by Ian Graham
But as I finished, the partner was smiling and nodding his head in agreement. “That’s great, Ian. I think that’s exactly right,” he said. You’ve got to have a passion for the intellectual side of the job. Otherwise, we’d all just be doing it for the money.”
“Um, right.”
It was the first week of my second year of law school at the University of Texas, a period known as the fall recruiting season, when partners from the top law firms all over the country swarmed to the Austin campus — and those of other law schools — to interview second-year law students whose first-year grades had met their standards. They were there to recruit us to be summer associates with them for the following summer, during which time they would try to persuade us to accept their offers of full-time jobs at hefty six-figure salaries, to start after we finished our third and final year of law school.
It was a seller’s market. In the booming economy of the late nineties, law firms were expanding fast and needed young associates to cover their ever increasing work demands. The biggest and most prestigious firms prided themselves on recruiting only the top students from the top-tier law schools. Competition for these recruits had driven those firms to pay their summer associates as much as $2,500 a week, to drop all pretense of requiring much work from them, and to concentrate instead on treating them to fancy lunches, social events, and fine dinners at partners’ homes and country clubs. Most law students, even those who didn’t necessarily want to work for a firm, were chasing these jobs at the biggest, highest-paying firms.
That was me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after law school. I never thought I’d actually want to be a lawyer. Growing up in Washington, D.C., and attending Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker prep school catering to the children of A-list Democrats, including the daughters of Presidents Clinton an obama, I’d always been surrounded by lawyers; almost every kid I knew had at least one lawyer parent. But it had never seemed like a particularly exciting job. To me, lawyers wore dark suits, worked very hard, and for affluent people, they didn’t seem very happy. My father was a lawyer, a partner in a large firm, and even thoug he was at the top of his profession, he worked long hours, on weekends, and while on vacation. I’d heard his stories of the constant pressure, the client demands, and the big-firm politics. He didn’t love it. I suspect he didn’t even like it. And he always dropped a lot of suggestions that I should not be a lawyer. Actually, what he’d say was, “I’m doing this shit so you and your sister won’t have to.”
What I wanted to do, what I was sure I was going to do, was be a baseball player. And while a baseball scholarship to Rice University prolonged my delusion somewhat, by my sophomore year it was pretty clear that pro baseball wasn’t going to be an option for a 5 10,” 160-pound utility infielder with “a bat like wet newspaper,” as my coach described my swing. Still, even if baseball wasn’t my future, I enjoyed being part of a top-ranked team and playing alongside five future Major Leaguers. But with four hours of practice six days a week in the fall and a seventy-game schedule in the spring, I didn’t have much time or inclination for long-term career planning.
Before I knew it, I was wearing a cap and gown, sitting on a folding chair in the Rice quad, and listening to Kurt Vonnegut tell me I probably wasn’t going to amount to much, but that was okay. Now, Vonnegut was, and still is, one of my favorite authors, but it occurred to me that a man who made his living writing offbeat doomsday science fiction might have some trouble offering perspective to eager young people about to enter the real world. After warning us that we were a race of “planet gobblers” who, if left unchecked, were on a course to destroy the earth, Vonnegut offered some career advice: aim low. According to Kurt, we couldn’t all be Kurt. Most of us would find that our ambition to do great things or to lead remarkable lives would only result in misery and failure. We should find a job we could do, do it well, and happily accept a pat on the back and a “job well done” as our reward. Good motherly advice. But I wasn’t having it. I was twenty-two and precocious. I was going to do something exciting, something I was passionate about — and make bags of money doing it. Exactly what that was, however, I wasn’t sure.
For lack of anything better, after graduating from Rice I slumped back home to Washington and found a job as the lowliest staffer for the House Ways and Means Committee, and waited for inspiration to strike. For the next six months, I sat at a desk behind an unmarked door in the Longworth Building, on Capitol Hill, answering questions and absorbing abuse from irate taxpayers, at a salary slightly above minimum wage.
