Strategies for Navigating Lawyers’ Careers

This article serves as an introduction to The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press, 2023) with a particular focus on the use of strategies in the book: that is, how do lawyers navigate the profession, starting from law school and planning their career from job to job? A Q&A with Bryant Garth, Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at University of California, Irvine School of Law, follows to further explore some of the ideas and provide analysis for future directions for the research. This issue also includes discussion around the themes of “inequality” and “structure.”

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In part 3 of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers, “Strategies,” the authors add depth to the “quantitative patterns” illustrated by the After the JD longitudinal survey through the stories told by individual lawyers about their careers. How did Juliette, an Asian American woman, explain her ascension to equity partnership in a large law firm given the structural barriers to entry? How did Patrick, a white man with middle-of-the-road credentials, narrativize his climb on the business side after moving in-house? Throughout the book more broadly, takeaways from these and other interviews add context and nuance to the overall trends captured by the surveys. AJD researchers conducted a total of 219 interviews with lawyers about their careers, exploring what they thought about career trajectories and how such individuals make use of their various social capital—networks, families, education—in light of other factors like race and gender. Lawyers from underrepresented categories, such as public-interest lawyers and people of color, were overrepresented in the interviews. Researchers interviewed 146 individuals, 47 of them twice and another 26 three times. Each interview sought to uncover not only the strategies lawyers use as they build their careers but also how they respond in certain conditions when particular experiences or qualities help or hinder their efforts at advancement.

The authors write,

It is not just a matter of how individuals and groups deploy their assets; it is also a matter of how those assets (and potential liabilities, like unemployment and law degrees from low-ranked schools) are valued in particular practice settings at moments in lawyers’ careers. Individual agency is seeking to gain recognition for forms of capital that may not be generally recognized within the current hierarchical structure of opportunity in the legal profession.

Part 3 of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers offers stories across various practice settings: law firms, small/solo practitioners, business/in-house, and government and nonprofit lawyers. In each case, the authors draw out the strategies people use to navigate their own careers in the context of the structures of the legal profession. For instance, one common career strategy is the path of corporate law—where many from elite law schools go onto large law firms, then proceed to go in-house, make partner at their law firm, or leave for another position altogether. Conversely, the public-interest path also shows a common journey for individuals from elite law schools: they focus their education in clinical opportunities, obtain a prestigious fellowship, and join a high-profile nonprofit. The authors write, “The lawyers choosing [this path] reject corporate-law careers,” suggesting certain rationalizations and ways of making sense of the world. Individuals who come from lower-tier schools and work in state government “have adapted to a more realistic set of options—those that afford job security, good benefits, and a modest income.”

Identifying how individual lawyers navigate these settings adds context and nuance to the raw statistics. For instance, the numbers might reveal that of those who continued at large law firms, over the course of the 13 years between wave 1 (2002) and wave 3 (2012) of the AJD study, only 10 percent became equity partner. Moreover, “two-thirds of those that made equity partner are men [and] 87% are White.” What happens to everyone else? Those who do not make equity partner either take on a nonequity role, finding their advancement capped; leave to pursue other opportunities; or both. Interviews help shed light on how individual lawyers felt about the barriers they faced or opportunities for growth presented to them, and the choices they made in light of these structures.

Strategy in practice

Pamela

A conversation with Pamela, an Asian American woman who attended a top 15 law school, reveals the inner workings of those data points—how those with diverse backgrounds felt the subtle discrimination of white male culture forced upon them—and how they navigated that tension to make the most of their careers. For instance, Pamela would ultimately leave her firm, realizing that cultural barriers to success were too overbearing.

At the start of her career, however, Pamela’s situation was different. She had top credentials and “was in high demand” with “21 callbacks” for jobs after law school. She ultimately chose to become a litigator at a regional office of an elite firm. There, she spent a lot of time on pro bono work, allowing her to see more court experience, which “felt consistent with the partnership track,” according to her and the authors of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers. When she was surveyed for the second time in 2007, she was in a nonequity role, feeling as if she could not advance without bringing in large clients. Explaining how she felt in her role, she said

It’s not an overt discrimination. In no way do I feel that because I’m Asian I’ve been discriminated against … [But] there is a bit of a paternalistic attitude toward women. You can either be relegated to the role of being sort of a submissive, little worker bee or, if you’re more assertive—and I’m definitely more on the assertive side—I feel that sometimes I scare the guys a bit.

