Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. On this show, I interview former lawyers to hear their inspiring stories about how they left law behind to find careers and lives that they love. Let's get right to the show.

Hello everyone. It is hard to believe but this is the last podcast episode of 2021 for The Former Lawyer Podcast. We're going to be taking a two-week break and we'll be back in the New Year. I was thinking about what I've seen and experienced over this last year and I wanted to return to a topic that we've talked about before and that I've also talked about some on YouTube Channel. That's about the issue of Biglaw associate burnout. There are plenty of articles, I'm sure that you've read some of them, about the extremely high levels of burnout that is being seen in Biglaw associates in 2021. There were some articles about it in 2020, there were lots of different factors at play, and it's still happening. I cannot tell you the number of people who I have heard from in the last year who are three, four, five, six months into Biglaw and they are just like, “I can't do this. This is inhumane.”

One, I wanted to talk about that again because the reality is that it just is continuing. I think there is an idea out there that because we're talking about it, maybe it's getting better or maybe if some more effort has been put towards it and so it's getting better. But I'm still hearing from people all the time. Honestly, it's not that surprising. I shared on YouTube, earlier this summer, a video about Biglaw associate burnout. That video is by far and away one of the most popular videos on the channel. One of the things I talked about in that video is something that I want to talk to you again about here, which is this idea that Biglaw firms acting shocked, surprised, or like they don't know what to do, or they couldn't possibly have anticipated the way that their associates are feeling in 2020 and 2021, these reactions make no sense. They're not attached to reality. There's a saying: Don't attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to incompetence. One or both may be at play here.

But listen, here's the reality: I graduated from law school in 2008. 2008 is when the Great Recession hit, 2008, 2009, 2010, Biglaw firms fired many associates. Sometimes they actually admitted that it was because of the downturn. Sometimes they tried to couch it as some performance-based thing. The reality is though that essentially, what these Biglaw firms were doing was shrinking the base of the pyramid structure of the firms. You have a small number of partners on top and then you have a smaller number of more senior associates, more mid-level, and then tons of junior associates. This is how you run a large law firm that is able to produce these huge profits per partner that started being pursued in the, I can't remember the exact dates but like the 80s, maybe late 70s when the Am Law 100 came to be and profits per partner took on this really oversized role in terms of assessing the “quality” of the firms.

Ever since then, needing to have a pyramid in order to make that structure work has become more and more necessary. But then when you chop off a big portion of the bottom of the pyramid, the whole thing becomes inherently unstable. It's just simply not going to work and it is going to burn out the people at the bottom because the system was designed, such as it was, to be supported by a large number of junior people. But if associates are perceived as cost centers, which there is an awful lot of talk amongst large law firms and partners in large law firms about how much they're paying their associates, if you perceive them as cost centers but they're also supposed to be the resource that is supporting the work, these two things are diametrically opposed. The problem is you had this gutting of the lower tier in 2008, 2009, 2010, and a lot of these firms never got up to the level of hiring that they were engaging in before that time even as things picked back up. Everyone, who was in the industry at that time, talks about how basically, the norms of what could be expected shifted because there was a sense of, “Well, you should just be happy that you have a job,” and all of these other really toxic things.

Anyway, the point is now you have these law firms that have never really brought their hiring numbers back to where they need to be in terms of people not being utterly crushed and destroyed, but that's the system. Genuinely, the system of Biglaw is dependent upon people being willing to burn themselves out to a greater or lesser extent. Specifically, burnout amongst associates is not a bug in the system, it's a feature. We've talked about this before, it is the inevitable result of the practices that Biglaw firms engage in. All of the hand-wringing, to the extent there is hand-wringing, and all of the shock that is expressed as though Biglaw firms can't imagine exactly why it is so bad and how to fix it feels, at least to me, very disingenuous because it seems—to me and I think to many others—the problems have been obvious on their face have existed for decades and at a certain point, if you're not changing what you do or how you operate, then you are choosing this system that burns people out.
I think this is important because inevitably, most Biglaw associates, when they are feeling crushed by their jobs, feel like there's something wrong with them like they should be able to tolerate these conditions, and the fact that they can't is somehow a moral failure or is a sign that they are not meant to be a lawyer in some moral way like, “Oh, well, you're just not as good as those of us who are more capable of handling this,” whatever, which by the way is its own absurd thing because we know that the way that many people cope with these kinds of environments is by either substance use, substance abuse, and also that we have an epidemic of mental health issues amongst lawyers. The reason I talk about these kinds of things so often is that when you're in an environment like that that normalizes what you're experiencing, it's very easy to feel like, “Well, the problem must be with me. The fact that I'm burnt out four months into this job, that I just spent three years of school and a bar exam, and etc, the fact that I'm burned out literally months in, must be a sign of some weakness on my part.” But it's not. It's a sign that you're human and the system that you exist in is fundamentally not designed to—not even promote your well-being or support your well-being—it actively is designed to be detrimental to your well-being.
The podcast episode I released a while back with the title Biglaw is Inhospitable to Human Life, I cannot tell you how many people I hear from about that specific episode and they say, “I read that title and I was like ‘Oh, you get it. You know what it's like.’” That's true. I think some people think that it's dramatic hyperbole when I say some of these things but I'm just trying to put words to things that are true, that are real, that are people's real experiences. Here's the thing about the legal profession: I'm talking about Biglaw here specifically because that's where I have particular experience with this and that's the thing that's specifically being talked about, but a lot of these dynamics in greater or lesser ways exist in all sorts of legal jobs. I am hearing, from all sorts of people, very similar experiences to my own in Biglaw to the experience of others who are in Biglaw and it's simply not okay. It's not okay that this is normalized. It's not okay that you are working in a system, in a profession that is, in many ways, designed to burn you out. It is okay to be a human being. It's good to be a human being. It's good to be a human being with human needs. It's so easy to forget that as a lawyer. In this last episode of 2021, I just wanted to remind you that you are human and that is good. I hope that as more of us speak out about these problems in our profession, things can change. Thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you in 2022.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.