“...smile in trouble, ... gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.”
Thomas Paine
The American Crisis, No. I
December 1776
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 1
Sometimes people ask me if I miss being a lawyer. Or, they ask if I would ever go back although I left almost 20 years ago. Occasionally, someone will even attempt to criticize or chastise me for having left the law. This blog of law memoirs is my reply. After reading it, you may ask why I didn't quit sooner and go into entrepreneurship -- or anything else -- sooner.
I became a lawyer because I have lawyers and doctors in my family, and grew up hearing that I could be a doctor or a lawyer or a doctor or a lawyer or a doctor or a lawyer. I chose law, because I like reading and thinking, I believe in justice, and I thought law would involve working with interesting people on interesting projects that make a difference, plus cuter clothes and less blood than medicine. Maybe I could even be a lawyer for a chocolate company, I told myself, as a life-long chocolate lover. The difference between how I imagined my law career, and the reality, was vast.
My law career began disastrously, and never changed course except to become more disastrous. Here are examples from my jobs as a summer associate while in law school, which should have given me clues that I was not on a happy path.
Summer Associate Job 1: London
After my first year at Harvard Law School, I accepted a summer clerkship at a large law firm in London.
Trouble started gently enough you might say, when UK customs officers refused to allow me to enter the country when I said I was there on business. I was so jetlagged from my flight from the US that I couldn't even feel as upset or stressed about this as I am sure I would have otherwise, and I slept sitting up for 4 hours at Heathrow Airport while the officers tried to track down someone at the firm on a Sunday who could confirm that I was there to work for the summer. I told the officers that after summer, I was returning to Harvard Law School and wouldn't want to stay in England, as my return flight also evidenced, but it seems they didn't believe me. Quite frankly I hadn't originally even wanted to go to England, and now it seemed they didn't want me either. Why hadn't I accepted the large law firm job I'd been offered in my hometown of Chicago?
Apparently, the UK customs officers managed to reach a janitor at the firm by telephone, who was able to reach a partner at home. Customs allowed me into England on the word of this (English male) partner, but held onto my US passport, returning it after the firm provided a work permit and before I raised an uproar through the US Embassy. Later, a female administrator at the firm told me she always says she's traveling for holiday even when traveling for business, because customs officials don't always believe a woman could be traveling on business.
Terrible lesson: tell a lie as a preemptive approach to misogyny.
I don't believe in lying. In any case, what would be the consequences of such a lie, if it were found out? Why could men be truthful if they were traveling for business, while women were supposed to take the risk of lying? Why should a two-and-a-half-month vacation seem more plausible than a summer job, anyway?
I did my best to shake off the weird start, and looked forward to a summer of law firm life and London life. I met many nice people, including my now ex-husband, a very kind young German law student who was also doing a summer clerkship abroad, and who took the photos of me above at the firm. I enjoyed getting to know the theaters, historical sites, and Indian food of London. Yet, misogyny and cruelty pervaded my experience at the law firm and indeed the rest of my entire legal experience.
For instance, at the London firm, the summer program was set up such that I sat with different partners in their offices, to shadow and learn from them while working on projects. One corporate lawyer I sat with would shout every day for his assistant to bring him a non-choccy bickie, a British colloquialism for a non-chocolate biscuit (packaged cookie in the US). Aside from the question of why anyone would want a non-chocolate cookie if there were chocolate cookies available -- yes, I've been a chocolate maniac my entire life -- I wondered why he didn't get his own bickie, why he didn't seem grateful to his assistant for her help, or why she put up with having to fetch cookies for him when he could have done it himself or just kept some at his desk. Yes, he was busy, but she had plenty of work to do too. I never heard her ask him to bring her a cookie, chocolate or non-chocolate. Moreover, there weren't many women attorneys, but I never saw a woman demand kitchen runs of her assistant. I didn't see any male assistants; however, most of the people who worked in the mailroom and brought deliveries to the lawyers were men, and I never saw any of the mailroom men being asked to bring snacks with their next delivery. This episode was an introduction to the idea I was to encounter throughout my career as an attorney that women at law firms should be substitute mommies or caregivers to men, and that oppression or showing who's boss can happen in a variety of ways.
