Making of Lawyers’ Careers Notes

Introduction: The Making of Lawyers’ Careers

• Five lawyers are introduced: Alicia, Paula, James, Lynden, and Constance. Despite all having spent time in a business-oriented law firm with over 100 attorneys, their careers have taken different paths.

  • Alicia: A White woman, attended a lower-ranked urban law school and started in a litigation defense firm.
  • Paula: A Latina, attended an elite law school and began her career in a prestigious corporate law firm.
  • James: A White man, graduated from a top-6 law school, had two federal clerkships, and joined a prestigious law firm known for high-profile criminal defense work.
  • Lynden: An African American man, graduated from a top-20 law school and became an associate in a leading DC litigation law firm.
  • Constance: Also a Latina, attended law school at night while working full-time in child protective services (CPS) and was later hired as a staff attorney in the district attorney’s office.

• Comparing these five career trajectories reveals truths about the legal profession’s structure of opportunity in the early 21st century and the strategies lawyers use to navigate its possibilities and constraints.

Alicia

• Alicia initially aimed for a large, major-market firm, attracted by their resources, reputations, and better pay.
• She decided such firms were not a good fit, preferring a family-oriented firm where she could have a better work-life balance.
• She began her career at a midsize insurance defense firm that hired graduates from tier 3 schools and paid associates just over half the largest firms’ starting salaries.
• A family connection may have helped her get hired, but she wanted to earn the job on her merit.
• Three years into her career, Alicia was confident and believed she was outperforming other associates and on the partner track.
  • She planned to be married with children and a partner within five years.
• Six years later, her narrative was less optimistic, with warning signs about her future at the firm.
  • The timeline to become partner had increased from approximately six to eight years to eight to ten years.
  • After being passed up for partner, she felt the firm was “somewhat discriminatory,” as she worked long hours and felt she was more productive than some male partners who had been promoted.
• She began to reassess her goal of making partner, claiming she did not need the title to be a good lawyer.
  • She reported personal disappointments but expected to remain at the firm.
• Twelve years into her career, she was passed up for partner again.
  • A senior male partner suggested some deemed her “not pretty enough” and that she had failed to land corporate clients.
• She struggled for another year before securing an inside counsel position in a large financial company.
• Reflecting on her job change, Alicia acknowledged that being passed over for partner had been “very painful” but ultimately positive.
• Moving to the bank position changed her way of thinking about the law and made her happier.
• She adapted her practice, appreciated the diversity of her corporate law department, and felt accepted for her style.
• As of 2021, she held a more senior inside counsel position at another financial institution.

Paula

• Paula, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, attended a top public university and an elite law school before starting in corporate practice with a leading national law firm where she had interned.
• She was interested in partnership but thought her chances were slim due to the small number of partners in the corporate practice.
• She gained informal mentorship from a female equity partner but never felt the partner would fully advocate for her.
• After a few years, she moved to a new city for her husband's job.
  • The firm transferred her, but she found it tough as a woman in the new environment, which she described as an “old boys’ kind of club.”
• After her father-in-law's death, she moved back to her original city and joined another prestigious firm.
• After a year and a half, she left, frustrated with big law firm practice and feeling a lack of fit.
  • She had a good mentor outside her practice group who showed her what it took to become a partner, including constant work and networking.
• She decided she wanted a more balanced lifestyle.
• With a headhunting firm's help, she became the deputy general counsel at a Spanish-language media company and has been there for 15 years.
• She hopes to become general counsel and is satisfied with her position, enjoying the better hours and having three children.
• Motherhood has meant missing networking opportunities, which could impact career advancement.

