One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School

by Scott Turow

  Ostensibly, the job search of the upperclassmen has little to do with the experience of first-year law students. The administration discourages as from seeking jobs for the summer after their first year, going so far as to deny lLs the services of the Pound Placement Office, which coordinates interviews and career counseling for upper-year students. The traditional wisdom is that 1 Ls profit by a rest from the law after the trial of the first year. Additionally, many employers are reluctant to hire first-year students because they do not yet know enough law.

  Despite those obstacles, most of my classmates sought and eventually found summer work, and many even had interviews at the law school with prospective employers just as the 2Ls and 3Ls did. There were a large number of first-year students, however, who never went near the placement office, and I was among them. I remain unclear on the detailed procedures of interviewing and looking for work.

  Yet as I watched my senior colleagues march through the school on their way to the outside world, like many as I felt my concerns over the future sharpening. I realized that important decisions were hardly as far away as they might have seemed. Though we were still nearly three years away from graduation, in only twelve months my classmates and I would begin our first round of interviews. And at that point we would be looking for more than a way to make pocket money. Traditionally, the job that a student takes for the summer at the end of his second year—the job we’d be interviewing for next fall—is a kind of tryout with a permanent employer. Many—probably most—Harvard students end up as associates in the law firms with which they worked the previous summer. Thus, a year from now I’d need some idea where Annette and I wanted to live and the kind of law I wanted to practice.

  Throughout interview season, therefore, I made it a point to talk to 2Ls and 3Ls about the general shape of things on the job front. I learned at once that it was easier to find work in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York; far more difficult in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle. I also learned that many upperclassmen did not much enjoy the search for employment. Although virtually every Harvard student who makes a serious effort finds work—a remarkable fact given the state of the legal job market—there are nevertheless pains and pressures to the interviewing process. You have to present yourself well in a brief period of time—twenty minutes an interview—and also face the possibility of defeated hopes. There are other tensions as well. Mike Wald, my college friend, had a bad time during interview season while looking for a summer clerkship.

  “The atmosphere is really something,” he told me one day at lunch. “People go bananas about ZYX firm and XYZ firm. All this pressure begins to mount to take any job supposedly ‘better’ than another. You feel as though if you don’t take the ‘better’ jobs then you’re blowing all the advantages you built up by going to Harvard Law School.”

  I asked Mike what made one job better than another.

  He shrugged. “If it’s a firm, maybe bigger-named clients, salaries that are a little higher. If it’s a government agency, the amount of power it wields and how much of it you’ll have when you get there. It’s hard to tell, really. All you know for sure is that ‘better’ jobs go to people with better grades.”

  One of the clearest messages that emerged to me as a member of the first-year class, just watching and listening during interview season, was of the paramount importance of grades. During the first weeks of school, I had thought that our marks were used only to measure off the lofty types fit for Law Review. But as interviews progressed and upperclassmen talked, it became apparent to me and my classmates that grades were a king of tag and weight fastened to you by the faculty which determined exactly how high in the legal world you were going to rise at graduation.

  “There are firms and agencies which only hire people with A’s, and ones that only hire people with A-minuses, and right on down on the line,” Mike said. “Not all of them are like that. But grades still count.”

  That meant there was an undercurrent sense of exclusion and lost opportunity. A few upperclassmen seemed to feel that they could not really get the jobs they wanted. And there was another, equally unhappy group, who seemed to feel the jobs they wanted were not really there.

  Most of the employers who interview at Harvard Law School are large private law firms. A law firm is a group of attorneys who share clients, profits, and responsibilities, very much like a group practice among M. D.’s. Firms range in size from two-man operations to the biggest in New York, Washington, Chicago, LA—some of which employ well over two hundred attorneys. The lawyers in firms are either partners—essentially part owners of the practice—or associates, salaried employees. The firms that interview at Harvard are among the biggest and best-known in the country, and their clients are often some of the wealthiest and most powerful businesses and individuals around—people who can pay for highly valued legal services. The big firms usually bill at between $60 and $100 an hour, and sometimes as high as $200.

  There are many advantages to big law-firm practice, especially to someone coming out of school. The large firms can more easily afford the time to train a new associate thoroughly; and because there is often no sharp limit on what clients can spend in legal fees, the work that is done usually meets the highest professional standards for thoroughness and care. The problems which are the mainstay of most firm practices—those of large businesses (contracts, merger or loan agreements, securities matters, tax difficulties)—are at times highly challenging and complex.

  But it is not an easy life. Young attorneys starting out as associates usually hope to “make partner,” a process that generally takes between four and eight years. For them, the combined effort of mastering law practice and impressing seniors often requires a grueling pace. Many of my friends in private firms think nothing of working sixty to eighty hours each week, and with firms billing clients for fifteen-minute or even six-minute portions of an hour, little of that time is spent idly.

