The Rationality of Law Students' Career Choices

Two of the major problems confronting the legal profession today are increasing rates of job dissatisfaction and the persistent problem of encouraging lawyers to work in public interest settings. These two problems are actually connected in an important way. Researchers have found that lawyers earning the highest salaries, typically in large law firms, are also the most dissatisfied with their profession, while lawyers working for government agencies, public interest organizations, and educational institutions are among the most satisfied. In other words, encouraging more law students to enter public service law could address both the problem of unhappiness in the profession and the underrepresentation of disadvantaged people with legal needs. Indeed, by reconnecting the legal profession with the notion of service to society, a professional ethic that seems to have disappeared in recent decades, we may be able to improve the profession more broadly for its own sake and for the positive impact it can and should have on society at large. In this essay, I examine why and how so many law students who have no intention of working at a firm or are interested in public interest as they begin law school end up accepting offers from large firms upon graduation. To address this paradox, we must understand the logical processes law students use in making their career decisions, and how these process may be flawed or biased. Recent findings in behavioral economics, which show the limits of rationality, shed light on this question. In particular, behavioral economics shows us that people have bounded willpower, bounded rationality and bounded self-interest, which all serve to encourage behavior which is not strictly self-interest maximizing, as that concept is understood in traditional economics. In this article, I argue that law students have shown bounded willpower, bounded rationality and bounded self-interest in this context. I divide this essay into three parts. In the first part, I address this question by looking at the bounded willpower, bounded rationality, and bounded self-interest of law school students. In the second part, I look at the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of different ways law schools have responded to the limited rationality shown by students, in particular public interest requirements and loan forgiveness plans. In the final part, I make suggestions for ways of addressing this issue, in light of the lessons learned from the first two parts. Winter 2006 Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest Two of the major problems confronting the legal profession today are increasing rates of job dissatisfaction and the persistent problem of encouraging lawyers to work in public interest settings. The high reported rates of job dissatisfaction in the legal profession, the high attrition rates at major firms, and the large numbers of attorneys who "drop out" of the profession altogether have been the subject of much concern and criticism for several years now.1 Unhappy lawyers are less effective for their clients, discourage the best students from entering the profession, and diminish the profession generally. A second problem is the unmet legal needs of poor and disadvantaged members of society. Despite the efforts of many public and private attorneys, disadvantaged clients do not receive nearly enough legal representation as they need.2 These two problems are actually connected in an important way. Researchers have found that lawyers earning the highest salaries, typically in large law firms, are also the most dissatisfied with their profession, while lawyers working for government agencies, public interest organizations, and educational institutions are among the most satisfied.3 In other words, encouraging more law students to enter public service law could address both the problem of unhappiness in the profession and the under-representation of disadvantaged people with legal needs. Indeed, by reconnecting the legal profession with the notion of service to society, a professional ethic that seems to have disappeared in recent decades, we 1 See John Heinz et al., Lawyers and their Discontents: Findings from a Survey of the Chicago Bar, 74 IND. L.J. 735 (1999); Patrick Schiltz, On Being Happy, Healthy and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy and Unethical Profession, 52 VAND. L. REV. 871 (1999); Michael Goldhaber, Is the Promised Land Heaven or Hell?, NAT'L L.J., July 5, 1999, at A17. 2 Legal Needs and Civil Justice: A Survey ofAmericansMajor Findings of the Comprehensive Legal Needs Study, A.B.A. (1994) (study found that the combined efforts of the private bar, individual lawyers and publicly funded legal services programs can serve only a small portionabout 20 percentof the civil legal needs reported by low-income households). 3 Ken Dau-Schmidt and Kaushik Mukhopadhaya, "The Fruits of Our Labors: An Empirical Study of the Distribution of Income and Job Satisfaction Over the Legal Profession", 49 J. of Legal Edu. 342 (1999).