James

• James's story illustrates the fast track to partnership in large law firms.
• Though not from privilege, his father was a respected professional, and he attended a top-10 undergraduate institution and law school.
• After clerking for two federal judges, he had his pick of jobs and chose a prestigious national law firm.
• He did not initially aim for partnership, expecting long hours and burnout but found he enjoyed the work.
• The mentorship environment, especially informal mentorship, helped him learn and succeed.
  • The firm emphasized building relationships over generating business.
• He was elevated to equity partner and remained modest, enjoying his work and feeling more included.
• He attributed becoming partner to excellent work, a broad range of skills, and fitting the culture.
• He felt his firm was committed to diversity but acknowledged the problem of attrition among minorities.
• He noted that his wife's decision to be a stay-at-home parent facilitated his demanding trial work.
  • She had previously worked as a lawyer at the same firm.
  • He reported that she wanted to return to work but was deciding what to do next.

Lynden

• Lynden, an African American lawyer, was pushed out of a large law firm, typifying the fate of many African American lawyers in law firms.
• Raised by a single mother who worked as a maid, he attended an elite undergraduate school and worked for the federal government.
• Then, he attended a top-20 law school and became an associate in a prestigious DC law firm.
• He moved to another well-regarded DC law firm focused on litigation but felt like an outsider, worried he lacked the “businessperson type of personality” required for partnership.
• He had not yet been considered for promotion at the time of the first interview.
• At the second interview, he had been turned down for partnership, given notice of termination, and was seeking his next move.
• He suspected he was excluded from practice groups due to his race, preventing him from bonding with partners, and he lacked powerful mentors to help him advance.
• During the recession, he was terminated when practice groups splintered, with no one protecting him or leading him to another opportunity.
• He acknowledged he had never made it into a “silo” within which he could prosper and was “bouncing around the outside.”
• He attributed his outsider status to race, background, and comfort level in networking in a mostly White world, and he lacked common cultural capital with the partners.
  • He had never golfed, for example.
• By the third interview, he had returned to working for the federal government as a lawyer for a regulatory agency, regularly appearing in court.

Constance

• Constance began her career as a CPS social worker while attending night law school.
• Her work impressed the district attorney, leading to an internship and then a job in the district attorney’s office after graduation.
• She started in the domestic violence unit and was promoted to felony assaults, then gang prosecutions.
• She received advice to try her first murder case and then leave, as she would gain all the training she needed before being “sucked dry.”
• She took the advice, tried her first murder case while pregnant, and then leveraged a relationship with an expert witness she had hired.
• The expert witness, a criminal defense attorney, offered her a job when she was ready to leave the district attorney’s office.
• Constance and her mentor built a practice advising and representing lawyers on ethical issues.
• They grew their practice through publications and speaking engagements and were recruited by a larger, national law firm as lateral partners, bringing their whole group with them.
• Constance became a nationally recognized expert in this niche practice area.
• She expressed satisfaction with her career trajectory and had considerable flexibility in her work schedule.
  • She worked from home and on the road and was usually out of the office early to meet family obligations.
• She considered changing practice areas once her children graduated from college.
• She moved to a partnership position in a large international law firm before relocating to a national legal market, where she now works as a partner and deputy general counsel for a large global law firm.
• The average partner compensation at her firm is reportedly 1.25 million per year.

