Young Associates in Trouble

Abstract:     
In the Shadow of the Law. By Kermit Roosevelt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2005. Pp. 346. $24.

Utterly Monkey: A Novel. By Nick Laird. London & New York: Harper Perennial. 2005. Pp. 344. $13.95.

Two recent novels portray the substantively unhappy and morally unfulfilling lives of young associates who work long hours in large, elite law firms. As it turns out, their search for love, happiness, and moral purpose is largely in vain. In the rarefied atmosphere of both fictitious firms, the best and the brightest while away their best years doing document reviews, drafting due diligence memoranda that no one will read, and otherwise presiding over legal matters with lots of zeros but precious little intrinsic interest. If this is what large law firm practice is like, the reader is bound to ask why large law firm jobs are so coveted. Is it really all about money?

In this review essay, we compare Kermit Roosevelt's and Nick Laird's bleak portrayals with findings from a unique dataset on law firm profitability, prestige, hours worked, and various measures of several associate satisfactions. We also mine the findings of several empirical studies that track the experience of lawyers over time. We observe that higher firm profitability is associated with higher salaries, bonuses, and prestige. Yet, higher profits also have a statistically significant relationship with longer hours, a less family-friendly workplace, less interesting work, less opportunity to work with partners, less associate training, less communication regarding partnership, and a higher reported likelihood of leaving the firm within the next two years. Nonetheless, graduates from the nation's most elite law schools tend to gravitate toward the most profitable and prestigious (and most grueling) law firms. The attraction of the most elite firms may be superior outplacement options. Or perhaps, as both novels intimate, it may stem from a reluctance to make hard life choices.

The available empirical evidence suggests that success within the elite law firm environment often entails a difficult array of personal and professional trade-offs. Although we find our empirical data to be informative, the novel may be a particularly effective vehicle for examining the rather existential nature of these choices. Thus, we suspect that the accounts drawn by Roosevelt and Laird will resonate with many elite, large law firm lawyers.

Keywords: Law firms, Am Law 100, Am Law 200, Partnerships, Roosevelt, Laird

JEL Classifications: D20, D80, D90, J21, J23, J24, J30, J44, L84

Accepted Paper Series