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In today’s episode, we talk about the sleeper hit, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. This show is a pure delight from start to finish. It’s quirky, witty, laugh-out-loud funny, bold, and catnip for anyone who likes music even a little bit. The musical numbers in this show are definitely ear-worms. You’ll be carrying them around in your head for months afterwards.
One of our favorite songs, because it hits close to home for us, is Don’t Be A Lawyer. My (Carla’s) career as a lawyer has been full of some serious bumps and bruises. So for today’s blog post, I’d like to go a little more in depth to a topic we cover in the podcast: is law school a terrible decision? Financially, it certainly can be. We talked about the stats for what you can expect to earn as a lawyer and the price tag for law school in the episode. And in a nutshell: it costs a lot, and if you’re not graduating from a top-flight school towards the top of your class, you will likely be paying those loans back for a very, very, very long time. I know lawyers who are 20+ years into their career and still plugging away at that debt.
But, as with most things in personal finance, the math is usually the simpler part. The harder, thornier part is the emotions behind your decisions. Today I want to talk about the decision to be a lawyer. If all you know about law is what you see on TV, you will likely have an extraordinarily unrealistic picture about what life is like as a lawyer. So let me break down my experience for you.
The Life of a Lawyer (Litigator)
I practiced in litigation, which basically means: one big company had sued another big company and I was defending the one getting sued. I’m going to break down the two reasons why being a litigator is often stressful and unpleasant: (1) The pressure to bill as many hours as humanly possible, and (2) The nature of the work itself.
The Pressure to Bill
Your value to the firm depends mostly on how many hours you bill. So what that translates to is: every minute of your time is a commodity that you track carefully. You track that time in six-minute increments (tenths of an hour), and have to meticulously write down not just how much time you spent working on a case but, far more importantly, exactly what you did to move that case along and provide value to your client. You can’t just write down: “research case law for 3.5 hours.” You write down something like: “Research case law related to whether statute of limitations begins to run on date of accident or date of first doctor’s visit for purposes of drafting motion to dismiss: 3.5 hours.” And you better actually be doing that for 3.5 hours, and it better seem to the client that this was a task worth doing for 3.5 hours or else they’ll dispute the bill. In my field especially, our clients scoured our bills for anything and everything they could dispute or write off, so we had to be extremely careful with how we phrased the tasks we had done or risk having our hours taken off the bill.
Every minute you’re not billing, you worry and stress about the fact that your hours will be lower. People talk about how much they’re billing and compare it to what you’re billing. You get awards for being the top biller in a particular quarter. The pressure to bill more and more is ever-present. Vacations, if you can take them at all, feel stressful because you are thinking about how much more you’ll have to bill to make up for this time off. We didn’t take a vacation for about 9 years, other than a few days off at Christmas and Thanksgiving every year to see family.
The Work Itself: Anatomy of a Lawsuit
Most of your time is spent alone in your office, researching, looking through documents, writing briefs (basically, formal papers as to why your side should win), and working on “discovery.” Let’s go through the basic anatomy of a lawsuit to see what the workflow is like. First, your client gets sued. You get a phone call from the client and they give you the formal complaint that was filed against them. Now, you have to file a formal response to that complaint (an answer), either admitting or denying the allegations against you. Depending on how quickly your client called you, you may have a couple of weeks or a couple of days (or worst-case, a couple of hours – been there done THAT), to submit your answer. Drafting an answer is a critical and detailed process because you have to address each individual allegation separately and make sure you understand from the client what happened so you can accurately address each one.
The next major step in the process is discovery. Discovery was the absolute bane of my existence. Distilled to its essence, it’s the process of finding documents and testimony that will support your case. What that translates to in real life, is, first, spending time carefully drafting formal written requests for different types of documents. This could look something like: “Please provide all correspondence between X & Y concerning the shipping crates you contend were stolen and the value of those crates.” You have to draft these carefully because if they’re overly broad, the other side can object to them as too burdensome. But if they’re too narrow, you might miss something. You also get LOTS of objections back about how some of the documents you’ve requested are irrelevant or protected by certain laws and do not have to be disclosed. There’s a lot – and I mean A LOT – of arguing over what documents you get and whether they’re protected. Of course, the whole time, you’re fielding the same requests being submitted to your client by the other side, so you’re making the same objections and trying to protect your own client’s information. This whole process leads to a lot of arguing over the phone with opposing counsel and a lot of researching to find case law to support your position that the documents you don’t want to produce are protected (or vice versa), and a lot of hyper-technical writing.