Inequality and Opportunity: Connecting Agency and Social Structure

• These five stories illustrate how large-scale social structures (gender, race, class, law school status, macroeconomic conditions) shape lawyers’ career prospects but are not deterministic.
• Social hierarchies structure careers but do not function as a caste system.
• Personal narratives show that social and professional hierarchies have contingent power.
• Paula used her elite credentials and Spanish-language proficiency to move in-house.
• Constance worked her way up from night school to a global firm, impressing mentors at each stage.
• It is unlikely Constance could have obtained an entry-level position in her current firm or risen through the ranks to equity partnership due to the old-boy network.
• Paula saw the limitations of mentorship, and Alicia found sexism prevented her advancement, but both converted their experience into successful careers outside corporate law firms.
• Lynden experienced how largely White law firms may hire African American attorneys who feel like social class outsiders and get fired without powerful mentors.
• Parenting and partnerships are also important to success.
• Constance’s career proves that female attorneys can parent while maintaining high-powered careers, but involves full-time domestic help and flexibility.
• Many women joke about needing a wife to handle childcare and domestic responsibilities.
• Men do not face the same trade-offs, and James attributed his success to his wife’s decision to put her career on hold.
• Paula noted she had not done the networking that might help her become a general counsel due to family commitments.
• These narratives are framed by the deep structures of the American legal profession, conditioned by the market and enduring legal and professional hierarchies, which are racialized, gendered, and classed.
• Inequalities remain inextricable from the market and professional opportunities.
• The division between public and private sector law creates correlated inequalities.
  • Private bar offers higher pay and status compared to government and public interest practice.
  • Lawyers are often advised to convert public sector capital into private sector opportunity.
• Paula represents the elite path from a top-tier law school to a large law firm to a well-paid in-house counsel position, which provides an outlet for lawyers who will never make partner, especially women.
• James's path, as a White man with elite education credentials, is the traditional one, flowing from first year to partnership.
• Paula and Constance's career trajectories are nontraditional for their profession.
• James's wife's decision to leave the labor market facilitated his high-level litigation practice.
• James had imbibed the firm’s common sense regarding diversity (desirable but hard to achieve because minority lawyers rarely stayed long) and continued to judge potential partners on the subjective standard of fit.
• Lynden exemplifies how lawyers of color from disadvantaged backgrounds do not achieve fit and may be pushed out.
• This book is based on the AJD Project, a longitudinal study that followed over 5,000 lawyers who began practice in 2000, selected as a representative national sample of new lawyers.
  • The data set includes over 10,000 survey responses and 219 in-depth interviews.
  • It investigates lawyers’ careers, including the role of social hierarchies, education debt, and the contours of the legal field.
• The study suggests law firms have been built on a specifically White and masculine structure that has begun to take up the rhetoric of diversity but changed only slightly in relation to external pressure.
  • All women are penalized in the profession and may leave when they believe they have maxed out their advancement potential.
  • People of color, especially African Americans and Native Americans, are not primarily lured away by other opportunities but pushed out by discrimination, alienation, and a lack of supportive, effective mentorship.
• The study finds that most law school graduates find ways to succeed and value their law degree.
• Law school pedigree matters less once a lawyer begins to practice, but advantages associated with law school prestige accumulate over time, widening the gap between graduates from highly ranked and lower-ranked schools.
• Elite law school graduates are more likely to come from privileged social backgrounds, showing how opportunity and upward mobility exist in a market overwhelmingly characterized by the reproduction of advantage.
• The book combines quantitative, qualitative, and public records data to consider the American legal profession and address the ways structural stasis and change interact with individual agentic strategies to shape lawyers’ careers.
• Many charge that American law has become too commercialized, abandoning a traditional commitment to public service in the pursuit of profit.
• Others argue that a growing professional instability has made legal careers less desirable, with a law degree no longer considered a ticket to a secure and lucrative career.
• The 2008 global financial crisis accentuated these concerns, leading to fewer law school graduates finding jobs requiring a JD and plummeting enrollments.
• Commentators have speculated about “the death of big law” and “the end of lawyers.”
• Crisis commentary is neither new nor generally based in valid research methods.
• Recurring crisis rhetoric is part of the process of professional change and reproduction.

Theoretical Perspectives

• The book draws on the Bourdieusian categories of the legal field and three general theoretical perspectives: the hemispheres thesis, social capital theory, and a range of political economy theories.
• These perspectives are interconnected and co-constituted.

Hemispheres

• John Heinz and Edward Laumann’s work on lawyers in Chicago divided lawyers into two hemispheres by clientele: the personal plight sector (serving individuals and small businesses) and the corporate sector (serving businesses and other large organizations).
• Lawyers in the corporate hemisphere occupied the socially and economically desirable end of other divides, while ethnoreligious minorities were largely excluded and concentrated in the personal plight sector.
• In 1975, the two sectors were roughly equal in size and largely distinct.
• In 1995, a reprisal of the survey documented the inclusion of women and racial minorities, a near doubling in the size of the profession, and a turn toward bureaucratization.
• The ethnoreligious segregation had largely disappeared, and elite corporate law firms had expanded into new fields.
• The corporate sector consumed almost two-thirds of lawyers’ work, and the pay gap widened.