Another lawyer I sat with in London took gender bias to a more overtly cruel place, by being overtly cruel to me. He sneered at me so intensely and criticized me so severely, for absolutely nothing, that I knew his hostility had nothing to do with me personally. Still, I couldn't stand to be around such negativity, or such horrible, abusive, inappropriate words, so I sat in the empty room separated by a thin partition from his and did my work there. One day, while I was sitting behind the partition, another lawyer on our project came into the side of the office where I normally would have been and asked the hostile lawyer if he had seen me. I was about to step around the partition but paused when I heard the hostile lawyer spit out that I was so useless I probably hadn't come in yet and was probably doing a disgraceful job with the project. I heard the second lawyer gasp at those words, and then I stepped out and said calmly that I had arrived early or on time as every day, had been working on the project steadily, and had in fact finished it. The hostile lawyer turned bright red, as it was thoroughly clear I had heard him telling evil lies about me. The second lawyer was also visibly uncomfortable. Ultimately, I was given excellent reviews by everyone except the hostile lawyer.
One more example from the London firm: I attended a training session with young associates, on how to talk with clients. The role-plays we were given were about interviewing hypothetical clients who had had accidents or the like, which wasn't precisely relevant to the work the firm did which was to represent corporations in writing contracts or handling disputes. Still, corporations are made of people, and most of us newbies embraced the training. The outside facilitator praised those of us who showed empathy during the role-plays. Yet it occurred to me that I never heard the lawyers praise anyone for empathy or anything else, or demonstrate that level of empathy with clients. This theme of lack of positive reinforcement and lack of empathy was to grow over the course of my disastrous career as a lawyer.
Positive lesson: I can learn a lot about an organization's culture by observing. And if I don't like what I observe, I can prepare to move on.
Terrible lesson: expect to see and experience subtle and overt oppression, hostility, lies, and back-stabbing; don't expect empathy to be valued, and don't expect allies; expect to be put into positions where I am expected to lie even though I won't do it.
I was not happy with these terrible lessons. This was a prestigious law firm, and it wasn't at all like the ones on television. (Spoiler alert: they never are.) This was not the kind of environment I'd dreamt about when envisioning an exciting and meaningful career as a lawyer. I noted that my soon-to-be fiance was having a different and more positive experience than I was. Was it because he was a man? Would the atmosphere be more positive for women attorneys at US firms? I would find out soon enough.
Summer Associate Job 2: Chicago
For my second and final clerkship during my time at Harvard Law School, I chose to go back to Chicago, and accepted a job at a top-rated intellectual property boutique law firm. I had grown interested in this area of law and was going to write my third-year paper on copyright in the Internet age.
To my initial delight, this summer work experience started beautifully. I found the work interesting, was learning a great deal, researched and wrote memos that helped clients and the firm, and got along well with my coworkers. One of the lawyers I worked with was double-Harvard like me, a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School; we worked well together and I hoped he might become a mentor. I also worked to build relationships with male and female partners, including one of the name partners, as I admired what he and the others had built and I hoped to learn more in the future about the business side of law, such as developing clients. I seemed to fit into the culture, which was hard-working, somewhat formal, collegial, and polite.
A problem: I did not implement the first lesson from my London experience, which was to lie as a defense to misogyny. Again, I don't believe in lying. Also, I didn't see the misogyny coming, forgetting that gender bias is not necessarily a specific action but an entire context, mindset, or environment. Here is what happened:
Remember the nice young German from the London law firm? We were the two foreigners, thrown together, and we ended up marrying! (And later, after 7 years, divorcing!) He was working in Germany the summer I was in Chicago, and I missed him terribly. Lawyers at the firm sometimes mentioned their spouses, or I would meet them with their spouses for dinner or social events. I mentioned that my husband was a German lawyer and that he was over there now which was hard, but that we'd be reunited in Cambridge while I finished at Harvard Law where he would be doing some research, and then we wanted to settle in Chicago (hint hint: I wanted to work at that firm after graduation!). The topic came up now and again over the summer, in a friendly and harmless way I assumed, with me always saying the same thing: I missed my husband terribly, and we were eager to live in my hometown of Chicago.
Summer ended, I received excellent reviews from everyone at the law firm, and I received -- no job offer for after graduation. Not receiving an offer from your 2L summer firm is highly uncommon, and a worry is that it can mark you as almost unemployable for any other firm, which apparently it did, as I graduated Harvard Law School with no job offers. This is also highly uncommon; practically unheard of, in fact. The typed words don't even look right: "graduated Harvard Law School with no job offers." Were the signs starting to add up? I was shocked at not receiving an offer from my summer firm, and I asked them why. I was told that everyone adored me and my work, but they didn't believe I would come back to Chicago, even though I said I would, because a married woman goes where her husband is from. More words that just look outrageous to me.
Terrible lesson: the first one all over again -- honesty fails in the face of misogyny -- with a new admonition not to believe in the absence of misogyny even if you don't see it overtly.
Terrible lesson: expect as a woman to be punished for having a husband or family.
