For people systematically chosen for being able to root out and analyze the rationality of arguments, lawyers are pitifully bad at being reasonable. Let us look, for instance, at the current theories about what to do with your law degree.
(1) Become a Corporate Lawyer at a Law Firm. By far the most popular choice, but which no one wants to talk about when inspiring you about to change the world. Most people take this, make a lot of money, and spend it on themselves buying big cars, big apartments, big diamonds, and a host of other things that will never make you happy in life.
(2) Become a Public Interest Lawyer. Not nearly as common, yet popular culture has induced the notion that this is nobler than being a corporate sell out by going the law firm route.
(3) Become a Government Lawyer. A nice balance between the two, with the perks of better hours and a reasonable lifestyle. In the good, better, best model, this is the “better” even if no one seems to agree on what the “best” is.
(4) Academia. Prestigious but obtuse. On the one hand it does not suffer from the downside of working for (gasp) giant corporations. On the other hand, no one really understands what utility comes from all those law review articles aspiring professors so desperately want published.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. But where will you do the most good? Conventional wisdom tells you that going into the private sector is bad because you will be working for big corporations that are invariably evil because they are big and because they are corporations. Save the world by going into public interest, fighting for the indigent and the oppressed, or by regulating those greedy corporate types by joining forces with the presumptively beneficent state! Such is the party line.
If you really want to do good by law, consider becoming a corporate lawyer, making a lot of money, and donating a substantial sum to charity. This is by far the greatest utility maximizing option you have. Let’s consider the following different scenarios:
| Profession> | First Year After Tax Income | Utility |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Lawyer | $100,000 | Allocate your skills by the market. If you decide to spend just 25% of your income on charity, you destroy all other professions by utility. |
| Public Interest Lawyer | $32,500 | You make just enough to survive, but get the warm fuzzies that you allocate your skills according to perceived need rather than market value. |
| Government Lawyer | $39,500 | You make marginally more than Public Interest Lawyers, and get the warm fuzzies that you use your skills according to the wonderful allocation capacity of the government. |
| Academia | $26,000 | You make less than everyone else while writing papers of dubious utility (Can poor people eat using your opinion on law’s impact on poor people?). |
Sources: https://www.totaltaxinsights.org/Calculator. Corporate Lawyer: using $160,000, For Public interest: using $40,000 as per NYU’s mean estimate http://www.law.nyu.edu/careerservices/employmentstatistics. Government Lawyer: Use $50,790 for as per http://www.justice.gov/legal-careers/attorney-salaries-promotions-and-benefits. Academia: Use $32,000 as per http://www.law.nyu.edu/careerservices/employmentstatistics. Single filing status, no dependents. Assumed living in NYC, though the end results are essentially the same in any city.
Let’s see what you would get if you invested just a quarter of your after tax income as a Corporate lawyer to charity. If you decide to give to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, one of GiveWell.org’s top rated charities, you could deworm children at a rate of $0.73 to $0.99 per child. http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/schistosomiasis-control-initiative. In other words, your $25,000 could deworm 25,000 children, seriously improving their quality of life. If solving Cleft Pallets is your thing, the smile train offers a life changing surgery for $250, meaning that $25,000 could change 100 people’s lives in a permanent way. (Though be careful, Givewell and other watchdogs estimate that the true cost is $1,000 and to be somewhat wary of this charity’s promises.)
Perhaps you could just give directly to the most impoverished, allowing them to decide for themselves what they most need to spend their resources on (hint: its not legal services, it usually is food, cows, and such) through the organization GiveDirectly (http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-directly). Additionally, for approximately $6, you can distribute a net that reduces child mortality rates for malaria, so with $25,000 you could distribute over 3,000 nets. With the current estimate of 1 life saved per 20 nets; that equals saving 150 lives per year. (http://www.againstmalaria.com/onechild.aspx, http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF.)
So there you have it—be a corporate lawyer, donate 25% of your post tax income to charity, and save 150 lives a year, or deworm 25,000 kids. Alternatively, go into Public Interest, Government, or Academia, and feel warm and fuzzy about yourself. Sadly, when people at this school talk about public service, they mean the latter, rather than the former. If only people applied the same amount of cognitive skill used in just one LSAT logic game to the most critical question of what to do with their law degree, hundreds of lives could be saved.
Response to Opposing Article: My respected colleague has misdirected her fury away from what is, ultimately, a mathematical question. Is it better to save the lives of 150 living, breathing, people, or to exert the same effort on an unquantifiable, indefinable “good”? If this article has made you indignant, then good. I, too, am indignant. Not for the feelings that I have slighted, but for the lives that could have been saved.