Social Capital, Internal Labor Markets, and Organizational Theory

• Pierre Bourdieu pioneered field theory, which imagines the legal field as a semiautonomous space of struggle.
• Actors internalize the rules and adopt strategies to maximize their chances of success by building up valued capital.
• Rivera (2016) found that hiring partners look for qualities similar to their own, preferring candidates with elite education degrees and the right kinds of social capital.
• Neely (2022) found that hedge fund managers protect their interests by building dense networks of Wall Street elites who look and act like them.
• The social capital perspective recognizes the socially constructed nature of the credentials and status that make up the hierarchies of law.
• Changes in the legal field do not necessarily topple its existing value structures.
• The AJD Project makes it possible to follow individual careers over time and inquire about forms of capital.
• Paula's experience shows that institutions' fundamental structure and hierarchy remain unchanged.
• Law firms needed to implement gender parity in entry-level hiring and engage in affirmative outreach to Latinas and other people of color.
• The structures of opportunity in corporate law firms and in other legal practices are revealed in quantitative and qualitative data.
• Social capital theory extends human capital theory to account for patterns of inequality more robustly.
• Human capital theory attributes racial and gender gaps in earnings to differences in individual human capital investments.
• Becker allows that discrimination may occur in labor markets but should be driven from markets over time because group-level discrimination produces less efficient outcomes for employers.
• A pure human capital analysis cannot account for the observable outcomes of law firms' partnership tournaments.
• Law firms protect their investment in associates hired on the basis of pedigree by giving the best-pedigreed associates preferred access to good work assignments and training opportunities.
• One’s stock of capital is only as good as its highly contingent, field-specific valuation or exchange rate.
• Corporate law firms were constructed around and continue to reinforce an embedded ideal of a White, male, elite-educated upper echelon.
• Opportunities in corporate law firms and other legal practices are revealed both quantitatively and qualitatively.
• Well-worn career paths are internalized by actors who implicitly or explicitly recognize their natural fit with particular tracks.
• Elite tracks into corporate law firms have widened, but equity partnership tracks within those firms are narrower.
• Changes within the legal field do not topple existing value structures.
• The semiautonomous social field of the legal profession fits within the broader social, economic, and political world in which lawyers and clients live and work.

Political Economy

• Lawyers work at the intersection of the market and the state.
• Scholarly theories range from the classic professions model (state grants monopolies in exchange for self-regulation) to critical examinations of monopoly as a strategy of self-interest and market control.
• Wilkins et al. (2019) propose an ecosystem metaphor, where the legal field’s micro-level components (law firms, clients, legal education) act as gears and the macro-level political economy involves the state, the market, and the bar.
• The legal field is deeply connected to political and economic power and supports existing power structures.
• The position of serving but remaining relatively autonomous from external power extends power to the legal profession and its hierarchies.
• Changes to economic, political, and social power require the legal field to respond and adapt.
• Constance’s career narrative shows how the micro-level shift in power between clients and law firms is the product of macro-level changes in the relationship between the state, the market, and the bar.
• Constance’s niche has boomed as the number of statutes, administrative regulations, and common law duties governing legal professionals has rapidly expanded.
• Since the 1970s, state officials have shed their traditional deference to bar authorities and have taken aggressive civil and criminal actions against lawyers and firms.
• Dramatic expansions in the size and geographic scope of law firms, the lateral mobility of lawyers, and the incidence of business-to-business litigation have swamped even elite firms in disqualification motions, malpractice claims, and other civil liability lawsuits.
• Bar authorities have revised the rules of professional conduct to focus on preventing and rectifying financial fraud.
• The macro-level forces of state actions and the erosion of gentlemanly market norms are driving the micro-level dynamics of Constance’s practice and, therefore, her career.
• Another aspect of the political economy of American lawyers is the relationship between lawyers’ private practices and their public roles.
• Lawyers may gain power in the legal field from participation in public service and pro bono legal projects.
• This can legitimate lawyers’ professional monopoly and serve as symbolic redress for inequalities in access to legal services.
• Individual attorneys can establish a reputation and gain clients by employing lawyers with good public service reputations.
• Scholars have asked how individual politics affects lawyers’ professional work.
• Heinz and Laumann (1982) and Heinz et al. (2005) found that the Chicago bar was politically fragmented along the lines of client interests but that many corporate practitioners identified as Democrats and expressed liberal economic and social values.
• Bonica et al. (2016) found that attorneys generally lean to the liberal end of the ideological spectrum but there is considerable ideological heterogeneity that can be parsed by practice setting, size of law firm, law school attended, field of practice, and geographic location.
• The AJD Project’s longitudinal research design gives its data clarifying power.
• Data collected on pro bono work, participation in community activities, political party affiliation, and economic and social liberalism reveal shifting linkages between lawyers’ private practices and public roles.
• Corporate lawyers tend to share the moderately reformist politics and neoliberal economic values of educated elites who govern the state and economy.