These were devastating lessons. I was disappointed in the lawyers, disappointed in myself for trusting them, and disappointed that when I opened up about my private life it was used against me, which would become another theme throughout my disastrous law career. Indeed, opening up and writing these memoirs is somewhat difficult, yet an enormous relief, because I internalized this recurring lesson about keeping my private life private. At this current time in my life, these memoirs have been bursting to come out, so here they are.
Back to the firm: it seems that if I'd been a man married to a woman from another city or country, I would have gotten the job. Or if I'd been a woman married to a man from Chicago, presumably I would have gotten the job? Would I have been able to keep the job if we had children? (Spoiler alert: terrible miscarriage story and career repercussions coming later.) Or should I have just kept my mouth shut? Moreover, did I even want to work with people who had such ridiculous and unfair ideas; if they were unfair about this, what else would they be unfair about? My full self is worthy and courageous and I had always known that; did I want to work someplace where I couldn't be my full self? Where was my ikigai?
Today, we hear that it's good to be vulnerable, including at work. I am naturally open and authentic, and a natural feminist who has always believed in equality. So far all I had to show for it in law, however, was a dead disaster of a law career before it even officially began.
Positive lesson: rejection is protection.
I understand that today. In addition, we know today from studies done by Harvard Law School and the American Bar Association that many women and men leave the practice of law -- with more women leaving than men, while the women who stay work more hours than men -- and we know that women lawyers are frequently penalized for having a husband or children, while male lawyers are generally expected to have a wife and children (all very heteronormative, I know). But at the time, I was incredibly distraught. I thought I would be treated fairly, and I was wrong. Should I have quit while I was still somewhat ahead, and recognized that law firm life was just not going to work out? Who was going to pay back those student loans? What was my Plan B? Where was my ikigai? Oh, the adventures in law career disasters that were still to come, bringing additional opportunity to "gather strength from distress!"
To be continued...!
Valerie Beck
Thomas Paine
The American Crisis, No. I
December 1776
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 1
 |
| My Harvard Law School diploma, earned in 1996. What happened at summer associate jobs on the way to that diploma, and what happened in jobs as a lawyer after that diploma, was a series of disasters known as my former law career, which ended in the 2000s. |
Sometimes people ask me if I miss being a lawyer. Or, they ask if I would ever go back although I left almost 20 years ago. Occasionally, someone will even attempt to criticize or chastise me for having left the law. This blog of law memoirs is my reply. After reading it, you may ask why I didn't quit sooner and go into entrepreneurship -- or anything else -- sooner.
 |
| Already a lover of liberty and justice, age 3. |
I became a lawyer because I have lawyers and doctors in my family, and grew up hearing that I could be a doctor or a lawyer or a doctor or a lawyer or a doctor or a lawyer. I chose law, because I like reading and thinking, I believe in justice, and I thought law would involve working with interesting people on interesting projects that make a difference, plus cuter clothes and less blood than medicine. Maybe I could even be a lawyer for a chocolate company, I told myself, as a life-long chocolate lover. The difference between how I imagined my law career, and the reality, was vast.
 |
| My law career did not blossom into a beautiful flower of ikigai, the Japanese concept of making a living at something you love. The concept involves the interconnectedness of the spiritual and the practical to create a happy, meaningful, and productive career and life. Law was not my ikigai. |
My law career began disastrously, and never changed course except to become more disastrous. Here are examples from my jobs as a summer associate while in law school, which should have given me clues that I was not on a happy path.
 |
| Not all fun and games: as a summer associate at a large London law firm. Yes, as a younger woman and as a child, my hair was very red! |
Summer Associate Job 1: London
After my first year at Harvard Law School, I accepted a summer clerkship at a large law firm in London.
Trouble started gently enough you might say, when UK customs officers refused to allow me to enter the country when I said I was there on business. I was so jetlagged from my flight from the US that I couldn't even feel as upset or stressed about this as I am sure I would have otherwise, and I slept sitting up for 4 hours at Heathrow Airport while the officers tried to track down someone at the firm on a Sunday who could confirm that I was there to work for the summer. I told the officers that after summer, I was returning to Harvard Law School and wouldn't want to stay in England, as my return flight also evidenced, but it seems they didn't believe me. Quite frankly I hadn't originally even wanted to go to England, and now it seemed they didn't want me either. Why hadn't I accepted the large law firm job I'd been offered in my hometown of Chicago?
