Up until now, I think the most difficult period of my adulthood was the year or so right out of college. I was 22-23 and had just been flung from the comfy nest of studenthood and into real life. For the previous seventeen years my job was to learn. All of a sudden, all that changed. My job now was to do.
It took a while to get on my feet, but eventually I did, both vocationally and psychologically. Vocationally I was able to stumble into a good career. I found something I liked to do and that I could do well. Psychologically, however, it was a big change to realize I was now a full-fledged grown-up. Kids are always desperate to be "grown-up," but it's a whole other unanticipated thing to actually be grown up and now solely responsible for your own well-being. You don't even get student discounts anymore... It turns out life is pretty expensive, and you're the person who needs to pay for it.
Still it wasn't really the responsibility aspect that was most daunting; it was that everything was new. Every adult situation I was facing I was facing for the first time, with no prior experience to tap into. It was scary and disorienting ascending the giant learning curve of life.
But by the time I was in my mid to late twenties, things got a lot easier. I was starting to have the benefit of experience, where even when trying situations came up I had some frame of reference I could draw from. Plus just being aware of my own competence was very reassuring. Experience really is a wonderful thing.
So here I am now, having thrust myself into a new career where I have none. Well, not totally none, as I had some summer clerkships and internships and now a year of practice. But effectively none. And now I'm supposed to sell myself into a job that everyone knows I don't know how to do? It's incredible, but this is the situation for nearly every law graduate, where they must approach an employer and essentially say, "We both know I don't know what I'm doing. But hire me anyway, teach me what I'm supposed to do, and, while you're at it, please pay me a lot of money."
It's actually worse than when I graduated from college and had something resembling a vocational skill. With law I have preparation but little functional training. Everyone knows that law school doesn't actually teach you to be a lawyer; it's something you need to learn on the job.
Thus junior lawyers are incredibly vulnerable. You read stories of abused associates all the time, because how are they to defend themselves? How are they to assert any sort of their own esteem when they know full well how ill-equipped they are for the job they are doing? Every new lawyer is extremely aware of how incredibly dependent they are on the beneficence of their employer. They're dependent on them for their livelihoods (law school must be paid for somehow...), and they're dependent on them for every bit of experience that they'll need before they can do anything else in the field. Including anything they ever thought was rewarding enough to justify all this effort and expense to become a lawyer in the first place. Then again, who's got time to think about that? Every day as a new lawyer there's a new mountain to climb, some necessary skill to learn or experience to gain. And every day you are reminded just how little you know. It's really quite demoralizing.
And people do get lost. Sidetracked into dull "careers." Personal lives wrecked by billable hour requirements. I remember at the NJ CLE course on ethics a presenter telling us that, more likely than not, we would be developing a substance abuse problem somewhere during the course of our careers. Because, don't forget, the need for training and income aren't the only pressures lawyers face - there's also a slew of ethical and professional requirements, to say nothing of duties to clients to, you know, like, maybe win their cases...
I think about what drew me to law school, the desire to make the world a better place, and I see my situation now, and I feel like I've been dragged backwards, away from my goal. It fills me with a certain terror, especially knowing what I lost to be here. I threw away financial security and professional confidence to end up in near destitution and doubt. Worse, the Rubicon has apparently been completely crossed. I'm not even sure I could have my old life back if I wanted to. I still get pinged my technical recruiters from time to time, and just saw a job that I would be perfect for, as it was exactly what I'd done before. On a lark (and, because I need to pay the rent somehow) I sent off my resume. But the recruiter blanched. "I can't sell you for this," he said. "You have no recent experience." Of course I don't - I was too busy with this Great Change.
I realized this Great Change had made me hardened and cynical a few months ago when I saw the movie Lean on Me. One of the students in the movie is unafraid to take on principal Joe Clark and argue down his policies. He tells her, and the movie makes this out to be something of a tremendous encouragement, "You should be a lawyer." And I immediately nearly jumped out of my seat shouting, "Nooooo!!!!" When I announced way back in 2002 or so that I was planning to go to law school, there were people Who'd Been There who warned me off of it. I was glib and cocky and ignored their advice, but now I understand it and why Clark's advice was so wrong: law wastes people. It takes their natural talents and strips them away. You may be good at arguing, but you aren't going to get to argue. True, there's more to lawyering than just arguing and clearly you do need to know more than just how to do that. But should it really take three years of law school and at least another three years of practice before you might, if you are really lucky and really tenacious, find yourself in a position where your passion and professional confidence can finally maybe meet? For too many people, I fear, that never happens. And I fear even more that it will never happen to me.