Sometimes I do not recognize the world as the one I grew up in. This bizarre tale of a new attorney who went, more or less, berserk against a potential employer who didn’t want to hire him as a paralegal leads me to ask whether the “the world owes me a living” attitude of the young man comes from generational experiences, geographical origins or is simply and purely a result of this one man’s peculiar and twisted outlook on life.
Lawyering isn’t easy and getting the first job isn’t easy for a young lawyer, even one with top grades from top-flight schools. Economic changes have moved large parts of “BigLaw” to India for processing. According to one estimate, 30-35% of litigation costs in large litigation by one estimate come from document review in the age of Microsoft Office, and there are lots and lots of English-speaking, high work-ethic attorneys in India who will work for 1/4 of a U.S. lawyer’s salary (with proportionate low personal overhead on their end.) While what my practice does – unemployment litigation, traffic disputes, misdemeanor criminal defense, debt collection work, etc.- cannot be outsourced to Bangalore or Hyderabad (or Manila, or Lagos, or Johannesburg, etc.), big law firms are vulnerable to outsourcing for much of their work.
One of the disturbing trends I have seen out of Generation Y’s cohort in law school is referring to legal work for live human beings, rather than for large corporations, as so-called “Third Tier Toilet” work, referring to law schools of lower (or no) prestige. I view the so-called “TTT” chatter as a way for frustrated law students – and possibly those who want to maintain BigLaw’s cultural prestige within legal education” – to kick dirt on the faces of clients looking up from the bottom of the economic well. It is a nasty sort of class-consciousness inversion – lawyers fearful of (or competing for talent with) blue collar law, poverty law, law for real persons not artificial corporate persons, passing on their own anxieties about their careers (or others’ careers) onto the backs of clients and areas of practice that don’t carry corporate prestige and insane salaries/workloads.
A new associate at major BigLaw firms may make $160,000 per year. In other words, she or he has two full-time $80,000.00 jobs, in one paycheck. Her or his salary requires that she bill at least $500,000 per year under 1:3 rule of salary:billings. At $225/hour, this requires billing 2200 hours per year; many law firms require much more. Who can pay $225/hour for a first year associate and three times that for a partner? Large corporations facing millions, even billions in opportunities and risks. Poverty law works differently – the high-stakes cases come often for the clients LEAST able to pay, not MOST able. Same with workers’ comp, unemployment cases, traffic cases for motorists who will get fired if they get their license suspended, criminal cases for young people who may want a job someday – high stakes cases very often accompany the inability to pay.
There is no way to bridge the gap mentally betwen the welder with 18 years’ seniority who just got fired over a petty squabble with a supervisor, and a 25 year-old law school grad who looks upon representing that welder as trivial, so trivial that any employer who won’t hire him deserves to be threatened and called a “career predator,” as did the new attorney in the case linked above. It’s part of a sick, inhuman mindset that looks about the legal profession as a bank vault to be raided, rather than as a craft to be done well for those who most need it. I see a connection between dismissing the profitability of middle-class law for the lawyer, dismissing the importance of the client’s case morally and dismissing the entire blue-collar and middle-class clientele en masse as “Third Tier Toilet” people.
Nobody owes a lawyer a living. Lawyers do not exist for their own sake, but to assist clients whom the law affects – sometimes for a profit, sometimes not. Lawyers entering the profession with the opposite mindset should go into vanity plastic surgery for Hollywood instead (this is not to disparage reconstructive or therapeutic plastic surgery.) There are no Third Tier Toilet clients; if you look at the legal rights of clients as being of a lower tier, or as the clients themselves as beneath you, please turn in your law license and go sell luxury cars to corrupt government officials in oil-exporting countries instead. There’s nothing wrong with preferring a high salary or corporate work; it’s the “the world owes me a BigLaw fat paycheck” mentality among some young lawyers that I find extremely offensive.
The Law Office of Bruce Godfrey proudly represents the unemployed, the accused, the forgotten, the marginalized and the damned. If BigLaw looks down on my clientele, or on me for representing real people, good. Looking down on people as people is a mistake worth punishing, and it’s always a good idea not to interrupt an opponent or competitor when they are making a serious mistake.