Does not making partner have to cause such suffering?
That's what I asked an underemployed attorney I have been interviewing for a feature article for a publication. The suffering seems to be without a basis in reality. After all, even during normal times for the legal sector, only a handful of associates make partner. A few years ago, as the business of law was changing, THE ECONOMIST predicted that likely only one out of nine in law school would become a partner. Now, that's probably lower.
The attorney I was speaking to had worked at large top Manhattan law firms before he washed out of the partner track. Yes, he was shattered and still is, poring over what might have been "mistakes" made. Of course he knows the odds are against reaching that goal. He knew it then.
The one person who was able to walk about from that usual trauma intact, he told me, had been a woman who didn't take the game all that seriously. So she didn't self-destruct. Shrewdly, she leveraged her legal background into a new career path as a journalist about the business of law.
So, what can the profession do to prepare new entrants to see the game for what it is, get what they can out of it especially in terms of skills that are marketable in other lines of work, and be grateful they got as far as they did?
My recommendation is to be honest about the difficulty of succeeding. In a sense, the hopes of practicing law have become analogous to the hopes of being paid to act, do stand-up comedy, or write serious nonfiction or fiction. Nothing wrong in trying. But since failure seems in the cards for most, frame all that as a youthful experiment. Eventually, it's a great story to tell our children.
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