Summer Clerks: Assess Your Potential Employer's Ethical Fiber

Law students expect to learn many things about their prospective employers in a summer clerkship--quality of work, personality of the people, time commitment expectations, and financial rewards.  Students should also attempt to assess the ethical and moral fiber of the firm's lawyers.  Of course, a student's exposure to such information will be limited, but nevertheless, students should look for:  How lawyers in the firm react in a time of crisis?  How does the firm handle conflicts of interest?  How the firm addresses personal problems of individual lawyers or staff?  How do the lawyers react to adverse jury verdicts or judgments? 

Law firms develop a culture that informs the individual lawyer's approach to decisions.  Part of the decisionmaking process involves the ethical fiber of the lawyers.  Associates whose personal approach to lawyering differs significantly from the firm's approach often experience significant dissatisfaction.  If the lawyers are always pushing the rules to the edge, you may feel very uncomfortable with the pressure to follow this lead.  On the other hand, if your personal approach is more aggressive than the other lawyers in the firm, the lawyers may be asking you to leave because they do not share your ethical fiber.  Many lawyers downplay the role that ethics play in day-to-day lawyering.  But, many of my former students have changed employers because of an incompatibility with the firm's ethical fiber. 

Comments

[David McGowan]

John's point is well-taken. I would add that it is hard to get a good read on this question over a summer. Some lawyers with aggressive demeanors are quite conservative ethically, while some seemingly laid-back lawyers are ethically agressive. One suggestion is that if a firm has an ethics committee, or just a lawyer or lawyers designated to mediate ethical disputes within the firm, you might try to find out how the relevant people work.

In my experience, these tasks often fall to relatively junior partners with relatively little business (economically rational because their opportunity cost of paid work is lower than for nascent rainmakers). In many cases, that means the true tone is set by those with big books of business. Sometimes those people are ethical, other times they seem to staff ethics committees with people who will rationalize what they want to do.

If a summer associate can make friends with a lawyer at the firm who seems trustworthy, it might be helpful to ask if the lawyer has experience with the internal ethics function or knows of others who have had such experience. There is a big difference between getting help and being pushed.

[John Steele]

David:

I began teaching PR at Boalt in 97 so we must have briefly overlapped. I wanted to say that I am not sure that "relatively junior partners" with small books of business are the people who currently perform that function at most firms. There's been a huge rise of outright General Counsel positions at larger firms, and in other settings there are are senior and/or semi-retired partners who perform the function.

[David McGowan]

John--

You may be right that there is a trend toward more senior people. I should have been clearer that the important point, in my view, is whether these folks have a base of power (meaning business) within the firm, not their level of seniority or their titles as such. By way of analogy, my sense is that more than one firm has a managing partner with less real power, when push comes to shove, than other partners who have major clients, though I have no reason to believe that this is always the case.

From an associate's point of view, I would say that one should try to get a sense of whether the folks with economic clout back up the folks fulfilling the ethics function. If not, an associate can be faced either with an ethics attorney who might bend to more powerful partners or one who is willing to give correct advice but has no effective means of protecting the associate from intra-firm unhappiness.

[Brad Wendel]

I want to second David's observation that it makes a great deal of difference whether the ethics partner has any real power within the firm. When I was in practice (mid 90's), many firms used the position of ethics/loss prevention partner as a way to gracefully ease out senior, well liked partners who were no longer players within the firm -- because they weren't either making rain or billing hours. Associates have to be aware of the old distinction between law on the books and law in action. There are partners who have titles and there are partners who actually make things happen at the firm. (At some firms, the ethics partner does have real power, and those are firms whose ethical cultures are more likely to be good ones.) David is exactly right that if an associate gets crosswise with a partner on an ethics matter, it's essential to find support from another partner with real power, not just a title.

[David Hricik]

I've seen it in all varieties: old with no work, younger but with no clout, and so on. Even long ago it varied, and it varies more today.

I don't think you can, however, extrapolate as Brad does about the firm's ethical culture from who has that job. Too many reasons go into the selection of that person at that time for the choice to reflect the firm's view toward ethics, I think.

But in any and all matters of firm politics, you want the partners with the most windows on your side, and you want to see how they view the ethics partner, as David mentioned. If the corner office partners think of the ethics function as "interfering with new business," you know a lot more than you do, I think, than if you know the identity of the person who is the lead ethics person.

David