I've not read the article, but those two if's are pretty big aren't they? I mean "If X, then X." Seems logical, but also not very useful for predictive purposes.

I think it is a little shabby to make a gender stereotyping assumption after admitting that one has "no evidence" to support it.

Not necessarily. Suppose a woman enters government service in the DOJ and returns after five years into the private sector. She has a much higher chance of making partner than any joe schmoe climbing the ladder and who is later forced out at year (8). This would especially be true coming from harvard, where many DOJ attorneys come from. All about the CV guys.

I don't have any evidence to support this, but if college professors have a higher probability than non-college professors of making tautological arguments on blogs, then any incentive program to increase the number of college professors will have the unintended consequence of an increase in the number of tautological arguments posted on blogs.

I would second what An-0-n says. Of the two assumptions, that public interest law destroys your ability to make partner seems the more unlikely one to me. I'm not sure I'd even agree that it makes it less likely, but "can't return to the private sector and make partner?" That strikes me as extremely unlikely.

This is just a special application of the following (tautological) argument:

If women on average are less inclined to undertake the activities needed to be a partner at a fancy law firm, there will be fewer women partner's at fancy law firms.

The interesting question is not whether this is the case, but whether the "activities needed to be a partner at a fancy law firm" are appropriate.

Should having a Y chromosome be required? Plainly not.
Should sleeping with senior partners be needed? Plainly not.
Should being an aggressive, thick-skinned, and argumentative person be needed? Hopefully not.
Should working inhuman hours with no family life be needed? Maybe yes, maybe no.

If these questions are addressed, then we shouldn't care how many women end up as partners at fancy law firms. If they are left unaddressed, I don't think providing women with an attractive alternative to firm life is so bad.

To amplify my prior point:

There is an implication that the reason why there are fewer women who are partners is irrelevant. Whether it's because of discrimination or because a substitute has become more attractive is irrelevant.

Sorry, that is complete BS.

Even if women are more likely to chose PI over biglaw partnership, there's the possibility that this program either induces or enables more women to attend HLS. The increased number of women at HLS may increase the number of female biglaw partners even if it reduces their percentage.

My sense is that there may be reasons to think that women have a greater tendency to choose careers that are less financially lucrative but more rewarding in other respects, but this program is not likely to affect that decision.

I also think that even if this particular unintended consequence is true, it is minor relative to the program's intended consequences.

I don't get this claim from the original post:

So, suppose that you are smart woman at HLS and you accept this offer. After 5 years in public service, can you join a fancy NYC law firm and 8 years later be promoted to partner? I doubt it.

Um, why not? I would think this group is particularly well suited to becoming partners if that's what they want to do.

Dear HLS,

You give me 3L tuition (not room, not board, not books, and not "living expenses"--i.e., enough booze to drown the misery of being around other HLSers). This allows me to avoid borrowing money at historically low interest rates.

I give up half a decade of real money, to work a miserable job with no support staff, no objective community value (I can't wait to proudly explain that I represent indignent aliens seeking asylum), and, oh, did I remember to mention, no real money.

GREAT! Sign me up!

I think the unintended consequence here is that it forces law students to choose a career path and stick to it, essentially, at what -- the end of 2L year?

With a loan repayment program, one can simply drop out of the program and take a new job. But with this program, if one "drops out," one is required to pay back the tuition. Now, perhaps the lost gains in dropping out of a repayment program and the money that needs to be paid back in the waiver program are the same economically, but few people have cash on hand to just hand over the $40,000 when it comes due.

Thus, the repayment becomes a five-year binding commitment to the public interest job. It unduly narrows student opportunities. It's like "early admission" in college admissions where you get a faster decision but are bound to attend that college; it's great for those who really want to do it, but bad for those who are on the fence and feel pressured to make a binding decision on what they want to do for a job NOW as opposed to giving themselves flexibility.

Sean M,

I'm not sure your assumptions are correct. Is the $40,000 due all at once, the moment the person leaves public interest work for private practice? Even if so, clerkship bonuses alone are currently at $50,000 for a one-year clerkship and $70,000 for a two-year in the Biglaw market, and assuming two or three years' seniority, the person would be starting out at around $180k/year or so; under those circumstances I wouldn't think that repaying the $40,000 would be impossible. Granted, this program might deter someone from transitioning from public service into a lower-paying private practice position, but I can't see how that relatively minor opportunity cost undermines the appeal of the program.

