In Response to Bill Barlow’s “BigLaw” Article

Bill Barlow’s recent article attempts to persuade his fellow students (and perhaps himself) that going into BigLaw is the most effective way to “save the world.” His definition of saving (or, perhaps more accurately, $aving) the world seems to be making as much money as possible and then donating much of it to charity. Under Bill’s view, it is how you spend your money, not your time and talents, that matters. Bill is absolutely right that distributional issues lie at the core of social justice efforts. But he is wrong that individual, voluntary wealth redistribution is the answer. The answer is the systematic redistribution of power and privilege. This is the work that public interest lawyers do.

As a BigLaw associate, your money can buy inhalers for children in low-income communities of color whose lungs are filled with the pollution pumped out by the coal plants built in their backyards. But your time and your talents will be spent defending the coal plant’s right to be there and to pollute as much as it pleases. Your money can “deworm” a child halfway across the world, or fix her cleft palate. But your time and talents will be spent enforcing pharmaceutical patents to keep life-saving medications prohibitively expensive for those same children, and millions like them. And your time and talents will not be spent defending the most vulnerable children in your own communities from the racist, destructive effects of mass incarceration or a failing education system. You will be too busy defending the white-collar criminals and corporations who can afford to pay market value for your services.

You can do good at a firm. You can take on pro bono cases and donate 25% of your salary to charity. But the money for your pro bono work and your salary has to come from somewhere. It comes from wealthy, powerful clients who pay your firm extraordinary amounts of money to protect their wealth and power. These clients will ask you to defend them against the people they have injured, defrauded, and discriminated against — people who must rely on the law to protect them because they do not have the wealth and power to protect themselves. Or they will ask you to draft contracts and facilitate their corporate mergers. At best, your job will keep you too busy to engage much, or at all, with the structural issues that keep people sick, poor, and hopeless. At worst, your job will be to use your clients’ resources to prevent the poor and powerless from using the law as a tool to address those structural issues.

There are fine reasons to do BigLaw. People have families to support, or debt to pay, or a genuine interest in corporate law. But you can’t save the world by throwing money at problems while working to serve the interests of clients who perpetuate those problems. The way you spend your money matters. But the way you spend your time and your talents — the way you spend your life — matters more.