The line on the resume

And why the excessive focus on credentials extends beyond looking at where someone went to school

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Earlier this week I posted a dumb tweet that got a bunch of views unexpectedly on Twitter:

It was dumb because while the first sentence was serious, the rest of it was a silly reference to the newly released U.S. News law school rankings, where UCLA moved up to #14 to oust Georgetown from the notorious “top 14” set of law schools.

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Lots of people rushed in to challenge what I said. Some pointed out that this is only an issue among the “top 1%” of the profession. Others said it’s only a phenomenon among “big city” practices, and doesn’t happen in smaller cities. Interestingly, sources ranging from Biglaw partners to law students took issue with the tweet.

Fine! You are all right.

You’ve forced me to break character to explain my poorly delivered joke. True, school based elitism probably does only affect a small number of lawyers. Although I wonder—if it affects the supposed “top 1%” of the profession, how is it possible that that type of mentality doesn’t trickle into other parts of the legal world?

Anyways. The point I was trying to make is that obsession with credentials is one root cause of a lot of the challenges facing the profession. As I tried to explain in a couple of follow up tweets:

When the practice of law becomes tied to these signals of quality, ie. credentials—what impact do you think that has on competition to obtain those credentials? I know this firsthand, and shared some of my own experiences last year in an article titled Stop Obsessing About Credentials. The chase to obtain these credentials began way before I was in the “top 1%” but instead began when I decided to take the LSAT.

“Getting a 170 is the golden ticket,” they said. “Because you’ll be set for life.”

Chasing things that will set you up for life is the real problem

It’s a problem in many industries, but uniquely powerful in the law. Maybe it’s because we’re so focused on precedent, or maybe it’s because we can’t measure what kind of work product is actually good. Whatever it is—we all end up going after that line on the resume in the hopes that it will give us what we were chasing all along.

The Line Of The Resume extends beyond just schools or where you’ve worked, by the way. Sometimes it’s about previous settlements you’ve obtained. Years ago, for a brief moment, I was a plaintiffs’ class action lawyer, who saw how judges appointed lucrative “lead counsel” roles to established firms based on the size of previous settlements. A different type of credential, but a credential nonetheless. Now did handling large cases mean these firms were the best ones to represent the class? I am not sure.

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Placing such importance on credentials has some pretty far reaching implications. And not just when people kill themselves trying to collect them.

I'm talking about other, more subtle implications. Like how the competition doesn’t happen on a level playing field. There are shortcuts and hacks

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involved in getting ahead in the legal profession, and many of them aren’t available to outsiders. Meanwhile the insiders—mostly men of a certain background—lecture the rest of us about why the system is fair, and use their own personal stories to illustrate why that is.

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The implication being, if you’re unable to collect these Lines On The Resume—it’s your own goddamn fault. Because it means you’re just aren’t good enough.

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Latest News

• The New York Times published an article called AI Is Coming For Lawyers, Again that, while containing nothing objectionable, focused entirely on AI’s impact on law firm lawyers. There was just a single throwaway line about how everything said in the article applies to in-house lawyers too, because they all used to work at firms. Which makes no sense given that a big obstacle to adoption is the billable hour.

• On the other hand, here’s an in-house focused article about how the skills that will keep your job secure aren’t the ones that will help you move up. Especially in a world where work will be increasingly done by AI and contract attorneys.

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What do you think?

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1. An explanation of T14 from Wikipedia: There exists an informal category known as the "Top Fourteen" or "T14", which has historically referred to the fourteen institutions that regularly claim the top spots in the yearly U.S. News & World Report ranking of American law schools. Furthermore, the "T14" schools remain the only ones to have ever placed within the top ten spots in these rankings. Although "T14" is not a designation used by U.S. News itself, the term is "widely known in the legal community.”

2. For example, just because some lawyer obtained a $40M settlement for their client, doesn’t mean they necessarily did a great job. What if the case was worth $100M+ and that lawyer bungled it? Maybe the big settlements are more about the lawyer’s ability to source cases than the ability to litigate them.

3. Also called “career breaks” or “unexpected opportunities.”

4. I’m not quite ready to write about this in depth just yet but last week I tried to articulate what drives me to create content online. In short, I do it for the outsiders, not the insiders.