My friends had bigger plans. Some were heading to Wall Street firms to make piles of money, or to business school and then to Wall Street. Others were going to law school or medical school. One had been accepted to Columbia Law School but had deferred enrollment in order to take a six-figure job at Goldman Sachs. That was about standard. As a “dipshit Ways and Means lackey” (one frequent caller’s characterization of me), I felt as though I was falling behind, that my friends’ careers were taking on higher trajectories than mine. And I began to stew. As a math-and-science-phobic government major, I had neither the preparation nor the knack for Wall Street or medical school. But law school I figured I could do. And although I didn’t necessarily want to be a lawyer, I thought law school would give me three more years to do some of the thinking I had not done in college, and a law degree would be a nice credential.
In other words, I went to law school for the same reason a lot of people do: because I got in and because I didn’t know what else to do.
“If you are here because you didn’t know what else to do, then you are here for the wrong reason.” These were the first words in the dean’s opening remarks to my first-year law school class.
Apparently, this was a common problem. Most law students, said the dean, are type-A personalities who don’t take well to being in the middle of a pack. Rudderless law students, he warned, would find themselves victims of their own ambition.
“The primitive brain will take over if you let it,” he continued.
The best grades get you onto law review? I wanna be on law review. The best firms interview only the top students? I wanna interview with the best firms.
“It becomes a herd mentality,” he said, “and you can get swept up in it.”
And from there, the primrose path narrows: from first-year grades to interviews with fancy law firms, to cushy summer jobs, to a career in big-firm law practice, so that we — the undecided but ambitious — soon find ourselves living a life we perhaps did not expect but could not resist.
“If that describes you, then mark my words,” the dean concluded, “the trade-offs will show up later.”
I had no history of competing academically. I was lucky to have gotten into law school at all. And my innocence protected me. My classmates, I figured, were the ones who would be competing for the best grades and best jobs. My goal going into it was simply not to embarrass myself.
The first year of law school is a shock to most who come straight from college. The Socratic method of teaching used on first-years, where the professor picks out a hapless student at the beginning of class and grills him at length in front of his peers, is an instant immersion in learning to “think like a lawyer,” on your feet and under pressure — the equivalent of medical school’s early exposure of its students to blood and gore. Most law students tend to be former hotshot undergraduates, and a lot of law professors, like marine drill instructors, take pleasure in knocking them down before building them up. “From time to time it may be necessary for me to point out the extent of your stupidity,” one of my professors told us with a smile.
So I kept up, reading and briefing cases and learning to spot legal issues. Maybe because (at first) I didn’t think I was gunning for the best grades, the law review, or a big-firm job, I didn’t feel the pressure that seemed to afflict so many of my classmates. And without that added stress, midway through the first semester I began to feel comfortable enough to think that with a
little luck on the exams I could finish the year in the top half of my class.
When our first-semester grades were posted, I was surprised to see that I was near the top.
That’s when my head started to turn. In one semester, my history of academic mediocrity had been erased and, poof, replaced with a grade point average that said I was no longer Ian Graham, lucky-to-be-here law student, but Ian Graham, top law student.
I worked even harder in the spring semester, and did even better.
Now, in the fall of my second year, though I hadn’t thought I wanted to work at a big firm, a summer job for $2,500 a week didn’t sound so bad, and the prospect of a six-figure income after graduation was starting to sound pretty nice, too. And with my first-year grades, the firms my classmates were begging to be interviewed by were begging to interview me. Just as the dean had warned, I got caught up in the frenzy.
Every morning during fall recruiting, before we embarked on our daily series of twenty-minute interviews, the lobby of the Career Services Building was packed with nervous law students in their “interview” suits, holding folders containing their résumés and transcripts and exchanging gossip about law firms. That firm is a sweatshop. I have a friend who knows somebody who works there, and she billed three thousand hours last year. Or, I heard that firm has the best summer program, and they’re bumping up first-year salaries next year. I tried to ignore most of the chatter, but it was comforting to hear that many of my classmates’ motives were as shallow as mine. The gossip was always about two things: billable hours and money.
