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Reflections after a year in law school | |
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< | -- By ElizabethHayden - 26 Apr 2018 | >
> | -- By ElizabethHayden - 4 June 2018 | | |
The kind of lawyer I want to be | |
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< | I want to be the kind of lawyer who cares about their
work, helps people solve their problems, and goes home at the end of the day and completely disconnects. I need to care about what I’m doing or I won’t want to get up in the morning and I won’t want to go the extra mile when I see opportunities to do so. No matter how interesting the work is, I’ll always feel like I’ve sold 8+ hours of each day to someone else, grinding away until my time is my own again. Being a law student living on borrowed money after supporting myself for a few years has been hard, and I’m excited to get back to that point again. Being at Columbia while having no money and watching your classmates move forward on the path to big law is difficult, but after spending a year in law school I’m more confident than ever that I want to devote my work time to helping individuals and not to generating as much money as possible. | >
> | I want to be the kind of lawyer who cares about their work, helps people solve their problems, and has a fulfilling personal life that is independent from that work. I need to care about what I’m doing or I won’t want to get up in the morning and I won’t want to go the extra mile. However I know that the best way for me to be happy is to learn how to feel fulfillment and excitement about my work while leaving the stresses of the job at the office, so that I can enjoy other things that I care about and relax after the workday ends. I want to devote my work time to advocating on behalf of individuals who need my help, but I know from my own past work experience that the more I care about my work, the harder it is to disconnect emotionally. Finding the right work-life balance is going to be the biggest and most important challenge for me as a new lawyer. There’s a part of me that likes to fight and work hard, but there’s another part of me that is laid back and wants to avoid stress. The tension between those two parts of myself is why I’m in law school, but is also why I need to be very careful about how I design my career to ensure that I can express both sides of my personality in harmony. | | | | |
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< | What does it even mean to help people?
Helping people can mean a lot of things, not all of which I personally agree are good. You can do a lot of things that make it look and feel like you’re doing good without actually moving forward. I want to be in a position where I can help a lot of people and make some kind of impact that lasts beyond my own career, but I also want to make sure I can see results from the work that I do, and I want to make sure I’m focusing my efforts in the best places.
In law school I’ve seen so many different ways that lawyers and law students are making a difference for individuals, and I want to be involved in some of those projects as a 2L and 3L. It’s been inspiring to see how many different ways there are for me to get involved, though I’ll admit, it’s also been a bit intimidating. There’s always a feeling that there’s someone else who could do a better job than me, who has some special skill that I don’t have. The biggest hurdle for me in jumping in to start helping has been the feeling that I’m not the best candidate for any job. I think that the best thing I can do is push past that fear so that I can try to build up my skills and experience throughout law school.
Why I still want to continue here | >
> | Before I came to law school, I also had a job where I helped people and I found that positively affecting others is a big motivation for me. Hearing a client’s mood change from angry and frustrated to happy and calm just because of what I said to them is incredibly fulfilling. However when I worked in software, the stakes were low. Helping a client meant only meant so much, but if I made a mistake or didn’t come up with a great solution, there wasn’t that much to lose in the grand scheme of things. Moving those skills into a legal context, where someone might go to prison if I don’t perform well enough, is scary. Even worse is knowing that sometimes succeeding in my own job could mean that someone else is harmed. When the stakes are high, I’m sure it feels even better when you make something good happen, but so much worse when you let something bad happen. If I want to do this kind of emotionally charged work, I need to make sure that I’m constantly working on ways to retain control of my emotions so the negative aspects of my job never take over how I feel. | | | | |
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< | After a year at Columbia, I feel even more confident that I can find a more fulfilling job with a law degree than I had before I came here. I’m also more aware than ever of the temptations that I need to avoid to make sure I don’t end up in a situation that is going to make me miserable. | >
> | What does it even mean to help people? | | | | |
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< | This past year has been a harder year than I could have ever expected. However it’s been exciting to see all of the opportunities that are available to me here at Columbia. I will admit to you that I want to “go home” and it’s hard to be somewhere where you feel out of place. But I know that dropping out of law school and getting on a flight to go back to a place where I feel comfortable is only going to feel good for a little while. | >
> | I want to be in a position where I can help a lot of people and make some kind of impact that lasts beyond my own career, but I also want to make sure I can see results from the work that I do, and I want to make sure I’m focusing my efforts in the best places. If I work as a public defender, I’ll be able to see positive results in peoples’ lives as a direct result of the work that I do. However I will also be constantly confronted by problems in our criminal justice system that I can’t fix. I’ll be limited in how I can affect the issues as a whole, because my main focus always has to be on my client’s best interests, not necessarily the best interests for all of society. However I truly do believe that protecting the constitutional rights of every person and working to minimize the negative impact of crime on the individual is one way to help the public as a whole, even though there may be times that by helping my client someone else is harmed. | | | My future path in law school | |
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< | The most important thing I want to get out of law school is experience doing things with the law. I enjoy learning about the law and I’m excited to have a chance to study the things I’m interested in more in-depth. However the real reason I’m here is to get a feel for what it’s like to be a lawyer and specifically what it’s like to provide legal services to people who need them. My hope is that working with clients in different contexts will help me figure out what kind of clients I enjoy working with and what work environments I thrive in.
