After the JD (AJD), is a national longitudinal study of legal careers in the United States, which tracked the professional lives of more than 4,500 lawyers during their first twenty years after graduating in 2000 and passing the bar exam. The first wave of interviews was done in 2002-3; the second wave in 2007; and the third wave in 2012-13. Subsequently, employment data for respondents has been updated through web searches through 2019. Some of AJD’s key findings are that female attorneys in every racial and ethnic group report higher levels of discrimination than their male counterparts; and attorneys of color, white women, and LGBTQ+ attorneys perceive high levels of workplace bias compared to white male attorneys and to respondents in other workplace studies.
Over the years, AJD researchers have published numerous articles reporting and discussing the study’s findings. Now, The Making of Lawyers’ Careers collects some of the study’s main findings. The book is organized in four parts: The Structure of Lawyers’ Careers, which revisits and explores the reality of lawyers in the United States clustering in individual and corporate “hemispheres” of practice; The Narratives of Lawyers’ Careers, which tells the stories of law firm, solo, in-house and government lawyers; Inequalities of Race and Gender, which investigates inequalities in the practice of law; and Public Roles and Private Lives, which studies public service, pro bono and lawyers’ satisfaction.
The Making of Lawyers’ Careers is essential reading for lawyers, law students, and anyone interested in the practice of law, lawyers’ careers, and the impact of law and lawyers on American culture and politics. Every chapter is a gem. For lack of space, I’ll discuss just three of my favorites here. Chapter 4, titled Race, Class, and Gender in the Structuring of Lawyers’ Early Careers, explains how gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class structure the careers of lawyers. The key conclusion is that these factors influence law school credentials, one’s first job, and subsequent mid-career choices, producing “a classed, raced, and gendered job structure in the legal profession.” (P. 66.) Specifically, “[c]areer outcomes are shaped by the accumulation of different kinds of social capital at each stage of the career process. The process begins when lawyers convert privileged social backgrounds into the college grades, elite undergraduate degrees, and LSAT scores that open the doors to elite law schools. Elite law degrees pave the way into more prestigious first jobs (most notably in large corporate law firms). The social capital of having worked in a large firm affords new opportunities, allowing these attorneys to move into corporations as inside counsel, to elite jobs in the federal government, and to smaller law firms. For a minority of attorneys – who tend to be white men with elite law degrees – starting in a large firm is the surest way to attain equity partnership in a large firm. The predictive power of educational credentials weakens as careers evolve, though educational capital, gender, and race all continue to shape lawyers’ career trajectories until at least mid-career.” (P. 68.)
These findings greatly enhance our understanding of the relationship between merit and equality in the American legal profession, debunking simplistic accounts pursuant to which success is attained by excellent hard working lawyers. The research shows that while merit and grit are essential to lawyers’ career growth, so are social capital endowments, identity capital, and credentials. The chapter establishes that talking about equality and inequality in the practice of law without considering the various ways in which forms of capital shape and inform lawyers’ careers is inaccurate and misleading. Moreover, opening the doors of the profession to all, for example, at entry-level positions of large law firms, and expecting so-called merit to take over resulting in equality in the ranks of equity partners ten to fifteen years later, is naïve if not foolish. Rather, those committed to making greater equality in the practice of law a reality must devise and implement promotion and retention policies, which take into account the impact of lawyers’ social and identity capital on their performance and its perception.
Chapter 5, titled Two Hemispheres Revisited: Fields of Law, Practice Settings, and Client Types, studies the work of lawyers in the twenty-first century. Its findings are insightful and profound. For example, the chapter’s findings regarding the geography of opportunity – most lawyers tend to move within the state in which they were first admitted – show that notwithstanding ample talk about increased mobility in the practice of law and the nationalization, even globalization, of law practice, we need to better understand local and regional mobility, their causes, and their effects.
A critical finding of Chapter 5 is that “most mid-career lawyers control how they do their work, which contradicts arguments that lawyers have become de-skilled or de-professionalized since the ‘Golden Age.’ Far more problematic, however, is their apparently scant control over how much they have to work,” (P. 82, emphasis added.). The importance of this finding cannot be overstated. As new classes of lawyer-employees (including in-house, staff, and temporary lawyers) continue to emerge and grow, we need to better explore and understand not only these lawyers’ loss of control over how they do their work, but also how lawyers’ (including large law firms’ partners and associates) loss of control over how much they work shapes and informs the meaning of their professional status.
Chapter 13, titled Dualities of Politics, Public Service, and Pro Bono in Lawyers’ Careers, is especially interesting. It finds that “[l]awyers’ politics are not a monolith. As in American society, gender and race/ethnicity are powerful determinants of the political identifications of lawyers. Within the profession, we see that graduates of elite law schools are far more liberal than graduates of tier four law schools. Most lawyers in elite law firms embrace both Democratic politics and the representation of business, a duality illustrated in our opening story of law student protests against Paul Weiss. Yet within this apparently stable constellation of elite practice and Democratic politics, our analysis of change over time reveals that if attorneys represent an increasing proportion of business clients over their careers their propensity to identify as Democrats declines.” (P. 219, emphasis added.) This duality defies naïve accounts of lawyers’ politics and demands nuanced future research into the complexity of liberal labels. Large law firm lawyers may identify as liberal and tend to vote for Democratic Party candidates, but they are far from liberal in meaningful ways. Because they represent and over time tend to become, if only implicitly, sympathetic to business interests and the “cause” of large law firms, they in fact advocate for and promote what are generally understood to be conservative agendas and interests.
In recent years, some law schools have supplemented the required legal ethics or law governing lawyers class with various offerings about the legal profession, law practice, and lawyers’ careers. The Making of Lawyers’ Careers should be a required reading in these types of classes. Indeed, it ought to become a cornerstone of every lawyer’s library.