By the 2012 survey, she was no longer at the firm. The assertiveness she drew attention to her in her interview meant that Pamela would push back when not given enough substantive work. Disagreements over ownership in a case and a coinciding recession ultimately resulted in the firm asking her to leave. By 2012, her pro bono experience and time spent volunteering after having a baby had led her to a prosecutor position. Pamela’s experiences at her firm—which she described as kind of like the reality show Survivor—are in line with the data. (“Asian American lawyers are far more likely to leave firms than are White lawyers,” the authors of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers note.) Ultimately, Pamela’s situation at the firm felt like a “no win,” but she was able to strategically center her pro bono and volunteer work to find a post-firm career path that worked for her.

Sean

Conversely, interviewing solo or small-firm practitioners flipped some of the standard scholarship on its head. As the authors explain, literature on solo or small-firm practitioners often describes them as “unhappy, leading precarious lives, hustling for business, and prone to ethical lapses.” Data on job changes and unemployment supports such a notion. Quantitative measurements revealed that solo practitioners were part of the “lower hemisphere,” often having gone to lower-tier schools and earning less than other types of practice (see “Solo practitioners: By the data” below). But the authors’ interviews showed solo practitioners can be “inventive” and “entrepreneurial.”

For instance, one interviewee, Sean, who attended a small almost-unheard-of law school in California, used the marketing and networking skills he learned in small practices to build a fulfilling career. After graduating, he ended up in a small firm for lack of other options. Though he called the small firm a “smoke and mirrors” operation, it was also where he learned “the business of law practice.” When he left the firm a couple years later, he moved to another small practice where networking continued to be critical. He became a member of local community and religious organizations, which helped further his client base. Over the course of his career, he dealt with several job changes, but some of the values and skills he had learned in small-practice settings, like placing a premium on networking, helped him navigate such uncertainty and difficulties across his personal and professional life. For instance, when he discovered a company he was working for was dealing with a criminal investigation, he left and was able to sustain his practice as a solo in part due to his ability to navigate such precarity. As he told the authors, “For the average attorney, relationships are the lifeblood.”

Luci

Twelve percent of the AJD respondents work in state and local government. Federal government is associated with higher prestige, with 25 percent of federal government attorneys coming out of large law firms. State and local government typically come from less prestigious backgrounds, even as they have some modicum of stability: “State government attorneys are the most likely to have graduated from a lower-ranked school and begun and stayed in state government across waves 1 and 3: 58%,” the authors write.

Luci, a Latina woman who attended law school, is emblematic of government attorneys who pursued pragmatic strategies: she looked for a stable job that would make enough money to support a family without requiring an overly taxing schedule. Luci attended night school at a lower-ranked school. When she graduated, she chose to work in compliance at a government agency because it paid more than public interest and had a “fixed schedule,” both of which were important factors for her as she provided care for her parents. The authors of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers explain that as Luci progressed in her career, “she has been strategic about applying for the right kinds of jobs for her and has relied on personal relationships to enhance her credentials and learn of new opportunities within the track she was now on.” Connecting with a mentor helped her segue her compliance role into an assistant general counsel position in order to make legal work (not just compliance) a larger part of her experience. When another position in government opened up, she did her due diligence and did not move, learning of the more cutthroat nature of that department. “I have a home here now. I’m not making as much money as I’d like to, but I’m comfortable, and people understand my situation,” she told AJD researchers. The rest of her career reflected this pragmatic, calculated approach: balancing stability and flexibility with ambition.

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The stories within this section are important corollaries to the data, presenting a more complex picture of what the numbers might only suggest or belie. Structural barriers exist, but within them, individuals are living their lives, figuring out how they can ascend the ladder, find stability, support their families, get respect, and more.

A discussion with Bryant Garth

The “Strategies” section of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers relies almost exclusively on interviews with participants surveyed in the After the JD study. First, why were the interviews integral to the project? What surprised you about their responses, and what would you have not discovered had you only done the quantitative surveys?  

First of all, the interviews are much richer than the raw data; they give you insights that you absolutely cannot pick up from the data alone, including regarding structural issues. For example, there’s a Hispanic woman we interviewed who went to an elite law school. She had her choice of big law firms when she graduated. She was looking to go for partnership, but it wasn’t going super well at her current firm, so she switched firms. Then someone in her husband’s family got sick, and that required her to move, so she stayed with her second firm and moved to another city. When she returned, she felt she had a really good female mentor, but that mentor was not able to do many of the kinds of things you need to help be taken seriously as a potential partner. At a certain point, she reflected on where she was. She decided to back off the path that was not being rewarded, and she went in-house.

The qualitative interview puts all these details in the context of explaining ‘choices’ in relation to pervasive structures of power.

