Law students think big firms are indistinguishable. Long hours, dull work, ungrateful partners, big paychecks. But real differences exist amongst these firms and, starting last year, students are finding out just how distinguishable they are.

 

We founded Building a Better Legal Profession to provide our fellow law students with an information clearinghouse about future employers. Rather than focusing on the most talked-about metrics – salary and prestige – we wanted to provide data on the quality-of-life issues that are increasingly important to our generation: billable hour requirements, pro bono commitment, demographic diversity, and more.

 

We’d seen plenty of glossy brochures and attended plenty of firm-sponsored dinners that touted a firm’s workplace environment. We wanted hard data. There wasn’t much out there, so started our own website and gathered as much publicly available information as we could find. We went live in October 2007 and attracted 100,000 visitors in our first month. Our results, as the New York Times has said, “shook up the legal world.”

 

We’ve already received scores of e-mails from students who appreciate our work with http://www.betterlegalprofession.org. Consider three scenarios:  

Forget the glossy brochures. Building a Better Legal Profession provides students with the data they need to make their employment decisions. As The New Republic put it, our site is “perfect information for law students.”

 

What’s best, though, is that your decision to work at a progressive or family-friendly firm can help change the way the legal market operates. If enough students start considering firms based on the number of hours they’ll work rather than just the amount they’ll make a year, then employers will have to reform their practices. There are a lot more top firms than there are top students – the 250 largest law firms alone hired 10,000 new associates in 2007, a full one-quarter of all the students graduating from American law schools last year – and we can afford to be choosy.

 

We can use our collective market power to show firms that we care about a lot more than prestige and salary. We can demand change, and we can create a workplace where we are valued, respected, and satisfied. We can show that, for us, the law isn’t just a business; it’s a profession. And that we want to help make it better. We hope you’ll join us.