Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

Today on the podcast, I want to talk about why Biglaw leaders are cowards. And it is a bit of a blanket statement. Of course, there are the necessary caveats. This is not true about every single person. This is not true about every single law firm. This is not true about every single partner in every single law firm.

However, this is a fairly consistent thing that is true across the board in many cases.

I actually am going to essentially be reading you what I wrote on LinkedIn, because if you are not aware, there has been quite a bit of organizing related to the Biglaw firms who have capitulated to Trump’s executive orders around DEI and other things. One of the most prominent people who is involved in that work is Rachel Cohen. I'll link her profile on LinkedIn in the show notes and on the blog post for this episode.

But she shared recently some steps that people can take related to influence that they may have in organizations that are not the Biglaw firms that have done the capitulating but where, say, one of those decision-makers—those law firms—may sit on a board in another organization. Again, we'll link out to that post.

I shared that post on LinkedIn, and I wrote just a little bit about my thoughts, which I had swirling around in my brain for weeks, and they just finally fully coalesced.

So let's talk about it, okay? Because one of the things that I have seen in the coverage of these Biglaw firms who have capitulated to Trump around DEI and the executive orders related to those things is that there is often, especially outside of the legal profession, this sort of surprise at the unwillingness to fight.

There’s this sense of, “Oh, this is weird. This is not what you would expect from these lawyers, these highly prestigious firms who ostensibly are the best of the best,” right? And I totally understand people having that reaction.

I completely can see how, if you're someone who's outside of the legal profession and does not have experience with the nature of Biglaw, why it would seem surprising or like out of character. But here's what I wrote when I shared the information that Rachel shared, and I want to share it with you too.

I said, “I have long maintained that the vast majority of decision-makers in most Biglaw firms are simply cowards. I’ve seen it again and again and again in the treatment of my clients, especially clients who have any sort of marginalized identity. It is not a bug. It’s a feature.”

I just want to expand on that briefly here. It has been my experience that the majority—not all, but the majority—of people who end up in decision-making roles, positions of influence within Biglaw firms, especially the more toxic of those Biglaw firms, cowardice is sort of a necessary feature in order for them to be the type of person who is ultimately able to rise in a toxic organization.

Because you don’t necessarily have to be a person who is committing all of these extreme atrocities that we see in terms of really horrifying workplace abuse that happens in these Biglaw firms, that anyone who has any experience in those environments knows goes on. You just have to be someone who's not willing to do anything meaningful about it.

So by its nature, I think the nature of a toxic organization is that it both grooms people into cowardice and rewards cowardice.

And also, these organizations protect those who are cowardly. The kinds of things that have happened to clients of mine, especially those who have some sort of marginalized identity in these spaces, the things themselves that have happened are atrocious.

The fact that it was allowed to happen and that other people knew it was happening and did nothing is like ten times more atrocious. So again, the vast majority of decision-makers in most Biglaw firms, in my opinion, are cowards.

So it was zero percent surprising to me to see the capitulation by most of the targeted Biglaw firms to the Trump administration. And honestly, this is why. These decision-makers, who are mostly still cis-het white males—not all, but again, the majority in the majority of firms—they are cowards behind closed doors. That I know to be true.

So in this capitulation, they’re just demonstrating themselves to be cowards out in the open.

If you think about your experience in a large law firm, the negative parts of the experience that you had, especially the things that happened that feel like they don’t completely make sense, often cowardice will explain it.

Often, if you’re like, “Gosh, that happened. It was so bad or so weird or so… whatever. Some part of me does not understand why, because it doesn’t make logical sense,” when you consider whether cowardice was playing a role on the part of the decision-makers, almost always the situation then makes sense.

In the sense of, there is a logic to it, not that it was right, not that it should have happened, obviously not that it was good, not that there's any excuse for it, but it is very, very common that something that feels like it doesn’t make sense, when you consider the role of cowardice, makes perfect sense. Because you're like, “Oh. That’s what a coward would do. And that’s what they did.”

So anyway, that was another slight digression from what I wrote. Just a couple more things to say, and then I will wrap it up here.

So here’s what I said. As I said previously, it was therefore zero percent surprising to me to see the capitulation by most targeted Biglaw firms to the Trump administration. These mostly cis-het white male decision-makers are cowards behind closed doors and have now demonstrated themselves to be cowards out in the open.

You shouldn’t trust their decision-making. And if you have influence in an impacted organization, please use your influence to prevent them from dragging us all down with their cowardice.

When I talk about the legal profession on this podcast, when I talk about Biglaw, when I talk about toxic organizations and just the things about it that are so destructive, yes, I talk about it because I care a lot about the individual people who are in these systems, right?

I care a lot about people who are stuck in these systems and being treated poorly, having bad experiences, whose mental health is being degraded by these environments, and who are also being made to feel like it’s their fault.

Of course, that is probably obvious that that is my main focus and concern and a big motivator for the existence of this business and this podcast.

But I also think that part of why I talk about it is because it’s not just about the individual people, right? There are consequences to allowing these types of organizations to continue to chew up and spit out human beings. There are consequences to running an organization in such a way that you encourage and reward cowardice.

The idea that somehow we limit the effects of that, that that’s just limited internally to the organization, that it doesn’t leak out, that it isn’t like toxic sludge that ultimately breaches containment and has problematic effects elsewhere outside of these workplaces, is like… it does. It does.

And some of those effects are going to be small and some of those effects are going to be big. Some of those effects are going to be the things that we have seen with Biglaw firms capitulating to fascism.

So anyway, all that to say, it matters. And it matters for the individual people in these organizations. It also matters for society. It matters for our country, if you are someone who’s in the U.S.

I’m not saying that it’s easy to not be cowardly. It’s not. It’s difficult. It is very difficult.

But I think more than ever, we need people in positions of authority and decision-makers who aren’t cowards.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. I really appreciate you listening. I will talk to you next week.

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.