These on-campus interviews were the first step in a mating game to determine who would receive callbacks — invitations to fly to a firm’s home city for a day of getting-to-know-you interviews. They were like quick first dates, including the need sometimes to hold one’s tongue and imagine.
“Why do you want to practice law?” (I don’t, really. I just want to get paid well for a fun summer job.)
“Why do you want to work for this firm?” (I hardly know anything about this firm, other than I’ve heard of it and it pays well.)
“Why are you interested in working in Los Angeles/D.C./ New York?” (Because it seems like a good place to spend the summer.)
I kept waiting for all this to come to a screeching halt. Considering what these firms were offering — big pay for an easy summer job with an almost guaranteed offer to join the firm for even bigger pay after graduation — surely they would dig a little deeper than just my résumé and one year of law school grades. At any moment I feared one of the interviewers would wave my undergraduate transcript in my face and ask me to explain how, as a Division-I baseball player, I had gotten a C-minus in Coaching Baseball, or had failed an introductory political science course nicknamed Bombs and Rockets. But this never happened. And the doors were opening fast.
At one interview, a partner from the Austin office of a large national firm eagerly shot out of his chair as I entered the room and shook my hand enthusiastically. “Ah bet you know James Dole?” he drawled with a smile, referring to James Doyle, the father of one of my Rice teammates, who was a well-known Houston lawyer and a big Rice baseball supporter. I answered that I did. “Well, then, unless yew bite a pardner’s wife in the ass tonight, yer hired!” he said, slapping me on the back. The “tonight” he was referring to was a cocktail party his firm was hosting at a local bar for interviewees they liked. That was it. I hadn’t even sat down. I’d aced the shortest interview in law school history.
And then there was Latham & Watkins. The firm had started in an LA storefront during the Depression and now had more than two thousand attorneys in twenty-four countries, partners who drew seven-figure incomes, and a global Fortune 500 client list. Latham had recently been named “Law Firm of the Decade” by a prominent international panel, and had been near the top of the American Lawyer’s “A-List” every year since the rankings began. It was a place where worried CEOs took their bet-the-business litigation and their billion-dollar deals. Among the big firms interviewing on campus, Latham also had a reputation around the law school as a younger, hipper firm than its peers. And it was also widely thought that it had the most lavish and raucous summer program. One of my more uptight classmates told me she had passed on Latham’s offer to interview her because of the firm’s “fratlike atmosphere,” where “everybody just goes out and gets drunk.” Which sounded to me like a point in the firm’s favor.
The afternoon before my Latham interview, John Dalton, a silver-haired, tanned senior partner in the firm’s Orange County office, hosted a cocktail party for all interviewees at the Hula Hut, a popular Austin bar. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, he announced, “No pressure today. Just have a few margaritas and enjoy yourselves. I’ll be here if you have any questions.” He looked relaxed, rich, and satisfied — all the things I wanted to be.
My interview the next day started with a warm greeting: “I’ve been waiting for this one. I like your style,” Dalton said. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but… whatever; it was a good start. He made sure to hit all the key interview points — why I was going to law school, why Latham, why LA — but there was none of the awkwardness or formality there had been in some other interviews. (At one of these, a partner from a D.C. firm introduced himself, shook my hand, and then pulled out a bottle of hand sanitizer and disinfected himself.) It felt like a casual conversation. We talked about life in Southern California, sports, politics. He waxed about Latham. It was a “slice of heaven” for him. He worked on cutting-edge legal issues and was surrounded by brilliant people. The firm atmosphere was “open and friendly.” Latham, he said, “is the big firm that doesn’t act like a big firm,” a claim I would hear many times during the recruiting process, along with “I wouldn’t practice law anywhere else.” When our twenty minutes were up, things had apparently gone well. Dalton invited me to join him and a few other interviewees he felt were “Latham people” for dinner that night at Sullivan’s, one of Austin’s best restaurants.
