Over the last several weeks, many have learned of the workplace experiences of white collar workers at Amazon. How they cry at their desks. How they are given little time off even when sick, or to recover from a health issue. That workers are expected to respond to e-mails they receive late into the night. Add to that the conditions of blue collar workers at Amazon warehouses, and one gets the distinct impression that Amazon may be a pretty bad place to work.
For many, this was surprising news. The startup culture, which Amazon tries to replicate even though it is now a behemoth, is supposed to be about joyful toil, energy-drink-fueled binge sessions that reflect inspired and hard work, and hard play afterwards. All by choice. The New York Times exposé about the working conditions at Amazon for white collar workers probably made some say “well, at least I don’t work at Amazon” the next time they received an after-hours email or had to go into the office on a weekend.
For lawyers, however, this wasn’t news. For some, the stories of white collar work at Amazon just described their professional life for the last 30 years or so.
The rise of Big Law, where today’s mega-firms welcome young law school graduates to assess whether they are “partner material,” coincides with a period of diminished job satisfaction for many lawyers, as well as high rates of depression and substance abuse among the members of the legal profession.
For some, the experience of working as a lawyer in a big firm is debilitating and demoralizing. In pursuit of larger and larger profits for firm partners, lower-tier lawyers can be pressed to work longer and longer hours, take on demanding work, and are expected to be available at a moment’s notice to handle their supervisor’s assignments any time, day or night, weekend or holiday.
Ask a lawyer who has gone through the wringer of working at a high-stress law firm whether he or she still flinches if the phone rings at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, evoking memories of the dreaded partner’s call telling the young associate to cancel plans for the weekend because a client insists that the big merger must be finalized by Monday.
So the stories of white collar work at Amazon probably evoked similar memories for many lawyers who worked in these sorts of law firm boiler rooms for the last few decades. Now, many of these firms have begun to cut back on the hiring of associates and have done what many employers have done in the past: outsource their work and look for cheaper alternatives to paying their own employees. As these jobs have dried up, fewer and fewer students are headed to law schools. The job prospects of law school graduates have diminished, causing many to question the law as a viable career choice.
But these types of working conditions, and the soulless, high-stakes and high-pressure drudgery that comes with them, are not necessary in the law. Moreover, there is a pressing need for lawyers, as 80 percent of low-income Americans and 50 percent of those of moderate income, face their legal problems without a lawyer because they cannot afford one.
What’s more, working for a cause such as combating homelessness, helping people fight racial discrimination, or pursuing better police-community relations can be rewarding, and a recent study of lawyer satisfaction shows that those who do what is known as public interest work report being far happier at their jobs than those who work in other legal settings.
The legal profession is a calling. It should attract those who wish to make a difference in the world through their law degree, like the next Thurgood Marshall; Ruth Bader Ginsburg; or Evan Wolfson, leader of the victorious Marriage Equality campaign before the Supreme Court this past year. The law can be a richly rewarding career–if not a lucrative one–for those who wish to pursue meaning in their work, and help change lives for the better.
Will the work be hard and do lawyers work long hours regardless of their career path within the law? Yes. Legal work is demanding, especially when the stakes are high. But it can also be intellectually stimulating and exciting. As a young legal aid lawyer working in Harlem on housing matters, I routinely arrived at the office at 7 a.m. and didn’t arrive home until 10 in the evening.
My day would often involve court, night meetings at my client’s home, intake, time in the office research and writing, and perhaps a stop at a government office or even the office of a big law firm that was working with me on a case pro bono (giving their young associates a chance to do more rewarding work!). Knowing that I was helping my clients save their homes kept me going.
Thinking creatively about their legal claims and putting my brain and my legal training to work to make their lives a little better as I felt I did every day: this was why I went to law school.
Careers in the law can be rewarding. Working in a big law firm can be rewarding, as can working in a prosecutor’s office, for a public defender, or work as a solo practitioner (but there the boss can be a total jerk sometimes). Lawyers, as a profession, need what author and recovering lawyer Daniel Pink describes as the essential components of fulfilling work: mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Amazon-style working conditions (as they are portrayed in the media at least) are anathema to those components, and they have no place in any work setting, let alone those of white collar knowledge workers and professionals.
Should today’s law students, and tomorrow’s, want to find fulfilling careers in the law, they should look for those settings in which they can put their skills and will to the test on behalf of a larger purpose. That is the essence of work as a professional, and to the extent lawyers have lost that, they should seek to regain it. For those who say there are too many lawyers, I respectfully disagree. We just haven’t deployed them to work where they are most needed, or always allowed them to have rewarding and fulfilling opportunities to put their training and skills to the test.
This piece was originally published on the professor’s blog. Ray Brescia is an associate professor of law at Albany Law School.