Bryant Garth, UC Irvine

You could call that just another woman choosing to go in-house for lifestyle reasons, but of course it’s not that at all. It’s someone who didn’t get embraced in the law firm setting. And it actually presaged a change in her whole focus. She also didn’t try to move up in the in-house world. She had kids and had a very good lawyer life, but she was taken out of the market for partner. You see that the gendered world plays a role also in her decision to move for her husband. The qualitative interview puts all these details in the context of explaining her “choices” in relation to pervasive structures of power.

When you interview people three times across their careers, it also gives you insight into their mental and emotional journeys. Sometimes, you see them struggling at the outset or getting involved in firms where there are ethical issues and navigating their way around that. You see people whom you come to admire who have built rich and fulfilling and ethical careers. Interviewing folks at three time periods also shows how a complex trajectory without elite law school or big-firm status might lead to a prosperous quasi public-interest immigration solo practice.

We all know the basic pathways. But the interviews show how people diverged or figured out strategies around structural issues or break with commonly held assumptions. For instance, solos are looked down upon in the profession as people who couldn’t make it into the more elite practices. But we find that there are some remarkably successful solos. Some people who came out of large firms say, “I thought about going solo for a while, but I thought it was such a big step down.” But once they do it, they may realize it’s great for them because they can draw on the networks and credibility of elite schools and large firms while still getting the flexibility of solo practice.

The details thus challenge categories that we often use to examine professional careers, for example, the category of public service encompassing governments, nonprofits, and public interest. We also tend to say that these are the jobs for idealists. Yet state government lawyers are, for example, often in it not because of idealistic values but because it’s a stable job with good hours, and assistant U.S. attorneys very often see their governmental service as part of a well-worn pathway to a lucrative partnership at a big law firm.

Race and gender also come out in a much more powerful way through interviews. One African American individual told us about he experienced race at work: “Law firms have silos. I was never in the right one. I was out there looking in and recognizing that I wasn’t going to be embraced by those at the core that mattered in that law firm.”

When you talked to lawyers in the AJD study, what did they say about how technology had impacted their career and their strategies for dealing with changes wrought by technology across their careers? How would you say technology is going to disrupt or impact lawyers’ strategies for navigating the profession moving forward?

There are writers on the legal profession who’ve been saying for more than 20 years that there’s a new normal coming and that it’s going to dramatically disrupt the legal profession. And if you don’t get on board with it, you’re going to lose the train. Technologies come, but you don’t see that so much from individual interviews. Instead, people don’t really talk about technology that much. They take it for granted that they’re available 24/7 via email and Zoom—they’re both more tethered and less tethered than they were before. But they don’t feel that technology is to blame. Similarly, technology around discovery is taken for granted.

For me, it’s not so much about [whether] lawyers [are] aware of and navigating around and using technology; it’s more about how technology is slowly, almost imperceptibly, changing the profession—mostly by absorption. On the day-to-day, not very much changes. But at the end of the year or decade, practice has actually changed a lot even though the profession has not fundamentally changed.

We all know the basic pathways. But the interviews show how people diverged or figured out strategies around structural issues or break with commonly held assumptions.

Bryant Garth

I think what you see is that these things get absorbed, but they get absorbed mostly in the big law firms, and they don’t get absorbed across the hemispheres so that there’s greater access to justice. Research has shown, for instance, that once there are opportunities to profit from technology, and access is market based, it accentuates the gap between the haves and the have-nots rather than closing the gap between the haves and have-nots. And I think AI is going to do exactly the same thing. It will be unequally accessed and used.

I do think that every student graduating from law school now needs to know how to use it, because the normal standard of legal writing is going to depend on an ability to prompt insights from generative AI. I believe you have to learn it just like you needed to learn LexisNexus. You can’t just go looking through the books and analyzing the cases. But ultimately I think it will be absorbed, but it will be absorbed in a very unequal way.

In the conclusion to The Making of Lawyers’ Careers, you write:

As this book goes to press, America may be emerging from a global pandemic and has recently experienced a year of protest over racial and social injustice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. Many are predicting that these events are creating a ‘new normal’ in which existing ways of working will be fundamentally upended by technology and generational change. Our analysis suggests that we should be cautious in making these predictions. While there will undoubtedly be many changes in the way in which lawyers live and work, our findings underscore that the social structure of the bar can adapt to these changes in ways that replicate existing hierarchies even as they create new strategies for individual lawyers to manipulate and challenge these structures.