THEN, at long last (at least 6 months to multiple years later), the fight is over and everyone finally gets their hands on all the documents the other side has agreed (or been forced by a judge) to provide. In many cases, this is hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, if not millions. (Side note – “burying” the other side in discovery so they will struggle to find the “good stuff” is not at all uncommon.) Now you’re scrolling and reading through thousands and thousands of pages trying to find anything that actually helps your case. This process of “document review” is the absolute worst. You may have a moment or two of glee when you find something helpful, but mostly it’s just mind-numbing. Technology is making this process a little easier, but many lawyers still insist on having someone review every page manually to be absolutely sure nothing helpful is missed.
After reviewing all the documents and finding what’s helpful, now you’re ready to talk to witnesses. You set up depositions (formal legal interviews under oath), to take the testimony of the people on the other side. You spend days or weeks thinking about what it is you need them to say, crafting questions to ensure you get everything you need out of them, going back over all the documents to make sure you discuss all important documents with them and ask them questions about those documents. The people you’re deposing will be very well prepped by the other side about what they should and shouldn’t say, so getting them to say anything helpful to your case will be like pulling teeth. You prep your own clients to make it equally hard for the other side to get anything good out of them. The actual depositions can be a day or two long, and are mostly extremely frustrating with a few highs of getting what you need.
Now that you’ve completed discovery, you start the process of preparing motions to the court. You file motions trying to keep certain things out of evidence. You file motions explaining why your side should win without having to go to a jury trial. You file motions to try to keep out certain types of expert testimony. You have all these same motions filed against you and draft response briefs refuting all their points. This process takes many more months.
At this point, assuming you haven’t won your case already based on one of the motions you filed, you have two choices: (1) settle the case, or (2) go to trial. Given the nature of my work, most of my cases settled, meaning my clients paid money to not risk having to try our case in front of a jury. Juries usually have no familiarity with the technical, esoteric arguments we would make, so trial was rare. But when you do go to trial, ohhh boy is that stressful. Everything you’ve worked on for years is now culminating in this one brief opportunity to persuade a group of random strangers (who know nothing about the law or the industry the case involves) that you’re right and the other side is wrong. Trial prep usually means weeks and weeks of 15+ hour days at the office, seven days a week, and a maximum level of stress. On the plus side, you are billing a ton of hours, which helps alleviate some of the stress over not billing enough. On the downside, you may or may not feel great about your case and will obviously not have any time for yourself or your family for a loooong, long time.
Does that sound fun to you?
So that’s it in a small nutshell. And of course you won’t just have one case going at a time. You could have a handful of big cases or dozens of “smaller” ones that don’t require as much time and don’t have as much money on the line.
Sometimes the cases you’re working on involve really fascinating topics and interesting people. But on the flip side, sometimes the case is dull, opposing counsel are epic assholes, your own client is extremely frustrating to work with, and you hate everything about it. It depends!
So does all this sound fun to you? Honestly, to some people, this description is not off-putting. Of course, the actual experience of it is far different than reading about it, which is part of what’s so hard about deciding to go to law school. Many jobs you can just hop into and try out for a while, but to be a lawyer you have to put in a huge upfront investment of time (3 years) and money. So if you get into it and realize … oh my God all of this is AWFUL, well … you might feel stuck because you spent a lot of time and money to get there.
But you should know a couple things.
First, there are other things to do with a law degree. From a litigator position like I had, it’s not too uncommon to go “in house” and work for a big corporation and offer advice to hopefully help them avoid the whole awful and expensive process of a lawsuit I described above.
Second, don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking that just because you own something, you have to use it. Once you’ve spent time and money on school, that’s it. Those assets are truly and definitively gone in the most permanent way possible. But that does not mean at ALL that you are stuck using your degree going forward. Imagine if you had booked a nonrefundable ticket to visit a country where a war had since broken out. The money you spent on the ticket is completely gone, and should not factor into the (very easy) decision of whether you should still take a vacation in a literal war zone. You preserve your health and your sanity above all else and don’t worry about the money spent. Does it suck? Of course! Is there anything at all in the world you can do about it? Nope! So you move on and make the best decision possible with the information you currently have. You should think the same way about the choice to get a degree in a field that is making you miserable. The money is a sunk cost – it’s as permanently gone as the Titanic. All you can do now is make the best choice for you going forward.
Past decisions should not chain you to a future of pain and misery.
In short, think very carefully about whether to go to law school. Talk to a LOT of lawyers about what it’s actually like on a day-to-day basis. And if you’re already a lawyer hating their job, don’t continue on with your trip to the war zone just because you already bought the ticket.
Life generally moves in the forward direction, and you should do the same. Look ahead to a life you want and don’t let your past decisions be an anchor that weighs you down for the rest of your precious days here on Earth.