Stop Obsessing About Credentials

What happened to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, what it says about the legal profession's extreme emphasis on proxies for success, and why it keeps lawyers unhappy

Happy Sunday my friends! I wanted to share some thoughts I had over the past week about credentials, why we, as lawyers, celebrate them so much, and how they keep us miserable.

It came to mind because earlier this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, was questioned about her LSAT score. Jackson has a lengthy track record of professional success, but even with that, someone still tried to undermine her record—in the real world—by bringing up her score on a standardized test from decades ago.¹

In addition to inspiring me to make a couple of dumb jokes on Twitter (see here and here) and a Tik Tok² (see here) it made me think.

---

Why do we, as a legal profession, celebrate proxies for success so much? Why do we give so much respect to signals and predictors of success, instead of the success itself? Examples of this are everywhere:

• Obsession with where someone attended law school (or their grades, or law review, or honors) many years after they’ve already graduated;

• Excessive focus on perceived prestige of a job or firm when deciding which employer to choose; or

• Bragging about number of hours billed vs. the outcome you achieved for your client

I realize that there are some good reasons underlying each of these examples. Like, maybe it’s difficult to measure success for a legal services engagement. How do you define a win when defending a lawsuit for a client?³ Absent a clear cut way to measure success, maybe you look at inputs and how much time was spent on the matter. And maybe the extreme focus on prestige has to do with how difficult it is to perceive quality in the legal industry, so you resort to signals and proxies, as a quick way to make a judgment about a particular opportunity, candidate, or school.