could have named 1 law firm when I started law school.

To prepare for the interviews, I spoke to a few upper year students who had worked at these firms. I quickly determined that at the 3 firms that were willing to interview me, there was 1 that I had no interest in working and 2 that seemed somewhat interesting.

I was lucky to end up with a job by the end of the interview process - especially since I really had no idea how things actually worked. Let’s just say that, knowing what I know, I would have done things very very differently.

My First Summer

I was 21 when I started my first job in BigLaw. I knew nothing about how this stuff worked.

One of my first assignments was to attend an AGM (annual general meeting) of a company and do something or other. The AGM was about a 45 minute drive from where I lived, and I didnt have a car. No problem - I was told to take a taxi. We’d expense it to the client.

And we’d also charge the client for my time to get to the AGM. Which meant that the taxi ride was about $300; ~$60 for the actual taxi ride and ~$240 for my time. This didn’t make much sense to me, and I remember thinking ‘is this really how this works? We charge the client $300 for a taxi ride?’

I added little value at the AGM, which will come as little surprise since I didn’t know the first thing about AGMs. I’m pretty sure I opened doors for people (literally, not metaphorically), helped take attendance, and did a bunch of relatively simplistic tasks. All of which the client paid for at my exorbitant hourly rate.

That - it turns out - is just how things worked. And over time, that concept became something you just accept. Our rates are very high but it makes sense. Clients are happy to pay for them.

Of course, that concept would stop making any sense to me several years later because…

My First Few Years as a Lawyer

Over the course of my 2L summer, articling, and first few years as a lawyer - it became glaringly obvious to me that the legal profession was bizarre. And the most confusing part was that it felt like nobody else understood this. People had simply worked in the profession for so long and not experienced anything else in so long, that everything felt normal.

After all, the other firms worked that way too. Therefore, it was normal. And the firm made so much money and had so many clients, that clearly this was all normal. After all, if clients weren’t happy, surely they would have left. Therefore, it was normal.

Of course, this was all nonsense. Nothing about how the legal profession operates is normal. Very little about how the legal profession operates is efficient or smart or well-thought through.

Because when you live your life in a monopoly (or I guess technically an oligopoly), you don’t have to do any of those things.

Oh the joys of being self-regulated and preventing competition, while at the same time insisting that change is hard. All as there is a massive access to justice crisis happening and denying your role in that.

I Wish I’d Known

I wish someone had told me that how we were doing things made no sense. That there were other jurisdictions taking very different and more innovative paths. That the lawyers I was working with may have known more law than me, but that they may not have known more about business or process than me. And that so many things they told me were true were merely their opinions that were based on pretty flimsy facts and logics.

And I wish I’d known that you can have a legal background and use it for an atypical career path that didn’t require you to do things the way they’d always be done.

I wish I’d known that law firms are some of the worst run successful businesses in the world (there’s that good old monopoly coming in handy again). I wish I’d known that so many lawyers were looking out for their own interests more than others, despite publicly stating the opposite.

I wish I’d known that most law firms are fiefdoms, and the job of the managing partner/executive is to protect the interest of the key rainmakers over pretty much everyone else.

I wish I’d known the profession will resist change and generally punish those who speak up.

But I also wish I’d known that there were so many people out there like me who recognized these issues and wanted to help. Who saw the inequity, the hypocrisy, and all the other issues - and truly wanted to drive change.

I’m glad I now know that despite the absolute stupidity of so many things in this profession, that change is on the horizon. It won’t happen quickly - it never does in this profession - but it is happening. I’m glad I now know that while many people in this profession are loathe to start new initiatives, they are very happy to help if you can just get the ball rolling.

In some ways, I’m glad I was so naive. Had I known what I know now, I would have left this profession ages ago.

But I also believe that knowledge is power. That knowledge helps create a more equitable profession. And that so many negative experiences that people have in this profession were avoidable if they had mentors and sponsors to guide them along.

While we can’t do it all ourselves, at least we can do our part to help improve things.

Real Talk from Real People

Join us on November 15 from 2pm-5pm EST for discussions from an amazing group of legal professionals about what they wish they’d known.

It’s going to be a great way to wrap up Day 2 of the Summit, and I can’t wait these talks.

See you there - you can register for free at authenticlawyersummit.com