  Yet the kind of objections to big-firm practice which I heard from students like Mike Wald really had less to do with hard work than with moral and political values. To Mike, an old ‘60s activist, it was discomforting to think of being part of a law firm which assisted individuals and especially large corporations whose influence on national life he did not approve of.

  “A lot of professors tell me not to worry about politics and just go for the training,” Mike said, “but how do you help U. S. Steel hold up a pollution abatement order during the day, then go home and read your mail from the Sierra Club and tell yourself that you’re one human being?”

  There are alternatives to big-firm practice—”corporate law,” students usually call it—but there are difficulties with each of them. Advancement in government practice is limited by the fact that top-echelon positions are usually political appointments. The “White Knight” jobs—working for the ACLU, or NAACP, or public-interest law firms which support themselves by suing on behalf of all citizens, as in consumer and pollution suits—are extremely difficult to get when coming straight out of law school. And the idea of hanging out your own shingle is increasingly unrealistic in these days of lawyer glut and of “firm practice” (which means that as an individual lawyer you can find yourself opposed by a seventy-member law firm that is capable of quickly exhausting you with a series of work-creating tactics). Additionally, all of those alternatives suffer considerably when compared to corporate practice in one area of indisputable attraction to job seekers: money.

  Firm practice is lucrative, and right from the start. Mike Wald, for instance, finally split his summer—six weeks in a Legal Aid office on an Indian reservation, six weeks with a Chicago firm. Legal Aid paid him $80 a week; the firm $325. Money was a topic always in the air during interview season, and my mind was sometimes boggled by the numbers I heard. I was accustomed to teachers’ salaries. At Stanford, in the English department, a full professor, well respected, after a lifetime of successful teaching and scholarship might have been earning $22,000. That is
the starting salary for Harvard graduates at many firms in New York. Moreover, the figure rises rapidly as time passes, especially after a lawyer becomes a partner. The law-school newspaper reported that an informal survey of alumni attending a fifteenth reunion revealed that for those working as attorneys, the average annual income was $70,000.

  Considering where I’d been, the talk of all that money sometimes made me self-conscious, even embarrassed. That attitude was not always shared. One day in early October, Aubrey and Stephen and I bumped into Peter Geocaris. Peter was in a suit, fresh from a day of interviewing, and he talked readily about the whole process. Peter wanted to do firm work in New York, where salaries are traditionally highest. When I asked if the amount of money he’d be making ever left him uncomfortable, he told me no.

  “I’m worth it,” he said. “I’ve gone to school for a long time, I’ve developed a skill, and people are willing to pay me for it. I’m not stealing from anybody. I’ll work like hell for what I make. I probably like law enough to work like hell for a lot less than what they’ll give me, but I’m gonna get it, and I don’t mind. The truth is that I’m the kind of person who knows how to enjoy the things that you can do with a lot of money—and dammit, I’m gonna enjoy them.”

  As first-year students, most of my classmates did not have well-developed feelings on these subjects—corporate practice and money. For most of us the interview season served only to raise those questions in a muted way for the first time. I had a few classmates who expressed a guiltless avarice when they looked ahead. “I came for the bucks,” one man named Jack Weiss had told me early in the year when I asked what brought him to law school. But most as did not see dollar signs whenever they looked into a casebook. A poll taken during interview season and published in the law-school newspaper showed that the as responding hoped for an average income of $28,000 in their twentieth year out of law school and a starting salary of $13,000. Some were eager for corporate practice, but about eighty percent said they would ideally prefer to do something else—public-interest work, political work, work on behalf of the poor. But many who did not want to do corporate work—about twenty-five percent—expected they would ultimately do it anyway.

  That was realistic, because that was where the great majority of us were going to end up. Over three fourths of the members of each HLS class practice with private firms at one time or another. Things just seem to push that way. Some students—many more, probably, than the newspaper poll showed—arrive with a strong interest in business law, and others develop it while in school. And there is a still larger number who come to feel over time that their obligations as attorneys are simply to represent the clients who call on them, without making an extensive ethical scrutiny of either the clients or themselves. For those students, the money, the power, the training, the quality of practice all make joining the big firms inevitable.

  But while I watched the interview season from the sidelines, I knew that if I was going to make that kind of conversion, it would not be painless or quick. Like Mike Wald, I’d spent much of my life involved in activist politics—the civil-rights and the antiwar movements, the McGovern campaign in ‘72. In mellower form, my activist convictions had stayed with me; corporate practice seemed to embrace a regime of power to which I’d long objected.

  When we left Peter that afternoon, Stephen said he would never take a job in a corporate firm, that he was heading back to the academy without detours. Aubrey, with his M. B. A., a believer in the proposition that business could be conducted with decency, teasingly told Stephen that he lived in an ivory tower. Stephen called Aubrey a fat cat. They asked me what I felt and I answered that I thought it would be difficult for me to take a corporate job.

  “But I don’t know,” I quickly added. “I feel so damned uncertain about everything I’m doing anyway. Who can tell?”

