Consider this gripe from “Francine”: “$165,000 is just not as much as you think. Take out $70,000 for taxes. That’s $95,000. Then there’s a broker’s fee ($2,500), rent ($1,200 a month), food ($200 a week), clothes ($2,000 a year, say) …” You get the idea.

Or this challenge from “Ivan the Terrible”: “I’d like to hear from at least one ‘genuinely’ happy corporate attorney out there—and please don’t give me that bullshit that you feed those 2L summer interns. I am not impressed by horseshit like ‘Uh, I’ve worked [made photocopies] on several billion-dollar deals’—whoopee.”

Obviously, people, our profession sucks the big one.

Or not.

The fact is, these young men and women are making more money in a year than millions of people around the world earn in their lifetime. And frankly, there’s not a lot of heavy lifting required. Sure, the hours are long and the partners are demanding, but what do young associates expect for these salaries? If they can’t take that kind of pressure in their twenties, how are they going to deal with the increasing responsibilities of partnership? This is, after all, a period of testing and learning. No one should expect to be coddled.

To be honest, the whining doesn’t really surprise me, since it often begins in law school. Many students who beat out heavy competition to make it to places like Harvard demand an end to competition and grading as soon as they arrive. They don’t like the Socratic method because it puts them on the spot. They demand speech codes to protect them from “offensive” comments. They want to be treated as adults when it comes to salaries but like children when it comes to the rough-and-tumble of the real world.

Sorry, but if you can’t take the heat, pick a different profession. If you want to be among the highest-paid professionals in the world, you’ll have to work for it. If Harvard is too competitive for you, choose a less competitive law school. If the hours at Cravath are too long, go to a firm that pays half as much and gives you more time off. Nobody is forcing anyone to aspire to the top rungs of one of the most-compensated professions, but if you do, you have no right to bring down the standards.

There are plenty of other options. Do public interest work. Defend capital cases. Work on environmental cases. These jobs, too, require hard work, but they may be more gratifying. They certainly don’t pay as well, but big money comes with a price tag—hard work and long hours. You are in control of your own destiny. Stop griping and start choosing. Here’s another idea: Open your own firm, either alone or with a friend or two. It won’t be easy, but at least you can decide how hard you want to work. Be sure to leave your previous job on good terms; the firm may refer cases to you if the matters are too small or if it has a conflict. You’ll have nobody to whine about, but if you get really successful, maybe you’ll be able to hire associates who can whine about you.

Young associates used to have the excuse that they were victims of a bait and switch. There was an old joke about the Devil offering a third-year law student a free look at hell. The student sees happy people eating well and having fun, so he becomes a sinner. When he dies and goes to hell permanently, it’s a very different place with fire and misery. He complains to the Devil, reminding him of what he’d previously been shown. The Devil replies, “That was our summer associate program.” But today—thanks to Greedy Associates and other information sources—no one has the right to claim surprise. You know what awaits you at the big firms, and you have chosen that path. So stop complaining. Either do your job or change jobs. There’s nothing attractive about a whining rich kid.

One day Myers might be keeping demonstrators at the mayor’s house out of jail. Another he’s negotiating down a vendor fee by more than $100,000—money that then goes straight to patient care. The next day he’s helping to set up and find counsel for a new health-care center in Durban, South Africa, where President Thabo Mbeki is questioning whether AIDS—a national epidemic—is even solely caused by a virus.

The 36-year-old Myers started down the public interest path in 1989 as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1994, Myers signed on with McKenna & Cuneo in Los Angeles to practice labor and employment law. He still cared about public interest work, but like a lot of law students, he decided to get some big-firm experience first.

As a newly minted associate, Myers worked the standard 10 to 12 hours a day, doing a fair amount of litigation and a lot of discovery. He liked the work, but he couldn’t stomach the business end: “Trying to reduce my life to six-minute blocks killed me,” he says. In 1997, Myers went with his department when it broke off from McKenna to become Curiale, Dellaverson, Hirschfeld, Kelly & Kraemer. About a year and a half later, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Curiale client, decided to hire its own counsel. Myers, who’d since moved on to Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, went for the job and got it.