YOURE EVIL BILL BARLOW!!
There is an argument to be made that making the most money possible and then donating it to charity generates more utility than working in public interest. Unfortunately, this is not that argument. To actually make that calculation you’d have to take into account the utility generated by working in public interest beyond simply “feel[ing] warm and fuzzy about yourself.” The author is correct that there’s a mathematical question here, but he’s failed to accurately pose it.
Hey math genius,
I’m a corporate lawyer. I donate 25% of my salary to charity. This year, I was lead counsel on a case that I got dismissed on a technicality for an oil conglomerate who should have paid millions in restitution to the public. Did I maximize social welfare?
For someone who is trying to use a “scientific” approach you are using a pathetically small number of variables in making your determination. You are refusing to include soft variables, probably because that would be too complicated for you despite your prodigious mathematical skills. You are equating deworming a child, which is a great thing to do, with fighting for structural change in a society. Obviously, people who do the latter have an impact that is harder to quantify and largely immeasurable in the short-term. Yet you coded their impact for your “analysis” or whatever you call this crap as merely “warm and fuzzies” for the practicing attorneys and did not assign any value to the outcome of their work. Then you compared “warm and fuzzies” to deworming children in determining that corporate law is better for the world. Hmm, seems like the person who is creating the variables may be SLIGHTLY biased. You really didn’t even try–not that this would still have any integrity as a “mathematical” study, but someone who at least wanted to maintain the visage of being neutral would have compared saving the children with the work of an average public interest attorney, such as saving 20 families from eviction in a year. Oh, also, can you quantify that for me? The benefit society inures when ten families not only are saved from homelessness, but remain in the home that their children grew up in? Yeah, that’s why your “mathematical approach” is all bullshit.
I think you should leave statistical analysis to people who actually know how to conduct an empirical study. I hope dearly for your future corporate clients that your approach to litigation is not as rudimentary as your approach to this article.
Yours truly,
An attorney from the private sector
In your wonderfully precise and realistic calculations, you failed to account for a few variables. By working for corporate America in the capacity most HLS grads do- going to large corporate law firms in major cities, you are working directly against the philanthropic causes you used in your example. The dirty little secret is that corporations do not care about social justice unless there is $$ attached to it. So you can donate your $25,000 to de-worm children in X country while going to your high paying big-corporate law job and making sure that Coca-cola can still poison the well water in that same country, or making sure that Shell Oil can violently suppress any labor organization efforts in that same country, and I could go on and on with the atrocities you are enabling and promoting and buying your supper with by working for these firms, but if you wrote this article you clearly are not interested in actually understanding what you are advocating.
In the cost-benefit analysis, don’t forget to factor in all the ways you’re making the world a worse place by serving powerful interests. For example, if you help a major corporation avoid taxes, all that tax money is diverted away from early education, food stamps, etc. You’ll help employers stiff workers, you’ll help banks fight regulation that keeps the economy stable, you’ll help car companies get away with selling lethal products, etc.
If no one works as a government lawyer, the underpinnings of our system will collapse, and then law firms and charities won’t be able to function.
If poor people don’t have lawyers, then the powerful (e.g., police, debt collectors, sex traffickers, employers) will run roughshod over them. You’ll have masses of people who live and die at the whim of philanthropists, and feel as though they have no control over their lives. Doesn’t sound like a super-stable situation, either for the poor or their benefactors.
a. Your government salary is wrong because it excludes locality pay, which is a core portion of government compensation. The actual starting salary for an entry level GS-11 step 1 attorney in NYC is 65,377, and it goes up pretty rapidly to over 100k within 3 years. Subsidized health benefits and excellent pensions are far superior to a law firm and are worth around 20-30k annually depending on your salary.
b. Also, your average salaries do not take into account loan repayment, which would be full in the private sector (significantly reducing that 100k take home and making it nearly impossible to donate 25% of your salary without living at a near poverty level) and, for good law schools, covered in full for public interest or government attorneys until they hit around 80k.
The author seems to assume that those BigLaw jobs don’t carry massive negative externalities.
The author also assumes that public interest lawyers don’t actually accomplish anything, but just have the warm fuzzies.
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but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr…
well I’m noot writing all that over again. Anyway, jսst wantеd to ssay great blog!
Excellent article. I’m going through a few of these issues
as well..
I should add that an easy fix in response to my critique is to add to the first paragraph, “assuming you have a choice”.