A few days ago, my mother sent me an email with a newspaper article attached, “Lawyers Scarce for Poor Facing Foreclosure.” In a way only USA Today can, the article summarized in less than five hundred words the plight of how the poor facing foreclosure were having a hard time obtaining free legal representation. I thought the article would have been better titled, “How Lawyers Avoid Their Own Foreclosure by Not Working for Free.”
Although I’ve quit the profession, I occasionally put on my lawyer hat. Usually when I hear proclamations on our collective callousness toward the less fortunate in our society.
For some reason my family (and USA Today reporters) think I should work for free. Over the years, I regularly get nudges like these about how the poor are desperately suffering without free legal services. And while my mother, and in fact, my mother-in-law, have spent their life working on behalf of the have-nots, they’ve never done it for free. No one ever explains how I’m supposed to afford all this pro bono work when I don’t earn much more than the clients I’m supposed to help. Working for free costs lawyers. First, there is the time that we could be spending working for pay. Then there is the malpractice insurance we would need to cover all this free work – because poor people will sue you. Free work could quickly put us in the hole.
Sometimes I want to scream from the rooftops – most lawyers aren’t rich. I’m not sure where that perception blossomed, but if it was ever true, it’s less true now than ever.
About ten years ago, my husband and I were in the process of financing our first house when the myth came to light. I was talking to the mortgage broker (before they became the evil bane of our broken financial system), and he started out by asking basic information. When I told him our occupations, he sounded positively gleeful – our loan was going to be an easy one – lawyers are rich. Then I revealed our total yearly income – which was hovering precariously around $45,000 and his enthusiasm dimmed. Next came the disclosure our student loan debt, which was very near $200,000 at that time.
“That’s it?” he asked – without thinking, I’m sure. “That’s it,” I proclaimed. He’d assumed we’d be earning at least twice that much. I kindly informed him that my husband had a government job, and I was working on cases helping the poor. The government provided good benefits, if not pay. But the poor don’t pay.
The Meaning of Median
Back then, I surely wished I earned more. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual earnings for attorneys in the United States is about $102,000. If only I’d better understood the meaning of “median” when I graduated. That whopping six-figure income is about what half of lawyers can expect to earn at some point in their careers. Though that number can seem quite generous, the median salary for those starting out is significantly lower. And when you throw in loans – because most of us graduate with about $80,000 in debt (a $1000/month) payment – that $102K doesn’t look so grand. The statistics are worse in California. According to the State Bar, 50 percent earn less than a hundred thousand – albeit many have some loan burden.
On the whole, we’re just as middle class as teachers, police officers and firefighters. I know a few lawyers who make quite a fine living, but they are the exception, not the rule. For the rest of us – it’s getting used to a middle class salary for those who left school with champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Whenever I mention pro bono work to my attorney friends, they shake their heads, roll their eyes and promptly get back to the business of aspiring to afford a house or looking forward to a future, free of student loan debt.
The less fortunate aren’t weighing as heavily on their minds as they seem to weigh on my mother’s. Perhaps, we lawyers should care more about the poor’s lack of access to the legal system. But when salaries at many non-profits start at $30,000 per year – you start realizing that if you don’t hustle fast enough, you will be the poor.
Recently my grandmother asked me a favor. Could I advise some distant “cousin” on attending an Ivy League law school? Now my grandmother is a very positive sort who thinks my graduating from law school is the greatest achievement of all time. Therefore, I had to make very clear to her that I would do it only if she was not going to be disturbed by me telling the truth.
And the truth is, I can’t, in good conscience, advise anyone to go to law school these days, unless they have the means to work for free. Private schools are charging between forty and fifty thousand dollars per year – and that doesn’t include the cost of living or books or the endless fees schools have concocted over the years. The same can be said of many public schools, especially those in California like Berkeley or UCLA. My alma mater, not to be outdone, estimates the total bill to come in around $67K – far more than the average American family earns. Couple that with three years of earnings forgone and low expected lifetime earnings, and it is not a pretty picture.
Look for a Different Career
I say skip it. If you must, train to do something someone is willing to pay you to do. These jobs are not attorneys, airline pilots, or primary care physicians. If I read one more article about regional airline pilots on food stamps, I am going to scream. The madness has to stop now. If the job prospects for a career are slim, and a glut of available workers has driven down the wages, then stop applying for those programs, enriching the schools with your (borrowed) tuition payments, and impoverishing yourself. To make any other choice defies economic logic.
If you said to your friends and family that you were going to use lottery tickets as your financial planning tool, they would pronounce you crazy and, likely, have you institutionalized. But to attend one of these professional schools and go deep into debt for the hope of a job is sheer lunacy these days. Sure, some people do well. I know well-paid lawyers and physicians – the pilots I know, not so much – but they are the exception rather than the rule. Sure, some people win the lottery – but no one realistically makes it their life plan.
I don’t know what the answer is for our potential professional class – but I know it’s not working for free.
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. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
