No Wonder I Left Law. Incessant Rankings Helped Drive Me Away

One day I was daydreaming in class when Mr. Golder called on me. I was, back then, a “B minus” girl – one of those kids who never paid attention, but could squeak by on a test with an 83. I had no idea what was going on before he called on me. I did not have my hand up.

Mr. Golder asked me how I viewed my classmates in relation to my academic career. As I was shaken from my reverie – thinking about MTV or bad boy bands – I probably sputtered something incoherent and non-responsive (like Sarah Palin). Maybe it was rhetorical, but he answered his own question. Each and every student in that classroom, he said, was my competition. High school, college admissions, jobs—everything was a race for whom the winner would either be me or one of them.

Up until that time, I had never thought of myself in competition with anyone. Despite athletic shoe company ads to the contrary, I was not in the game. I didn't even watch the game. I figured that people performed better and achieved more if they came together in communities, and there was enough room in the world for everyone to succeed at what they desired. Sure, not everyone could be President of the United States, or Secretary General of the United Nations. Most likely, race, gender, class, and (mostly) lack of a family dynasty would keep me from those jobs. But surely any of us could be doctors, or lawyers, or writers if we worked hard. Now, keep in mind, I was sitting squarely in an affluent suburban school in Connecticut as I had these thoughts.

Competitiveness Bobs up Again

I did not think of Mr. Golder’s lesson again until nine or 10 years later when I entered law school. During our orientation process, the law school surveyed us on what other schools had accepted us. When I told my classmates other schools they considered more prestigious accepted me, they were surprised I was there. Almost across the board, I learned that my classmates had attended the highest ranked school into which they had been accepted.

This was my first exposure to the over-ranked world of the law. I am not saying I was oblivious to ranking. I went to a “top-ranked” liberal arts college in the northeast. And I only applied to law schools in the Top 15 in the country. But I assumed there was little difference between one Ivy League school or another except location and culture. I could never have been more wrong.

The first day I walked into law school was the beginning of my ranking life. The school I chose was apparently ranked 11th or 12th at the time. It wasn’t hard to remember when U.S. News and World Report rankings were scrawled on every blackboard every spring. But I’d gotten into the third and fourth ranked school (no Harvard or Yale for me). But I picked the school I attended for intangible reasons, like size and sense of community. That was rational to me. Making a choice based upon some magazine’s annual ranking was not.

Desperate to Succeed

I learned for the first time what grading on a strict curve actually meant. There would be only so many A’s or B’s to go around, and either you got one or your classmate did. Of course, applying a strict curve to what is clearly not a random sample of the population is fallacious, but this was law school, not statistics school. Good grades were a scarce resource, and the students (me included) were thrown in the gladiator ring to battle it out for quartile placement and all that went with it. Let me tell you, it was bloody. When friends told me that fellow students would hide books or try to sabotage each other, I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. Gone were the days of communities of students coming together to help each other. My idyllic undergraduate days were long past.

Although other schools have gotten away from this, our school had a strict class rank. After first semester, we knew who was first in the class and who was 10th. We even all knew who was last. And everyone in between. Our individual identities morphed into single and double and even a few triple-digit numbers.

It’s Ubiquitous. I Am Surrounded

Naively, I assumed that ranking would end once we graduated from school. I thought these future lawyers would move to their respective cities, start their careers and drift away from the obsessive competition that had gripped many of us for three years. I was wrong. Really wrong.

Meeting a lawyer for the first time is like getting a numerology lesson. Hi, I went to the No. 16 school, and I work for the No. 45 firm, and I was featured in the Top 40 lawyers under 40. And that’s all before the first cocktail. The American Lawyer ranks large law firms annually, and attorneys act as if their fortunes will rise and fall with those rankings. Who has the most lawyers, the largest profits, the longest list of international offices, and on and on.

Getting off this merry-go-round was the best thing I ever did. At a dinner party last week, another friend (and lawyer) asked me if I missed it – and if I ever thought about going back. My answer for him was an unequivocal “no.” It is blissful to live free of rankings.

Even when you get out of the competitive sphere of law firms, as I did, the ranking continues. Work for government – federal trumps state, which trumps county, which most definitely trumps a measly municipal job. Working for a judge is prestigious, but appellate judges are more prestigious than trial judges, and again working for a mere municipal judge might as well be in six-point font on your resume.

Did you go work in-house for a large company? In-house work is less prestigious than firm work, but more money in-house is better than less. Large is better than small. Entertainment ventures are better than sanitation companies. A more impressive title is better than a less impressive one – even if both titleholders have the same duties and responsibilities, and receive the same pay.

Even specialization is not free from judgment. Attorneys treat intellectual property (particularly patent, but even trademark, copyright and trade secrets) like the holy grail of law practice. If you talk to 100 students, it seems that 98 want to practice in that specialty. Criminal law, of course, is the bastard stepchild with family law only a stitch above that, and then only because it is “civil.” And it continues to split along those lines – environmental good, personal injury bad. Corporate and business law good, products liability bad.

Even lawyers on opposite sides of the same coin have ranks. Criminal prosecutor is good, while defending the constitutional rights of accused criminals is bad. Don’t believe me? Just look at the descriptions of the attorneys running for judge. There is no shortage of criminal gang or criminal drug prosecutors. The criminal defense attorneys and public defenders cloak themselves under the general guise of “criminal attorney” – lest they turn off the many lawyers who might otherwise not cast votes for them.

Getting out of law was like getting off a hamster wheel. Finally, I can take a deep breath and relax. I have no rank or status among my lawyer peers, and that’s just fine with me and Stephen Gould.

Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. She's a reformed lawyer, and full time novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. This will mark the debut of our newest, and perhaps most charismatic, weekly essayist. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.