Notwithstanding the gender balance, this ought overall reduce the number of HLS grads going to large firms, and thereby the number of partners, managing partners etc. over the long term. Which would, again, over the very long term, reduce support for, and the prestige of, HLS. But boy, is that a small marginal difference and a long, long term.

Now, in the short run, does this benefit HLS by making it more attractive to candidates who might have seen it as a one-way ticket to scrivening subprime CDO prospectuses? I'd expect they considered this before announcing the program.

So what is the problem?

I am reading these numbers and thinking to myself: Is BigLaw insane? I have spent my entire career in public law and while the BigLaw money is nice, I actually have a life that does not revolve around 2200 billable hours a year--in fact I don't bill hours at all and actually have weekends, holidays, and even evenings off.

Frankly, though, I wonder whether many law students are well-situated to make this decision the summer after 2L. Unless I were very sure that I wanted to go into PI, I would not want to narrow my possibilities so decisively.

Maybe eliminating indecisive students is a feature of the plan rather than a bug. Instead of just rewarding whoever ends up in public service with loan repayment, they are actually seeking out those that will commit to doing public service work in advance.

A reality check for those wondering about the market for new HLS grads:

1. New HLS 3rd year public interest tuition forgiveness program = 5-10 extra grads per year going into "public service."

2. Massive layoffs on Wall St beginning, umm, right about now = 100-200 extra grads per year going into "public service."

Advice to a lot of you bottom 50%ers finishing up your second year: sign up now! You'll look altruistic! I gave up the big bucks because I really, really wanted to defend against frivolous prisoner lawsuits in the DOJ Civil Division!

Wait till your Wall St firm doesn't make you the offer after your summer associateship and you'll just look like a plain old loser!!

[Believe me, I've seen this before. You kids are too young to remember what a recession is.]

This looks like a way to get more HLS grads into public service jobs. But it doesn't actually create any more public service jobs, so this means the students who currently get them would lose out.

Do we really want Harvard grads to be first in line in even more places? I certainly don't. Sticking them all in New York strikes me as a plus -- then I don't have to worry about them.

Sigh, one would think that what would matter is how likely people are to get to do what they want but for some reason people seem unable to grasp this topic except at the level of group statistics.

For instance consider the common complaints over female representation in math and sciences. Despite a few retrogade implications of discrimination it seems quite clear that this effect is primarily the result of subtle social factors not overt discrimination or disparagement (not to say there aren't some incidents). In other words women are underrepresented in math and science because they are somehow induced (socially conditioned/innate/whatever) to be less interested in these areas. But if women are actually doing what makes them happy whatever the cause that wouldn't constitute any gender imbalance that deserves to be fixed.

Of course it is a complex tough problem to answer whether in fact women are being triked into doing things that make them less happy (or maybe men are) but if people can't get over the straight up percentages how can we even effectively ask this question. Unfortunately people have a great deal of trouble disentangling the question of what they find impressive as a career and what it is a good idea for people to do. Grad school may be impressive but it's far from clear it makes most people who take that option happier overall.

----

Ultimately when you get to the sort of subtle feedback between someone's personality and society we see in things like women and math/science the notion of gender fairness/equity/discrimination simply aren't well defined. These terms presuppose a fixed actor whose desires are either thwarted or aided but when those desires themselves are subtly shifted by society the concepts just don't make sense.

Yet more evidence that the real focus should be on what yields the most utility. Unnecessary barriers of any kind create suffering for no reason. No need to muck with all this complexity.

The HLS policy is essentially a tax on those who choose not to go into the public sector, i.e., those who pay full freight.

Generally speaking, most people would rather go into the public sector than to Wall Street. The job satisfaction level is the same. The work environment is much better (generally you don't get berated by your superiors). The hours are better. You don't need to worry about fees. You get better work, faster.

For those who want to raise their children (as opposed to having a nanny do it), public law is a very good choice.

On the other hand, you don't make over $100,000 to start. And you don't have the great perks.

So, if someone were to offer a 33% reduction of tuition fees, yes, I think it would be an incentive.

I have always viewed large law firms as subsidizing their new attorneys' law school. They pay a significant amount of money for summer associates and start their associates at salaries that make paying $120,000 in loans palatable. Perhaps they should also pay some of the freight for those who want to go in the public sector.

There is another benefit. Those from the top of the class who go into public sector work open slots at high paying jobs for those slightly lower in the class.

This makes me laugh because in law school so many people talked about being community lawyers, lawyers for the poor, etc, but in the end they comepted and worried about getting a job at the top firms and could not give a damn about "public service."