The $54 million, 400-plus-employee nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation is dedicated to providing medical and other services regardless of a client’s ability to pay (funding comes mainly from government sources). The foundation operates 12 health-care centers throughout the United States as well as an AIDS hospice, a managed-care program, and 16 thrift shops in Los Angeles County.

As a department of one, Myers handles the gamut of legal issues, from helping to set up clinics to dealing with employment issues to wrangling with government agencies over funding. When a legal curveball comes at him, he has to figure it out for himself. “I like to take things from start to finish on my own,” he says.

Working for a nonprofit may mean forgoing the beach house in Malibu or weekly dinners at Dan Tana’s. “But you have to decide how much is enough,” says Myers. “I make six figures. I ought to be able to do what I want to on $100K a year.”

What makes the job worthwhile, though, is making a difference. Take the Durban clinic. “If we’re successful in Durban, we’ll show other developing countries that they, too, can do this,” says Myers. “Efforts like that combat the disease. It’s hard to think of work that’s more important.”

Resumé

• General Counsel, AIDS Healthcare Foundation
  Los Angeles, 1998—present
• Associate, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp
  Los Angeles, 1998
• Associate, Curiale, Dellaverson, Hirschfeld, Kelly & Kraemer
  Los Angeles, 1997–’98
• Associate, McKenna & Cuneo
  Los Angeles, 1994–’97
• Harvard Law School 1994
• Paralegal, Legal Aid Society of New York 1989

Raise Your Hand
It still happens. I see it every fall. Intelligent, confident women walk into law school classrooms and their desire to speak instantly evaporates. Law school is scary … we’ve been conditioned not to … Yes, there are reasons. Overcome them. Raise your hand. Women ask brilliant questions after class all the time. Ask them in class. Someday (soon) you’ll have to present your ideas in the boardroom or the courtroom, where it matters. Hell, this is just law school. Speak up now.

Raise Your Sights
You get your first set of grades, and they’re so-so (most people’s are, which explains the concept of the median). Your classmates start landing sweet firm jobs. Who needs it? you ask yourself. Who wants it? I don’t plan to go on the partner track; at some point, I’ll probably have kids and work part-time. Don’t settle. Almost 25 years after the fact, I’m still introduced as the first female president of the Harvard Law Review. Go out for law review. Or moot court. Or work for a professor. Think well of yourself. Every time the law review deal gets mentioned, I’m proud of it. No matter how hard I work for the rest of my life, no matter what I do or don’t accomplish, I’ll always have that. There’s time to settle later. Do your best now.

Run in Packs
Real differences exist in the way women are treated in law school. The best way to understand them—and to figure out how to deal with them—is to get together with other women and talk about them. When I was in school, our women’s support group cleverly named itself the Women’s Support Group, and we met at the bar where I worked in Somerville. Sometimes we talked about gender bias at school and how to overcome it; sometimes we talked about our career goals and how we might achieve them; sometimes we talked politics; sometimes we just drank. Whatever we did, we did it together, and through some magic—a magic you owe it to yourself to feel—it mattered. Here’s something else that matters: Most of you will be rich or powerful (or both) someday. The bonds you forge now will lead to opportunities down the road.

Change Something
It’s not a game of gotcha. You can always catch decent people doing and saying stupid things. That’s not the goal. When you think about what battles to fight, ask yourself, Will this bring about real change? Here’s a cause to consider: Push for more female professors at your school. Send a letter from your support group to the dean of faculty asking what’s being done to identify and hire the best female professors available. Then volunteer as a group to help in the search. Why bother? Because you’ll help a fellow woman. Because it’s good karma. Because women (and men) need female role models. Because women make up half of the population and half of the law students but just 30 percent of the law professors.

Go Easy on Yourself
Here’s the truth: I sat in the back row. For three years, I hardly ever raised my hand. I let my moot court partner—a man—speak for me. I changed a few things, but not many. So go easy on yourself when you find that you can’t follow this sage advice.

