Attention: law school applicants

I've been posting entirely too much lately--it's almost as if I don't have a life. On the contrary, after reading a number of articles recounting the terror that typically ensues after law school graduation, I realize how lucky I am to actually have a life a year out of law school. Allow me to share from the latest article sent to me by a caring (or perhaps cynical) friend to illustrate.

The article, entitled "Who Says Being a Lawyer Has to Suck?" starts out by telling us about Grace, 31, who has a resume any prominent law firm would "salivate over"--1. Phi Beta Kappa as an undergrad, 2. graduation with distinction from Stanford Law school, 3. prestigious clerkship with the Ninth Circuit her 3L year, 4. first job at one of San Francisco's most elite law firms, and 5. Fulbright Scholarship to do research at Oxford secured during her first year at the firm.

Despite her appearance as any law school's golden child, Grace describes her associate experience in a tone that would frighten even the most ambitious masochist:

She describes the nearly three years she spent as an associate as the loneliest time she could imagine. She used to think she was lucky to not have a life – no boyfriend, no kids – because at least she didn’t have to feel guilty about working about 80 hours a week. The other associates were no consolation. Everyone fought so valiantly to prove they did have a life outside the firm – that they knew the latest events in Iraq or what had happened on last night’s Grey’s Anatomy – that lunch had become a pressure-filled hour of one-upmanship. The final straw was when she looked at every single partner in her office and decided that, even though each of them earned around $1 million a year, there wasn’t one whose life she envied.

“You take the best and the brightest our country has to offer,” she now says, just two months after deciding to quit her job, “and subject them to mind-numbing drudgery for all hours of the day, year after year…” Here her voice trails off, and she looks like she’s about to cry. “I hated it when people would ask me what I did because it was so boring even to talk about.”

When Grace told her firm's partners that she was quitting to do something else, most whispered that if they only didn't have the mortgage or family, they would also quit. This, along with the following staggering statistics reported in the article, casts a shadow on our "prestigous profession":

1 - Merger mania has created cutthroat firms with 1,000-plus attorneys and worldwide ambitions. Partners are under extreme pressure to bring in enough business to generate over $1 million each year in per-partner profit. Smaller firms scramble to compete for clients and rainmakers or be bought up for big profits. In the mayhem, the hours for associates have gone from intense to insane, and the brass ring of partnership that used to make their enslavement palatable is becoming more difficult, if not impossible, to attain.

2 - In one year alone, 2005, one in five associates in the nation up and left his or her firm. Of associates with about five years’ experience, an astonishing 78 percent are no longer with their original firm (up from 60 percent in 2000). These attrition rates are the highest ever recorded.

3 - In 1958 the American Bar Association estimated that “there were only approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year.” That amounts to a roughly 40-hour workweek, plus two Saturdays a month. By 2003, however, about 28 percent of associates were billing more than 1,950 hours. Today, associates at top Bay Area firms often bill upward of 2,200 hours, and some as much as 2,600. In order to hit 2,200 hours, a person has to be on the job from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. every weekday and seven hours on Saturday twice a month, with three weeks of total time off a year.

4 - Associates, who bitterly see how their labor is billed out at up to 10 times the rate of their salary to allow their partners satisfy the hunger for higher profits, are each expected to pull more hours, morale be damned.

5 - Even when associates are able to grind out the hours and make full partner, they find it rarely delivers the golden prize it once did. “The power and prestige of being a partner is completely gone,” says Albert. “A partner is only as good as the money he or she brought into the firm last year. If you’re not a hunter, meaning you don’t bring in clients, you better stay really good friends with some hunters or you’re out of luck.” It is becoming increasingly a part of business for partners to lay each other off.

6 - In a 2001 study, 71 percent of female and male graduates from the nation’s top five law schools reported experiencing serious conflict between their work and their personal lives. And when male lawyers in their 20s and 30s were asked if they were willing to take lower salaries in exchange for more free time, 70 percent said yes.

In response, I thank my lucky stars for my attorney job, which requires no billable hours, allows me to work 9-5 with 18 days of vacation leave a year, and provides a 25cent candy/soda/snack machine for those "tough days". I will take it.