You Have to Start Somewhere
Why starting at the bottom is hard but is also an important step in your legal career.
In every profession, you start at the beginning (or less charitably at the bottom). Professional chefs start as line cooks. Professional airline pilots start as first officers. Professional doctors start as residents. Professional actors as extras or understudies.
But for some reason law students and junior lawyers assume that when they start in their first law firm job as a summer associate or first year, they are going to be doing all of the things. After all, they think, I finished a year (or more) of law school. I am ready to go.
But that is not how it works.
Like any profession, your formal education is the first step, not the last step. This is not Suits. You don’t get to take a deposition, argue a motion, or draft a brief on your first day. Those are all tasks you need to work up to. And for good reason. Even if law is no longer taught through apprenticeships, it remains the case the best way to learn how to do something (and more importantly, how to do something well) is through experience. Sometimes that experience will come from paying clients in the most interesting and cutting edge cases, but far more often it will come by supporting someone who has had experience so you can “watch and learn.”
But this can be frustrating. I know. I remember coming back to my law firm after three years of law school, one year of on-the-job experience, and two federal clerkships and being asked to complete tasks like putting together a fact timeline from a set of documents and preparing routine discovery responses. I remember thinking: I can do so much more than this—put me in coach!
In retrospect though I may have had great experience, I just did not have a lot of experience on the specific tasks that more senior folks were in charge of. It was only by working my way up that I was progressively given more responsibility—and when it happened I kind of pined to be back at the beginning to learn more. This process helped me gain the trust of my supervisors and my clients but also gave me low stakes reps so I was ready for higher stakes ones. It also helped me see the big picture and what could go wrong.
As a summer associate this is particularly hard because your job is term limited and you are, by definition, at the bottom. My suggestion is to take solace in the lower stakes more routine tasks and watch and take in everything you can about the higher stakes tasks that you are able to support.
The best lawyers I know built their skill not in the spotlight, but in the shadows—by showing up, staying patient, and being relentlessly curious about how the work gets done. Do that, and when your moment comes, you won’t just be ready. You’ll shine.
Keep standing out,
Jonah