I can’t begin to guess what the dinner bill came to that night. For three hours, nine of us — Dalton, seven of my classmates, and I — drank countless bottles of fine wine and ate the best surf and turf in the city as we listened to all the great things Dalton said about Latham. When I finally excused myself, fearing I wouldn’t be able to stand up if I stayed any longer, Dalton pulled me aside. “I really hope you come out for a callback with us, Ian. I’m going to put in a good word for you. You’re a Latham guy. I can feel it.”
I was beginning to feel it, too.
I received five callback offers, from firms in LA, New York, and Washington, all of whom wanted to fly me out for a full day of follow-up interviews at their offices, put me up in four-star hotel suites, and, if things went well, wine and dine me. It had been only a year since I’d wandered into law school. This was heady stuff.
Some of the callback interviews were off-putting, and others were flat-out strange. At a prestigious international firm in LA, most of the attorneys I was scheduled to meet with were too busy or couldn’t be bothered to see me. So I was bounced around to substitute interviewers, who seemed annoyed they had to spend twenty minutes talking to me. The only partner I met spent the first fifteen minutes of our twenty-minute session talking on the phone to a buddy about a recent golf trip to Scotland, all the time winking and nodding at me as though I were in on the conversation. When he finally hung up, he said, “It feels good to be king. You got any more questions?”
At a big firm in Washington, an intense young litigation partner began our interview by leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk and silently eyeballing me for several minutes while he gnawed on, and then appeared to actually eat, what looked like a wooden coffee stirrer. “I see you’re not on law review,” he finally said. “Don’t you consider yourself a winner? We only hire winners here.” His voice began to rise. “I don’t ever fucking lose… neeeverrrrr!”
Again, Latham stood out. The office was located in the
seventy-four-story, stone-and-steel I. M. Pei–designed U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi, at the center of the high-rent Bunker Hill district in downtown LA. The polished marble lobby was filled with well-dressed people coming and going. A high-speed elevator with a television showing news and stock quotes shot me to the main Latham reception area on the fortieth floor, where Joy, Latham’s stunning, blond, midtwenties hiring coordinator, greeted me with a smile. She handed me a schedule for the day and gave me a quick tour.
Latham’s LA office, which served as the firm’s worldwide headquarters, occupied the sixth and the thirty-fifth through forty-fifth floors of the building. The structure’s round design left no place for corner offices, slightly muting the subtle but clear pecking order. Among the attorneys’ offices ringing the outer walls, partners’ offices were bigger and had the best views. Secretaries’ bays and paralegal and staff offices sat on the inside of the building, separated from those of the attorneys by a carpeted hallway encircling each floor. On the walls were large original photographs, each floor with a different theme: famous architecture on thirty-eight, iconic portraits on forty-two. There was a large law library staffed with full-time librarians on forty-one, and on the sixth floor, an attorney dining room where breakfast was free and lunch was only six dollars.
Also on six were the conference rooms where Latham attorneys faced off against opposing parties like Samurai warriors. The photographs surrounding the conference rooms on six were a not-so-subtle statement to outsiders: a lion mauling a gazelle, a bull trampling a runner in Pamplona, a tank crushing a bicycle.
“Everything is set up so that attorneys can focus on their work,” Joy told me. Almost an entire floor was devoted to a Document Support Center, where attorneys could drop off marked-up drafts at any hour of any day or night and get them back within hours as edited, finished documents. On floor thirty-eight there was an Operations Center with round-the-clock secretarial, paralegal, and technical support and the ability to handle any attorney request, from dinner orders to car service to travel arrangements (although Latham had an in-house travel agency, too).
