To BigLaw or Not To BigLaw Forum

[Anonymous User]

1. BigLaw --> Public Interest is... not really a done deal. I'm deeply skeptical of the notion that it is. As a 30-year veteran DA put it to me, an ex-biglaw associate has zero relevant lawyer skills to a public interest attorney's job, period. Even 'litigation' in biglaw is...just...not litigation. So there's no advantage in skill set relative to a fresh LS graduate. In fact, it can even be an impediment, both for lifestyle habits/perceived salary frustrations as well as obviously looking like you're not committed to the cause (more on that last one in a bit).

I don't want to go as far as saying that BigLaw --> PI is a "done deal," but I think the above overstates the difficulty of the transition. Yes, as others ITT have pointed out, it's hard to go from BIgLaw --> PD office (BigLaw --> prosecutor far more common). But PD isn't the entirety of PI.

Yes, I'm the anon above who was talking about the potential benefits of biglaw and I should have specifically noted that PD seems completely different to me and I would assume biglaw won't help for that. For me, public defender would be low on the list of PI jobs I would take to have significant, positive impact on society. I'm grateful for people that do it though and that opinion of mine may well be completely wrong.

My goal doing pro bono in biglaw is always to handle cases that normal nonprofits (and typically other private attorneys) can't and to ideally do so in a way that creates precedent or continuing influence beyond the individual client (which can include building a base of knowledge in my firm and/or city). I'm not talking about like the housing cases referred to above. Anyone can do that, you just need *an* attorney.

Anon initially quoted here.
Fair nuff. I’d just note that the advice I got for points one and two were from a career DA who had no love lost for PD work; there’s a universality to those maxims.

It sounds like what you want to do is impact lot. For what it’s worth, every single impact lit attorney I’ve met either started as straight PI or went PD —> ACLU or whatever organization you want to fund your impact lit. In law school, one of the former heads of the ACLU straight up declared “we do not hire anyone with corporate law on their resume.” Whether he was being dramatic or not, your dice to roll. I do think ultimately it’s still worth sampling various positions to determine what you want to do with your life, but if the only kind of PI you really really want to do is impact lit instead of DA/PD...all signs I have suggest you should tread really, really carefully.

Biglaw to ACLU doesn't seem to be that rare. I found three people in literally three minutes of searching.

Venable to ACLU Corporate Counsel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-rohlfing-85949260)
Started at Munger Tolles, now ACLU Corporate Counsel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/connie-chiang-41214614)
Started at Ropes and Gray, now ACLU Associate Corporate Counsel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/candace-brown-501844b1)

[Anonymous User]

Those three are all corporate counsel, though, which isn’t quite the same as the classic ACLU position - they’re more like in house for the ACLU as an entity. Obviously still more of an impact on PI than biglaw, but not the same kind of work that people generally think of when they hear ACLU (that is, they’re not the ones out there suing on behalf of prisoners and so on).

I guess that’s the other thing I find weird about this - I get wanting to make an impact in your work, but I would think another factor here is going to be the kind of work you do. Giving biglaw money will certainly have an impact but if you want to feel like your work as a lawyer is actually doing good in society (or however the OP is defining this), giving money isn’t going to feel at all the same as actually doing PI legal work.