So my question is this: First, what hierarchies would you want to see disrupted? And in order to do, what interventions would you make to cement change in the legal profession?

I am a believer in stories of continuity. My most recent book with Yves Dezalay is called Law as Reproduction and Revolution, and part of the thesis is that the law and lawyers absorb changes—“revolutions” that come from outside. Social changes happen and have an impact—for example, there are more women and people of color now in positions of power in the profession—but revolutions are curbed and there’s a reproduction of structures of power. At the end of the day, the partners are still overwhelmingly the white men from elite schools with country club memberships and wives at home or some variations. The structures are there, and I can’t wish them away. There’s a consensus that there are obstacles, and we need to work harder to dismantle them. Places like law firms, the judiciary, and academia, we all agree, need to try harder. But the depth of the structures that stymie and absorb change are rarely acknowledged.

One place I want to spotlight where there’s huge discrimination is the prejudice against graduates of lower-ranked law schools. Typically, people who go to these schools didn’t have parents who could put them in educational settings that made it possible for them to get the highest LSAT scores, and then these students are disqualified from many professional positions—including teaching, clerkships, and many law firms—because they’re deemed not good enough on meritocratic criteria. The reproduction of the elite of the profession comes with the smug idea that “we are the best and the brightest.” And that’s simply not true. Some students were simply not afforded the opportunities. We know that, for example, in the pandemic, when law firms weren’t going to schools in person to interview but were conducting interviews on Zoom, they didn’t open up the playing field. There’s a very diverse set at the bottom of the law school hierarchy that certainly could excel in elite settings if given the chance. But presumed meritocracy limits their opportunities, even though most paradoxically are glad that they joined the legal profession.

I tell students, if you see that gender, race, class, and ethnicity are having an apparently adverse impact on your career, you should remind yourself that it’s not your lack of ability that’s letting people assume you are not good enough.

Bryant Garth

When you look back at Heinz and Laumann’s personal client hemisphere, or the so-called lower hemisphere, you see that it has some advantages that were especially evident in the 1970s. They went to local law schools. They were often immigrants, and in practice they owned all the jobs in state government, in city government, in prosecutor and defender offices, in small firms—because the upper hemisphere scoffed at those jobs, which were actually good jobs if not as lucrative as corporate practice. But now everything is “meritocratic” based on law school attended. The Loyola or DePaul graduate may decide they want to be a prosecutor, but they will now lose out (though not always) to the Northwestern graduate. The network is still strong, but not like before. Previously, in addition, the top Loyola or DePaul graduate could become a professor in those schools, but rarely anymore. You have to get the Yale Law graduates and the Harvard Law graduates for your professors. There’s this reverse class warfare in the guise of meritocracy, and if I could just dispel that with a magic wand, I would.

Students today need better strategies for a changing legal market, which itself is a moving target. What would you tell students about how to plan their career? What qualities do they need, and how do they prepare for instability and uncertainty?

If you really learn about the structure of the legal profession—the different careers, the patterns, the sequence—it’s empowering in two ways. One is you see patterns—for instance, if you start at a big law firm with a nice degree, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Even though we might naturally think that once you’ve started your career, it’s all about the quality of work you do, we find that the assets that come to you from the network—the contacts within the firm, some of the skills, some of the attitudes, and just the symbolic value of connection to a big law firm—are all things that keep on giving.

But if you learn also that these are the paths that you’re preprogrammed to take, you also learn that you can reject them. You don’t have to be pushed by the winds that are blowing everybody else. In The Making of Lawyers’ Careers, you’ll find exceptions of people who have not gone the traditional route and have thrived. It’s good to know that there is a place for the herd to go if you want to take a well-worn path. But what you see is that those who are self-conscious about rejecting the obvious paths can make more interesting careers. It can be extremely empowering and make you open your eyes to different strategies.

I tell students, if you see that gender, race, class, and ethnicity are having an apparently adverse impact on your career, you should remind yourself that it’s not your lack of ability that’s letting people assume you are not good enough. If you see that your work and work assignments and mentors are judging you with implicit and explicit biases, you should act. There are structures that are imposed on you, but you have agency in navigating those structures in a different way. At a recent Law and Society conference, a commentator on The Making of Lawyers’ Careers noted that structures of power create patterns of careers such as those from the sequences portrayed in the book. There are people who create their own paths defying such structures of power. In this way the profession is open. But the structures of power limit the openness, so these unique paths are not so evident that we can trace them into sufficient numbers to make a real pattern.

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Bryant Garth is a Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California Irvine School of Law and codirector of the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession, and holds a joint appointment in criminology and law and society.