Apparently, the UK customs officers managed to reach a janitor at the firm by telephone, who was able to reach a partner at home. Customs allowed me into England on the word of this (English male) partner, but held onto my US passport, returning it after the firm provided a work permit and before I raised an uproar through the US Embassy. Later, a female administrator at the firm told me she always says she's traveling for holiday even when traveling for business, because customs officials don't always believe a woman could be traveling on business.
Terrible lesson: tell a lie as a preemptive approach to misogyny.
I don't believe in lying. In any case, what would be the consequences of such a lie, if it were found out? Why could men be truthful if they were traveling for business, while women were supposed to take the risk of lying? Why should a two-and-a-half-month vacation seem more plausible than a summer job, anyway?
I did my best to shake off the weird start, and looked forward to a summer of law firm life and London life. I met many nice people, including my now ex-husband, a very kind young German law student who was also doing a summer clerkship abroad, and who took the photos of me above at the firm. I enjoyed getting to know the theaters, historical sites, and Indian food of London. Yet, misogyny and cruelty pervaded my experience at the law firm and indeed the rest of my entire legal experience.
For instance, at the London firm, the summer program was set up such that I sat with different partners in their offices, to shadow and learn from them while working on projects. One corporate lawyer I sat with would shout every day for his assistant to bring him a non-choccy bickie, a British colloquialism for a non-chocolate biscuit (packaged cookie in the US). Aside from the question of why anyone would want a non-chocolate cookie if there were chocolate cookies available -- yes, I've been a chocolate maniac my entire life -- I wondered why he didn't get his own bickie, why he didn't seem grateful to his assistant for her help, or why she put up with having to fetch cookies for him when he could have done it himself or just kept some at his desk. Yes, he was busy, but she had plenty of work to do too. I never heard her ask him to bring her a cookie, chocolate or non-chocolate. Moreover, there weren't many women attorneys, but I never saw a woman demand kitchen runs of her assistant. I didn't see any male assistants; however, most of the people who worked in the mailroom and brought deliveries to the lawyers were men, and I never saw any of the mailroom men being asked to bring snacks with their next delivery. This episode was an introduction to the idea I was to encounter throughout my career as an attorney that women at law firms should be substitute mommies or caregivers to men, and that oppression or showing who's boss can happen in a variety of ways.
Another lawyer I sat with in London took gender bias to a more overtly cruel place, by being overtly cruel to me. He sneered at me so intensely and criticized me so severely, for absolutely nothing, that I knew his hostility had nothing to do with me personally. Still, I couldn't stand to be around such negativity, or such horrible, abusive, inappropriate words, so I sat in the empty room separated by a thin partition from his and did my work there. One day, while I was sitting behind the partition, another lawyer on our project came into the side of the office where I normally would have been and asked the hostile lawyer if he had seen me. I was about to step around the partition but paused when I heard the hostile lawyer spit out that I was so useless I probably hadn't come in yet and was probably doing a disgraceful job with the project. I heard the second lawyer gasp at those words, and then I stepped out and said calmly that I had arrived early or on time as every day, had been working on the project steadily, and had in fact finished it. The hostile lawyer turned bright red, as it was thoroughly clear I had heard him telling evil lies about me. The second lawyer was also visibly uncomfortable. Ultimately, I was given excellent reviews by everyone except the hostile lawyer.
One more example from the London firm: I attended a training session with young associates, on how to talk with clients. The role-plays we were given were about interviewing hypothetical clients who had had accidents or the like, which wasn't precisely relevant to the work the firm did which was to represent corporations in writing contracts or handling disputes. Still, corporations are made of people, and most of us newbies embraced the training. The outside facilitator praised those of us who showed empathy during the role-plays. Yet it occurred to me that I never heard the lawyers praise anyone for empathy or anything else, or demonstrate that level of empathy with clients. This theme of lack of positive reinforcement and lack of empathy was to grow over the course of my disastrous career as a lawyer.
Positive lesson: I can learn a lot about an organization's culture by observing. And if I don't like what I observe, I can prepare to move on.
Terrible lesson: expect to see and experience subtle and overt oppression, hostility, lies, and back-stabbing; don't expect empathy to be valued, and don't expect allies; expect to be put into positions where I am expected to lie even though I won't do it.
I was not happy with these terrible lessons. This was a prestigious law firm, and it wasn't at all like the ones on television. (Spoiler alert: they never are.) This was not the kind of environment I'd dreamt about when envisioning an exciting and meaningful career as a lawyer. I noted that my soon-to-be fiance was having a different and more positive experience than I was. Was it because he was a man? Would the atmosphere be more positive for women attorneys at US firms? I would find out soon enough.