  Later, I thought about what I’d said. I realized that was only the truth. Forced by interview season to look at the future, I was not sure that when my turn came I would be able to sacrifice all the advantages of work in one of the big law firms. But it irked and pained and surprised me that I was already feeling that kind of temptation, that kind of doubt.

  10/9/75 (Thursday)

  Another crowded week. In Legal Methods we “filed” Jack Katz’s lawsuit. Each of us drafted a version of the complaint, and we’ll also have to represent the other side—Grueman’snext week and prepare an answer, though God knows where I’ll find the time to do it.

  Time remains a scarce commodity, and I’m still dragging through the week on five or six hours of sleep each night. The work itself is a lot easier. I can read a case with concentration and need only go over it once, if very slowly, to absorb the outstanding points. But with the increased skill which my classmates and I feel, come new liabilities. The professors are all assigning more work and much of it seems more difficult. In the casebooks, as we go on, it seems as if more crucial material has been edited out of the reports. The other day, in Contracts, we had a case where it was just impossible to tell which party was the plaintiff.

  Whatever the burdens, my condition remains good, even outstanding. I am still awfully excited by the law. Increasingly, I can see patterns in what I’m learning, rather than just a series of abstruse doctrines. There are a lot of perpetual paradoxes—such as the fact that the law claims absolute authority, a ceaseless obedience, from citizens, even while it is in a constant process of change. I also see repetitive philosophical dilemmas such as the one Nicky has talked about often: the struggle to design rules which can be easily and equally applied, but which can also be adjusted to allow for what’s unique in each case. How can the law be efficient and certain without resorting to flat declarations such as “Death to all thieves”?

  The stuff is still in my head all the time, although at moments I wonder if that absorption isn’t a little dangerous or crazy. The other day I ordered a hamburger and sat a few minutes earnestly puzzling over whether a contract had been formed and what the damages would be if I reneged. Would the restaurant be entitled to the reasonable value of the hamburger, or their full profit?

  A lot of my classmates continue to feel a greater remove from the law and a lot more unhappiness in it than I do. Many morepeople are enthusiastic about law school than were, for instance, at the end of the first week. But there’s also a hard core—at least a third of the section—who can’t seem to find a way to enjoy it. Karen Sondergard is still crying almost daily and there areplenty of people who talk about how frightened, uncertain, overwhelmed they constantly feel. Some classmates complain about boredom. Many still bemoan the competition and the hard-driving atmosphere. On those matters, I continue to feel people should be looking a little more honestly—and charitably—at themselves. There are not many of us around there who like to run at only half speed, even though we probably end up pushing each other.

  However, whatever their reasons, I know that people are sincere when they talk about how unhappy they are. I’ve heard more than one person describe the past month as the worst in his life. It’s some sign of the crazy intensity of the experience that from my own perspective, I’d have to call it one of the best.

  Over the Columbus Day weekend, Annette and I went with David and his wife, Lynne, to upstate New York, where David’s family owns a cabin on a lake in the Catskills. He and Lynne had invited us up there to see the fall colors for the first time after our years in California and to take a rest, which we all needed. It was the first weekend off I’d had since I’d started law school, six weeks before.

  As we drove out of town, I sat in the front seat with David, talking law. We arrived at the cabin after dark and did not see the hills until the next morning, but as Lynne and David promised, they were magnificent. Maybe nothing but that kind of grandeur would have been enough to remove me from my legal trance. Even so, it worked. We hiked and fished, drank and talked by the fire. We looked around the small, pretty upstate towns and often simply stood dazed by the splend
id spread of color across the small mountains.

  I had a chance for the first time in weeks to spend some time with my wife. For Annette, it had not been an easy month and a half. She’d started a new job as an art teacher in a grade-school district in one of the northern suburbs. It was an excellent job and she felt lucky to have it, but the work was physically taxing and it left her exhausted. She saw 700 children a week and carried her materials with her from room to room. And I was in no state to help her with the adjustments to a new environment. I was barely there, distracted at all moments and usually studying. Toward me Annette had maintained a generous good humor. She told me she considered this year a period when we were “living on our savings,” the fund of love, regard, good feeling accumulated through five years of a good marriage. But despite her tolerance, I knew it was no fun. She was alone and tired, and also stuck with most of the housework.

  For us it was important and exceedingly pleasant to have time together again when my head was not boiling over with law.

  “You’re relaxed,” Annette told me on Sunday morning. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you this way again.”

  She was right. I was somewhat amazed, just by the changes in my physical state. I felt slower, stronger, more substantial. I had slept. My stomach was not perpetually clenched. My pulse seemed less violent. I did not feel always on the verge of a light sweat. I realized for the first time how great the pressure was which I’d been under. I was a different person here, the man I’d been six weeks ago. I thought about different things. I was not trying to keep my language precise, or analyzing every spoken proposition to find its converse. I could look at mountains as well as words and books. I could live with nothing but the dull gray buzz of tranquillity passing through my head.

  “I’ve stolen away from the brain thieves,” I told Annette.