If there are less women as partners because they choose public interest work, my thought is, "so what?" That's the problem with the diversity whores, the numbers are everything and the reality means nothing. I think the world will be OK if some women who could have been partners at top firms instead choose to do good work for others, but that's just me.

I'd be curious to know how many lateral hires at large firms come from public agencies.

Maybe NALP collects this data. I can offer anecdotes, though.

In reading hundreds of biglaw attorneys' profiles as interview prep, the only people I found with PI experience were a very few former AUSAs (now doing white-collar defense), regulators (now working on the industry side), and politicians/state-court judges (whose term in office was clearly mid-career and certainly helped them amass a good book of business). I also found a couple people who had spent time as legislative aides, although I think that was before graduating law school.

I did not find anyone at all with a legal aid, PD, or state prosecutor line. No one listed anything at all that involved saving children, protecting consumers, or helping indigent defendants.

I concluded that, at least in the markets I canvassed, there is simply no way to move from the PI track to the firm track, with a narrow exception for those who do a brief stint in certain government activities.

The idea that doing public interest work makes it impossible to make partner at a big law firm is ludicrous. In fact, I remember one litigation partner telling me that he'd been ordered to accept a particular public interest opportunity (in his 7th year!) if he wanted to make partner. Admittedly, that defintion of public interest includes working for the government but I think that's a totally reasonable definition of public interest.

If a lawyer wants to work at Habitat for Humanity and then switch to a big law firm and make partner, it can be done. The person just cannot expect to get full credit for the years at Habitat because their legal training to date has very little applicability to the work they will be doing. Also, before getting hired, the applicant might have to allay some concerns as to whether he or she is temperamentally unsuited to big firm work.

I think everyone on this Board who is currently at a "Big Firm" or (like me) used to work at one of those firms, will agree that working at such firms ages you in dog years. Getting even three years of credit for 5 spent in the public sector is a good trade.

As for "Partner's" statement about big books of business being a requisite for partnership, I think there's a huge amount of truth to that but not at the decision point of most 8th years. No one can have real pull as a partner without their own book of business but almost no associate being considered for partner has a portable book of business yet. Associates generally do not bring in de novo business to fancy NY firms and the partners for whom they work generally keep the client relationships. At best, associates can work well enough with their clients that those clients grow to like working with them. For senior associates, those relationships can become good enough that clients will go with them for some matters if they leave the Firm but it's pretty damn rare for junior associates (1-4 years) to be forming even that kind of relationship. Moreover, at the partnership meeting, the billing partner for that client will NEVER admit that an associate has that kind of relationship with HIS client. As for it being a tournament at which you must compete for many years, the partners I know don't give a damn. They want to know at the moment of deciding partnership whether someone has what they think it takes to be a partner. They don't bother to learn the names of the junior associates because they disappear too quickly. They do, however, know the names of all the senior associates in their department and have a pretty good idea of which ones they will consider for partnership after working with them once or twice. For example, if you're a litigator and work a major trial with a partner, he or she will have a very settled opinion of your potential to be partner by the end of that trial. It won't matter at that point whether you spent the first years of your career at the UN or spent them at the firm.

More importantly says;

I give up half a decade of real money, to work a miserable job with no support staff, no objective community value

Something tells me that if you see no objective community value in Public Interest law, you are not the kind of person who should be going into public interest law.

And does anyone else think Personal Injury when they see PI law?

In response to TerrencePhillip and Rab01,

I agree that the very small group of "public interest lawyers" who can switch to big firms and make partners includes outstanding AUSAs (as I originally said) and outstanding lawyers at very important governement agencies (e.g., DOJ, SEC, EPA). Notice that this is a new and greatly expanded definition of the term "public interest lawyer," but the key is that we agree on the facts.

Rather than continue with merely contradicting others, I will retire from this itneresting debate with one last, "it is extremely rare for people to move from the traditional public interest slots into partnership track at 'fancy NYC firms' and other leveraged elite firms."

Oh, there are probably some lawyers who would be better suited to other professions, but there are plenty of perfectly good ones who aren't in the top of the class at Harvard. They may be better practitioners than academics, they may have family ties to a particular geographic area, or they may have chosen state schools for economic reasons. A bunch of carpetbaggers from Cambridge may not be particularly welcome in their midst, especially if the Harvard kids lack community ties and behave as if public interest is a career move rather than a real commitment.