Summer Associate Job 2: Chicago
For my second and final clerkship during my time at Harvard Law School, I chose to go back to Chicago, and accepted a job at a top-rated intellectual property boutique law firm. I had grown interested in this area of law and was going to write my third-year paper on copyright in the Internet age.
To my initial delight, this summer work experience started beautifully. I found the work interesting, was learning a great deal, researched and wrote memos that helped clients and the firm, and got along well with my coworkers. One of the lawyers I worked with was double-Harvard like me, a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School; we worked well together and I hoped he might become a mentor. I also worked to build relationships with male and female partners, including one of the name partners, as I admired what he and the others had built and I hoped to learn more in the future about the business side of law, such as developing clients. I seemed to fit into the culture, which was hard-working, somewhat formal, collegial, and polite.
A problem: I did not implement the first lesson from my London experience, which was to lie as a defense to misogyny. Again, I don't believe in lying. Also, I didn't see the misogyny coming, forgetting that gender bias is not necessarily a specific action but an entire context, mindset, or environment. Here is what happened:
Remember the nice young German from the London law firm? We were the two foreigners, thrown together, and we ended up marrying! (And later, after 7 years, divorcing!) He was working in Germany the summer I was in Chicago, and I missed him terribly. Lawyers at the firm sometimes mentioned their spouses, or I would meet them with their spouses for dinner or social events. I mentioned that my husband was a German lawyer and that he was over there now which was hard, but that we'd be reunited in Cambridge while I finished at Harvard Law where he would be doing some research, and then we wanted to settle in Chicago (hint hint: I wanted to work at that firm after graduation!). The topic came up now and again over the summer, in a friendly and harmless way I assumed, with me always saying the same thing: I missed my husband terribly, and we were eager to live in my hometown of Chicago.
 |
| Nineties newlyweds. |
Summer ended, I received excellent reviews from everyone at the law firm, and I received -- no job offer for after graduation. Not receiving an offer from your 2L summer firm is highly uncommon, and a worry is that it can mark you as almost unemployable for any other firm, which apparently it did, as I graduated Harvard Law School with no job offers. This is also highly uncommon; practically unheard of, in fact. The typed words don't even look right: "graduated Harvard Law School with no job offers." Were the signs starting to add up? I was shocked at not receiving an offer from my summer firm, and I asked them why. I was told that everyone adored me and my work, but they didn't believe I would come back to Chicago, even though I said I would, because a married woman goes where her husband is from. More words that just look outrageous to me.
Terrible lesson: the first one all over again -- honesty fails in the face of misogyny -- with a new admonition not to believe in the absence of misogyny even if you don't see it overtly.
Terrible lesson: expect as a woman to be punished for having a husband or family.
These were devastating lessons. I was disappointed in the lawyers, disappointed in myself for trusting them, and disappointed that when I opened up about my private life it was used against me, which would become another theme throughout my disastrous law career. Indeed, opening up and writing these memoirs is somewhat difficult, yet an enormous relief, because I internalized this recurring lesson about keeping my private life private. At this current time in my life, these memoirs have been bursting to come out, so here they are.
Back to the firm: it seems that if I'd been a man married to a woman from another city or country, I would have gotten the job. Or if I'd been a woman married to a man from Chicago, presumably I would have gotten the job? Would I have been able to keep the job if we had children? (Spoiler alert: terrible miscarriage story and career repercussions coming later.) Or should I have just kept my mouth shut? Moreover, did I even want to work with people who had such ridiculous and unfair ideas; if they were unfair about this, what else would they be unfair about? My full self is worthy and courageous and I had always known that; did I want to work someplace where I couldn't be my full self? Where was my ikigai?
Today, we hear that it's good to be vulnerable, including at work. I am naturally open and authentic, and a natural feminist who has always believed in equality. So far all I had to show for it in law, however, was a dead disaster of a law career before it even officially began.
Positive lesson: rejection is protection.
I understand that today. In addition, we know today from studies done by Harvard Law School and the American Bar Association that many women and men leave the practice of law -- with more women leaving than men, while the women who stay work more hours than men -- and we know that women lawyers are frequently penalized for having a husband or children, while male lawyers are generally expected to have a wife and children (all very heteronormative, I know). But at the time, I was incredibly distraught. I thought I would be treated fairly, and I was wrong. Should I have quit while I was still somewhat ahead, and recognized that law firm life was just not going to work out? Who was going to pay back those student loans? What was my Plan B? Where was my ikigai? Oh, the adventures in law career disasters that were still to come, bringing additional opportunity to "gather strength from distress!"
To be continued...!
Valerie Beck
“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.”
ReplyDeleteJ.K. Rowling
Thank you for sharing those wise words and kind sentiment!
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