Research Design and Data

• The data analyzed in this book are the most comprehensive collected on the careers of lawyers.
• The project has produced a nationally representative longitudinal data set for an entire cohort of lawyers with three waves of surveys (2002–3, 2007, and 2012) and career mobility tracking through 2019.
• The sample was selected in a two-stage process.
  • The nation was divided into strata by region and size of the population of new lawyers in 2000.
  • State bar records were used to select lawyers who would be statistically representative of the national population of lawyers admitted to the bar in 2000, with oversampling for race and ethnicity.
• The longitudinal survey started with a wave 1 sample of 8,225 lawyers across 18 sampling areas, with a 56% response rate.
• Wave 2 had a 50.6% response rate, and wave 3 had a 53% response rate.
• 2,035 respondents answered all three survey waves.
• The surveys elicited data on social background, education, employment, earnings, networks, community and professional activities, and job satisfaction.
• AJD Project principals supplemented these data sets by conducting 219 in-depth interviews with survey respondents, overrepresenting lawyers of color, public interest lawyers, and lawyers in small firms and solo practice.

Plan of the Book

• The book presents the analysis of agency and structure in the making of lawyers’ careers in five parts.
• Part 1 sets the historical context of the AJD Project cohort’s careers.
• Part 2 analyzes the structure of lawyers’ careers through the survey data, revealing sequences or pathways along which the diversity of lawyers’ careers commonly fall, divided into four higher-level categories: those who start in large law firms, those who start in small and midsize law firms, those who work in business (as inside counsel or businesspeople), and those in government and public sector jobs.
• Chapter 4 examines how social background predicts law school status, which shapes career moves.
• Chapter 5 revisits the measures of specialization by fields of law and client type that laid the basis for the two hemispheres thesis.
• Part 3 presents narratives of lawyers from all four sectors of practice to bring the social capital approach to life, considering the strategies lawyers pursue as they develop their careers, molded by class, gender, and race, though they affirm lawyers’ agency.
• Interview data grant new insights into the sector-specific operation of status hierarchies, suggesting revisions to some previous literature.
• Part 4 focuses on inequalities of race and gender.
  • It analyzes the enduring racialization of law firms and the accumulating disadvantage affecting African American lawyers due to education debt.
  • It examines diverging career paths of men and women and gender inequality in lawyers’ earnings.
  • Men build their careers and families through the support of women and earn more in law practice, whereas women earn substantially less.
• Part 5 turns to the evolution of lawyers’ public roles and personal career satisfaction, examining political orientations, participation in community organizations, and pro bono legal service contributions.
• It finds a dualism in which politically liberal lawyers predominantly serve business interests and a dualism in the ways lawyers pay lip service to pro bono projects but fail to provide significant representation.
• It analyzes career and job satisfaction data and finds that most lawyers express high levels of career satisfaction, including women and people of color who face disadvantages.
• Part 6 concludes by returning to the relationship between agency and structure in lawyers’ careers in light of the data yielded by the AJD Project.