The Catcher In The Hedge Fund

So, I'm reading _The Destruction of Young Lawyers_, by Douglas Litowitz, in-house counsel at a Chicago hedge fund and former Sonnenschein associate. The book has received some great blurbs from some notable nabobs of legal scholarship (Tushnet and Delgado) and a lot of coverage (positive and negative) at Legal Ethics Forum and elsewhere in the blogosphere. There are lots of good links and articles at the LEF post. I especially recommend Jeffery Lipshaw's (draft) review available on SSRN.

I think Litowitz's book has attracted attention for two basic reasons: 1) it is a colorfully written, absolutely uncompromising attack on the legal profession and 2) it purports to offer a "marxist" critique. That word tends to attract people's attention, in case regular N&B readers hadn't noticed. Sad to say, the book's approach is really not marxist at all. I don't have a lot to say about that, other than to observe that even in the world of neomarxist social critique, a handful of unrelated and basically off-hand quotations from Marcuse, Kierkegaard, Engels, Barthes and Ralph Nader don't add up to a critical apparatus.

I do think, though, that the book is something all of us should read--at least the first ten pages of. Not because it's right, and certainly not because it's thoughtful ("furious" would be more like it), but because I think it crystallizes a view that we as law students hear all the time about the profession we're about to enter: that lawyers are miserable, anxious, self-loathing substance-abusers; and that law school and law firms make them that way. Billable hourse, rigid hierarchies, angry senior associates who throw staplers at new lawyers, tedious, humiliating instruction in law school, professors who live for the thrill of getting off sarcastic one-liners at the expense of confused 1-Ls, the whole schtick.

I've heard this a lot since I starting thinking about going to law school, and I feel like I've been hearing it at an increasing pitch as I talk to classmates, friends, and others about getting ready to graduate. Although there are bits of truth caught up in this account, it is largely discordant with my actual experience and observations (admittedly for only a few months) working at a law firm, and completely discordant with my experience (for about two and a half years now) of attending law school. The reason I think the book is valuable is that it presents this dominant view in a sort of unintentional caricature--which offers an opportunity to hold it at a little bit of a distance and think about why people might believe it even if it isn't true. It's a pretty short book; I read the first two chapters last night. I thought I would make just a couple of points about those chapters, and then possibly post more as I read more.

Chapter One: "Unhappy Young Lawyers": It's a kind of angry, impressionistic pastiche of inaccurate factual premises (e.g. that virtually no lawyers are solo practitioners any more, that there's "no money" to be made in consumer-protection litigation), generalizations drawn from the author's dinner-table conversation, and bizarrely-footnoted (and in some cases completely unsupported) statistical claims. It's such a bleak description that on first blush it's pretty alarming, but it's so shrill that it rapidly burns through its own credibility.

Chapter Two: "The Trouble With Law School": Basically recounts the author's own unhappy experience, and asserts that this is how everyone feels. Litowitz writes: "I have never met a person who liked law school. Period." I believe him, but I think this speaks volumes about his methodology and the underlying motivation for his conclusions. He purports to have conducted a systematic study of acculturation into the legal profession, but he never came into contact with a single person who liked law school? Really? I like law school. I've been fortunate here at Boalt to encounter and spend time with many other people who do, too. Not that there aren't frustrations. Not that everything is perfect. And not that some people aren't obviously miserable. But come on! If Litowitz has never met a person who liked law school 1) his study was not nearly as systematic as he says, and 2) his own hatred for the experience has obviously shut him off from contact with people who enjoyed it. What kind of study is this? Second, and perhaps even more telling, is this generalization (and the parenthetical comment that animates it): "Deep down, the central fear of every law student (I felt it myself) is that they will be discovered as a fraud, a phony, someone who dresses the part but who knows nothing, who will be exposed at any moment, like a graduate of medical school who cannot take a pulse." Some measure of doubt is part of life, but I don't think Litowitz is in a position to say (as he basically does say) that everyone who goes to law school is paralyzed by this kind of fear.

My opinion: This is adult narcisism in the technical psychoanalytic sense. This is the distorted perception of a person who was traumatized, and who can only believe 1) that other people are just as unhappy as him deep down, and 2) that the source of their unhappiness is the same as his. Think of King Lear encountering mud-splattered Edgar, asking if Edgar's daughters had betrayed him, too:

"Dids't thou give all to thy two daughters?
And art thou come to this?"

One additional note. I actually agree with some of Litowitz's prescriptions for change. Law school instruction does have a pretty old-fashioned pedagogical model. I think his criticisms of the case method are wildly overblown, but I do think that more project-based, skills-based learning would be a great addition. I actually think legal education has changed somewhat in this regard since Litowitz went to school (Northwestern '88), in that lots of 2Ls and 3Ls do have the chance to do clinical work. His "comprehensive study" notwithstanding, he doesn't seem to notice this trend.