You know, I write on this blog a lot about my experiences as a young lawyer, and some of my readers are people who are aspiring to (or perhaps simply considering) the practice of law. I guess for a while I sort of considered that my niche, here in the blogosphere: talking about what it feels like to be me, bumping along as a lawyer trying to do it reasonably well and also be reasonably happy. I guess I read the blogs of practicing lawyers and law professors who have established a field of expertise and think, "I don't have much in common with them," and I read the blogs of the law students and the pre-law students struggling to make sense out of things and figure out their lives and I think, "I am a lot more like them than like these grown up practicing lawyers." So sometimes, unconsciously, my writing feels like it's for them. This, guys, is what it's like on the other side. All of a sudden this morning I feel sort of silly for thinking I have much to say about it.
There's a fella here interviewing for a job with us. He's clerking now, and before that was in law school. Right now he's down the hall with the partners but he came to my office first and we talked for maybe half an hour about the firm and my thoughts and beginning one's career in private practice.
The conversation flowed alright but I mostly felt this strange gulf. There were vocabulary words I was throwing around that I suddenly realized aren't things that he may have ever seen before. And the nature of what I'm doing each day -- I gave examples, but probably the actual nuts-and-bolts tasks associated with the things I do aren't clear to him, sitting on that side of the desk. And even as I kind of realized it it felt almost unbridgeable to try to really explain. He asked me a question about freedom and responsibility -- I don't remember the wording but the thrust was how much of what you do is shaped by you, and how much are you dispatching others' instructions. So I answered the question but I was trying to think back to when I was just hired, and the things I did when I was first starting out, and how it was different from how my job is now. That, too, seemed like an unbridgeable gap -- two and a half years out, and I'm already losing a reliable memory of what it was like to be completely inexperienced. Cripes. I feel like I am completely inexperienced right now, but I'm infinitely more experienced than I was then, and find it hard even to imagine life with that little experience or instincts or common sense. I find it hard to translate the day-to-day things about my job and my life as a lawyer, specific to this firm and in general, to someone who is just starting out.
I wondered then, and I wonder now, why law firms hire first year lawyers anyway. Doesn't it make more sense just to hire laterals? Obviously I'm grateful that that's not the case: someone's got to hire inexperienced lawyers and be patient with us when we still don't speak the language at all. But the gulf there is so big. I really didn't think it was that big when my friend walked into the office -- he came in and sat down and my first instinct was, "Oh, great, I'm just like you, only you've been clerking so you probably know lots more than I did when I started out, but I can really give you a great idea of what it's like to work here." And then I began to notice that, no, to really communicate the essence of this job, this profession, this particular place, we either have to have a conversation that lasts a couple of days, or you just have to work here. I am left with this uneasy feeling that somehow, over the last two and a half years, somehow I have absorbed some invisible essence of lawyerliness that means I now have more in common with lawyers who have been practicing for years than with lawyers who haven't practiced at all.
Does this trend continue? Like, when I've accumulated another three years of experience will I look back at the me right now and think, this person hasn't a clue, and I can't really convey my experience to her through words? So pretty soon the only people who can understand lawyers are other lawyers? Yikes.
In three years, if you're still doing the kind of law you're doing now, you will almost certainly have lost the insecurities that you are now feeling and instead feel solidly expert in your field. In 2007, if you picked up work that you did in 2004, you'll probably (despite Sherry's tendency to be too modest) think, "Hey, I was doing darn good work back then; I wish I had known it. But, I'm even better now."
I wouldn't worry about being only able to talk with lawyers, since you are not the kind of person who gets together with folks and needs to talk solely about her job. Almost no person with a skilled job can readily express the core of the job, or its everyday operations and knowledge, in a way that "outsiders" can readily understand.
After two or three of the 3-year learning curve cycles, you might find that there isn't enough new stuff being learned to make the job interesting enough for you. I think that's the professional side of the 7-year-itch phenomenon. What's wonderful about 21st Century worklife is that no one expects talented people to stay in one field or profession for their entire worklife. (In fact, even untalented people -- or especially them -- need to be flexible enough to have several careers in their lifetime.)
Posted by: David Giacalone | May 10, 2004 at 12:48 PM
A comment about firms hiring fresh graduates: when it comes to SMALL firms, I really don't know why they even bother. The obvious benefit is that the starting salary of a fresh graduate is lower than for a lateral. But I don't see how that monetary benefit is all that significant.
I'm certainly biased by my own experience. I was hired fresh out of law school by a small boutique law firm. After 2 years of getting hands-on training by my partners (who are superb lawyers with stellar reputations), they basically put me in a perfect position to be recruited by bigger firms, which I was and which resulted in my leaving. I left on great terms with my former firm, but from a purely economic perspective, I don't see how they benefited from hiring me as a fresh grad. I benefited and have no complaints. But how did they?
Posted by: UCL | May 10, 2004 at 02:11 PM