According to Harvard University’s “Our Mission and Culture” page, the mission of Harvard Law School is to “advance[] the cause of justice all over the world through excellence and leadership in legal education and scholarship.” However, according to the class of 2022 employment report, of the 590 law students who graduated, only 8% worked in public interest—down about 3-4% from the prior two years. Rather than taking jobs to advance the cause of justice, the vast majority of HLS graduates work in “BigLaw”, a colloquial term for the “largest, most high-powered firms in the country.” These firms lavish new recruits with salaries above $200,000 fresh out of law school so that they will put up with miserable conditions and often handle cases with legal theories ranging from the objectionable to the depraved. Many HLS students, saddled with significant student loan debt (recent estimates say students graduate from HLS with close to $170,000), see no other option other than to make a Faustian bargain with BigLaw firms in order to pay off their loans, get a proper return on their investment, and live a joyful adulthood (if not immediately, perhaps a few years down the line).
A new organization, founded this year by Harvard Law students, seeks to provide law students with insight about the human cost of corporate defense work, as well as start a practical conversation regarding potential alternatives. On Thursday, April 6, 2023 at 7pm in Belinda Hall, that group of student organizers launched the Law Firm Transparency Project, which, through an informative website and other advocacy measures, seeks to prove 3 main points:
- Legal work has an enormous impact on the lives, liberties, and livelihoods of individuals and communities.
- Law is adversarial.
- There are justice-oriented, human-centered, well-paying alternatives to Big Law.
At the launch event, the student organizers illustrated these points through a candid, gentle conversation about the struggles of planning a legal career with antiracist, egalitarian sympathies. Discussion of the financial realities facing graduates from HLS is “a nuanced and complicated conversation,” noted Kiese Hansen, HLS ‘23, a co-founder of the project. Correspondingly, Dylan Hosmer-Quint, HLS 23’, another leader of the Project, made clear both at the outset and throughout that the “point of the event [was] not to shame anyone,” but was more to make sure people were aware of the ramifications of committing to a BigLaw job.
The Project started the discussion with focus on the first point, that, in Hosmer-Quint’s words, “people most affected by the decisions of lawyers are often not lawyers, and that includes career decisions.” Often corporate defense firms will obfuscate their participation in systemic injustices through emphasis on their pro bono work; major players in the legal field tout the application of their abundant resources to matters of social justice, such as representation of tenants, incarcerated people, and other underprivileged clients. Simultaneous with their pro bono work, the same firms represent clients who exacerbate these harms on a much larger scale. Hosmer-Quint told an anecdote of how Sidley Austin promoted its work to win 1,000 incarcerated people their release from prison during the COVID-19 pandemic, but just 10 years prior represented California prisons in an attempt to prevent 46,000 inmates from being released from overcrowded prisons.
After emphasizing the effects of corporate defense work, Hosmer-Quint brought the discussion to the Project’s second point. “Law is adversarial: when you win money for your client, or protect your client from liability, the other side loses,,” he said. Discussions about BigLaw practice typically focus on neutral topics like experience, hours, and vague notions of professionalism, but the form of the work is meant to draw attention away from the substance. One example mentioned was the widespread practice of deflecting criticism of BigLaw work by saying “I’m only doing transactional work” (rather than corporate defense litigation); the statement implies that helping companies with mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies is less likely to contribute to systemic harm. The Project provides examples of how transactional work can be just as harmful, such as Skadden’s representation of Johnson and Johnson in their efforts to avoid liability through creative bankruptcy filings.
For first-year law students, there is serious “institutional pressure,” as one 3L put it, towards BigLaw, and that pressure can crowd out alternatives. Most 1Ls participate in the Early Interview Program (EIP), through which Harvard facilitates interviews between prospective interns and corporate firms. Many voices at the event noted the disparity between structures facilitating entry into BigLaw positions and those for the ostensibly less secure, less lucrative public interest paths. They commented that this dichotomy created an air of “negativity” around public interest. One 3L described it as “a bubble” where things are overblown, and people describe “making $50,000 ” as poverty wages; meanwhile, beyond the “bubble”, as many as 25.2% of Americans lived on less than $35,000 as of 2021.
“Law when you win money for your client, or protect your client from liability, the other side loses,,”
Students noted that this culture of negativity has the effect of reducing apprehension towards corporate law positions, which participants of the event described as more costly than it appears. One 3L, who spent their 2L summer splitting time between a BigLaw firm and a public interest job, described deep feelings of shame for doing problematic work. The student cautioned other public interest-inclined 1Ls who work with corporate firms to be certain about foregoing “good work” to do a BigLaw summer, even if it is noncommittal. Additionally, summer associate programs are notorious for not reflecting the actual day-to-day of a first-year associate at a law firm. Katie Super, HLS 23’, who helped co-sponsor the event as a member of the Program on Law and Political Economy, recalled from her experience as a legal assistant how corporate firms sheltered summer associates from the actual day-to-day of full-time attorneys.
One major elephant in the room addressed at the event was the discussion of graduating with debt and its relation to the agency of individual law students. Many students committed to public interest work noted that they were on the higher end of indebtedness amongst HLS students, with some well above the average and deep into the $200,000s. Other attendees alleged that some law students hide behind the general notion of graduating with “loads of debt” to take a BigLaw job, while having comparatively low indebtedness. There was a sense that a number of attendees took issue with BigLaw track HLS students attempting to avoid moral scrutiny by describing their choice as ostensibly coercive.
“people most affected by the decisions of lawyers are often not lawyers, and that includes career decisions”
These points all lead to the third point promoted by the Project: there are real alternatives to BigLaw work that make fiscal sense for HLS students. The Project seeks to rebut the false dichotomy of lucrative corporate defense work vs. modest public interest work. Organizers pointed out that public interest jobs can be quite profitable. They contended that “[students] don’t have to go into corporate defense to have a meaningful, financially secure career.”
One example of such work is plaintiffs’ side law, which concerns representation of parties seeking to redress injuries, often marginalized groups. The average salary for a plaintiffs’ lawyer varies widely depending on the source, but most place the number around $80-120k, well above the 2017-2022 median American per capita income of $37,638. A number of plaintiffs’ firms even pay over $200,000 in starting salaries to junior attorneys, BigLaw wages. Many government attorney jobs, meanwhile, far exceed local salary averages, and often come with benefits that significantly reduce law school debt. In addition to LIPP (Harvard’s program to financially augment relatively lower paying public interest jobs), public defense and plaintiffs’ lawyers may apply to federal and state loan repayment assistance programs(LRAPs) in 24 respective states. While the organizers do not claim that these alternatives are a substitute for the potential windfall of a BigLaw job, they argue that foregoing a career in BigLaw may not be as costly as it appears.
In launching their new project, Hosmer-Quint and his colleagues attempt no small feat. Simply put, the prestige and financial benefits of BigLaw work are significant and impossible to ignore in any honest conversation about career choices post-graduation. However, the general mood amongst the students at the initial Law Firm Transparency Project event was one of optimism, rather than concern. Only time will tell if this launch and website is as far as the Project will go, or if they represent the early developments of a greater shift in the discourse.