This summer I’m going to be working at a public defender’s office. I tried to pick an office where I would be able to do as many different types of work as possible as a 1L, so that I can really see what the job would be like rather than spending all of my time just improving my research and writing skills. I want to use this opportunity not just to learn about public defense work, but also to meet attorneys doing the work that I aspire to do so that I can see where they get fulfillment from the work and what challenges they face.
Next year I’m going to participate in the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem community defense externship, where I’ll have the chance to take on an actual case and I’ll be able to see how a more holistic approach to public defense works in practice. It will be incredibly valuable for me to get a chance to learn from an attorney in a one-on-one setting and get a feel for the process in a more direct way.
For the rest of my time I want to maximize the externship and clinic opportunities available to me, and I want to take classes that are going to help prepare me to work in criminal defense and as a trial advocate. I also want to get involved with some of the pro bono opportunities available so that I can learn about other types of legal services and gain more experiencing working with clients in other settings. I also want to get more involved in the public interest community at Columbia so that I can connect with people here who care about the same things that matter to me. | >
> | This past year has been harder than I could have ever expected. I’ve lost so much since coming here, and I will admit to you that I wish every day that I could go home. However, the more people I meet who are doing the work I want to do, the better I feel about the path I’m on. Even though my old career was a lot less stressful, I would look at my coworkers who were 20 years ahead of me and I felt dread about one day being in their position. Now I’m meeting people whose jobs I can actually imagine myself doing one day, and I’m hoping that’s a good sign. | | | | |
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This draft is good at helping to identify the issues to write about.
If you want to do criminal defense, help people, and disconnect at
the end of the work day, the most important route to improvement in
the essay is to look at the tensions among those objectives, in
order to begin thinking strategically about what you intend and how
you intend to make it happen.
The people criminal defense counsel help are criminals. In no
segment of the practice do the innocent comprise a sufficient client
base to pay the rent, and in agencies of public defense clients are
assigned, not chosen. There are indeed ways to make a longer-term
difference in the system, even as defense counsel, but the work from
day to day is about helping people to minimize the punishment they
suffer for inflicting harm on others. This is good and important
work, if we are to have a just society at all, regardless of the
identity and moral status of the immediate client. But how one
disconnects from the doing of that work at the end of the day, in
which "disconnection" and "dissociation" are close synonyms, is
important to think about and understand.
I'm glad you are considering doing this work. I'm glad you know how
to gain some exposure to its realities while in law school. I think
it is important that your reflections on it—even at this
earliest, speculative stage—embrace the issues it raises head
on, not through either "gladness at opportunity" or a continual
struggle with individual self-doubt. These are also valid feelings,
to be sure, but they get in the way of the slightly deeper
introspection, nearer to the bone, where you can do some very
powerful self-scrutiny at this point. | >
> | After a year in law school, my plan is still to work towards becoming a public defender. That might shift as I learn more about the work and how it affects the lawyers that do it, but I think that the only way for me to find clarity in what I want to do is to do things and reflect on my experiences. As I start working with real clients, I also need to work on developing strategies for managing the emotional load of the work. As an emotional person I am good at empathizing with others, even flawed people that the rest of society doesn’t want to deal with, but with that comes a vulnerability. I need to learn how to disconnect from my work so that it doesn’t overwhelm me, while gaining confidence in myself as a lawyer and an emotional being so that when my client takes out their anger on me, I can listen to them and help them without letting their actions affect how I feel. | | | | |
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