I couldn’t. Do what you can, and forgive yourself the rest. Maybe you’ll be the president of law review. Maybe you’ll be the first female nameplate partner at some major New York firm. You’ll definitely enjoy the next three years.

Today, our heroes have clay feet. It turns out that Clarence Darrow almost certainly bribed jurors (though he was a great trial lawyer). Thurgood Marshall was a mediocre courtroom lawyer (though a great legal strategist). Our current fictional legal antiheroes—as created by the likes of John Grisham—tend to be ethically challenged drunks, opportunists or sexual predators. And now we learn that a majority of our Supreme Court justices cheated in order to secure the presidential election for their candidate.

If you think that “cheat” is too strong a word, consider the following law school hypo: Imagine if, six months before the election case, 1,000 of the most prominent constitutional-law professors, Supreme Court litigators and journalists who cover the High Court had been given an approximation of the majority opinion in the Florida case. Only here’s the twist. The names of the litigants and their party affiliations were not provided. Suppose further that each of the experts had then been asked to rank the sitting justices on a scale of most likely to least likely to (1) grant a stay to stop the recounting and (2) permanently end the hand recount on the grounds that the “intent” of the voter was a standard so imprecise that it violated the equal protection clause.

Is there anyone who believes the experts would have predicted the votes of the five justices as they actually wound up voting? Please. To the contrary, most surely would have predicted that, on the basis of their prior decisions, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O’Connor would have been the least likely to join such a decision. After all, these judges have repeatedly ruled that the same equal protection clause is not violated when the state executes convicted murderers on the basis of far less precise standards. Had then–Vice President Al Gore been ahead by a few hundred votes and then–Governor George W. Bush been seeking a recount, I have no doubt these justices would have mocked any equal protection claim made by Gore.

If I am right—and you know I am—then what else could this be but cheating? To render judgment based on partisan politics—on the party affiliations of the litigants—is to violate the first rule of judging: Never decide a case on the basis of favoritism.

Okay, so now you believe that some justices cheat. You probably already suspected that some lower-court judges play favorites with lawyers and litigants who supported their election or appointment. But Supreme Court justices? That came as a surprise even to a lifelong cynic like me. What does this revelation do to your commitment to the rule of law? Does it give you a license to cheat?

My hope is that it redoubles your commitment to the rule of law and to total honesty in its practice. It should also make you more suspicious of all legal and judicial institutions. Trust no one in power, including—especially—judges. Don’t take judicial opinions at face value. Go back and read the transcript. Cite-check the cases. You will be amazed at how often you will find judges “finessing” the facts and the law. Too often, legal observers take as a given judges’ intellectual honesty. It’s up to you to do a better job. If you smell a rat, blow the whistle to the Judicial Conference, the American Bar Association, Congress. At the same time, protect yourself from accusations of unprofessional conduct by being absolutely sure of your criticism (never forget that judges and lawyers protect one another).

In the meantime, get real. Understand that judges are human beings and that in America most of them have gotten where they are by playing the partisan political game, and playing it well. The best check on the judiciary is a suspicious consumer.

It must start in law school. It must start with you.

1
Master the Facts
Think it’s a coincidence that Überlitigator David Boies so often comes out on top? It is not. Boies draws on his gajillion-watt memory to master reams of facts. And knowing the facts cold is one of the simplest, most powerful ways to win over a jury, says New Orleans attorney Russ Herman, former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. As soon as you’ve collected all the depositions, all the documents and all the other evidence, says Herman, hunker down and learn every detail of your case. As the trial unfolds, your command of the facts will send two key messages: (1) I care about the case enough to devote the proper time to understanding it and (2) I am a thorough, highly competent professional, so you can trust everything I say and do.

2
Dress … the Way You Dress
Conventional courtroom wisdom holds that lawyers should dress down. The thinking: Jurors are more sympathetic to those who seem similar to themselves. Fine, but don’t dress too down, says Malcolm Wheeler, a Denver-based defense attorney and an expert in jury decision making. “If you normally wear $3,000 suits and you put on something from Sears, you’ll subconsciously feel like a fraud,” says Wheeler. “And the last word you want a jury to tag you with is ‘fraud.’ ”

3
Start Smart
Many lawyers waste time introducing their colleagues or offering condescending primers on the legal process during opening arguments. Instead, says Wheeler, follow the rule they use in Hollywood: Set the tone in the first ninety seconds or the rest of the story will fail.

4
Now Restart
Limit presentations to twenty minutes or less, says Andrew Sheldon, president of the American Society of Trial Consultants. (Studies show that the average person has an attention span only about that long.) If you must stretch out part of your case, build “mini chapters” into your main story. The more fresh starts you weave in, the likelier jurors will be to remember what you say.

5
Anchor Away
Savvy lawyers employ a tactic that can cause a jury to doubt the veracity of the other side’s witnesses before they’re even called to the stand. Paul Lisnek, cofounder of the Chicago trial-consulting firm Decision Analysis, explains how it works: Early in the trial, an attorney begins “anchoring” himself in a certain spot in the room whenever he imparts negative information about his opponent’s case; when speaking favorably about his own client, he walks to a separate location. Then, while cross-examining opposing witnesses, he makes sure to stand in the “bad spot,” leading the jury to subconsciously question what they’re hearing.

6
Don’t Impel Experts to Eschew Obfuscation
Many lawyers think expert witnesses ought to use language jurors can actually understand. But a 1996 Princeton University study found that when it comes to highly credentialed authorities, clarity isn’t necessarily compelling. The research compared two testimonies given by the same doctor in front of several juries. In the first testimony, the M.D. described in simple language how a chemical had been known to cause “cancer of the liver”; later, he described that condition as “tumor induction” with “hepatomegaly, hepatomegalocytosis and lymphoid atrophy in both spleen and thymus.” The results: Jurors found the highfalutin phrasing more convincing.

7
Step Off
Movies and television shows often depict lawyers cozying up to the jury box, even leaning on the railing as they plead their cases. Fine for Bobby Donnell, bad for you, says Wheeler. Jurors, like everyone else, don’t like strangers invading their space. Wheeler suggests keeping at least a three-foot buffer between you and the jury box.

8
Promote Lying
Geoffrey Fieger, the brash litigator who made his name defending Dr. Jack Kevorkian, recommends this technique for turning jurors against a witness: During cross-examination, get the witness to tell a lie. Any lie. Fieger, for example, once had a television producer on the stand. The producer testified that he believed people typically don’t mind hearing sexual fantasies about themselves and their spouses (a point critical to his side’s main argument). Fieger then asked the producer if it would be okay with him if Fieger talked about tying up the producer’s wife and licking whipped cream off her breast. Trapped, the producer insisted that no, he wouldn’t mind. The message sent to jurors: This guy aims to deceive you.

9
Befriend the Bench
“There will always be one lawyer whom the judge wants to hear from first when there’s an objection or a question from the jury,” says Wheeler. “You want to be that lawyer.” Why? If the judge appears to favor you, the jury will likely follow his lead (research shows that people are heavily influenced by those in positions of authority). Trial consultant Lisnek actually attempts to mirror a judge’s seated posture in order to send the signal that he and the judge are simpatico. At the same time, he cautions against being too obvious. The jury regards the judge as their coach. You want to be seen as his star player, not some starry-eyed rookie.

10
Close With Care
Craft your closing argument thoroughly, but leave some room for improvisation. If you sense the jury is leaning against you, you may need to pound your argument harder. If the jurors seem sympathetic, however, it may be better to gently guide them to their own conclusions. Consider this example from Duke law professor Neil Vidmar. He tells of a plaintiff’s lawyer who decided not to ask the jury for a set amount of damages at the end of a personal-injury case. The jury came back with an award far larger than any he would have dared suggest. The point? The most persuasive attorneys don’t even have to ask for what they want.