Letters to a Young Lawer Read online

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  letters to a young lawyer

  South Africa or in the Jim Crow South did not deserve

  respect. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore should be followed — that’s what it means to live under

  the rule of law. But it should not be respected, any more than the robed cheaters who wrote it should be respected. American law today sometimes deserves re-

  spect, other times it deserves condemnation. It must al-

  ways be obeyed, but it need not be admired. Honesty is

  more important than respect.

  If you don’t love the law, what should you love (aside

  from loved ones)? Love liberty. Love justice. Love the good that law can produce. Aspirations don’t disappoint,

  so long as you realize that the struggle for liberty, justice and anything else worth pursuing never stays won.

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  D o n ’ t H a v e D e a t h b e d R e g r e t s

  We’ve all heard the cliché that “nobody on their death

  bed ever regretted not having spent more time at the of-

  fice.” Sure! If you achieved a high degree of professional and financial success during your lifetime. But the reality is that there are many people who should regret not having spent more time at work. These are the people who

  failed to achieve their potential because of laziness or

  misplaced priorities. We rarely hear their deathbed regrets: “Damn, I should have spent more time working

  and less time with my ungrateful kids and the wife who

  left me for a more successful guy.”

  The reality is that the frustration growing out of fail-

  ure to meet your professional goals may well hurt your

  family and personal life. At least for some, there is a direct relationship between professional success and family happiness. This is not to deny that many successful people

  spend far too much time making more and more money

  and far too little time enjoying it with their family.

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  Alan Dershowitz

  Striking an appropriate balance between professional

  and family life is one of the most difficult challenges

  faced by professionals. Nor is there any one correct bal-

  ance for everyone. Each individual must decide on the

  priorities appropriate for him or her.

  “To everything there is a season,” as Ecclesiastes

  wrote, and priorities may differ over time. When aspir-

  ing for partnership, it may be wise to spend more time in the office — perhaps even to postpone becoming a parent, or to shift primary child-rearing responsibilities to the spouse who is not in the rat race for partnership. For some couples, gender may be a factor, while for others

  the choice of priorities may be gender-neutral.

  I have observed a generation-skipping phenomenon

  among some of my friends and students. First-generation

  lawyers — especially those whose parents were working-

  class immigrants with little formal education — tended

  to choose hard work and professional success over

  hands-on involvement in child rearing. The children of

  such highly motivated and successful professionals often

  tend to choose the opposite priorities, because they

  were both the victims and the beneficiaries of their par-

  ents’ — most often their fathers’ — priorities: They

  were victims of less hands-on parental involvement in

  their own upbringing, and they were beneficiaries of the

  financial security achieved by their parents’ hard work.

  They want to avoid victimizing their own children in

  the way they believe their own parents — in their drive

  for success — victimized them. They, themselves, need

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  and value financial success less, because their parents

  have provided them with the kind of safety net whose

  absence made their parents work so hard.

  These generational dynamics obviously differ among

  families, but every family has its own action-reaction

  phenomenon. The point is that the decision about prior-

  ities will be influenced by many factors, some conscious

  and some unconscious. But it should be a decision! All too often priorities are not explicitly chosen, they just seem to happen. And only years later —hopefully well before

  the clichéd deathbed regret scene — do we come to real-

  ize the choices made, the priorities chosen, the road

  taken. By then it is often too late to return to the illusory fork in the road and to explore the one not taken.

  Yet, to some extent we all obsess about that mysteri-

  ous road. That is why Frost’s poem continues to have

  such a hold over our imagination. The road not taken al-

  most always seems more inviting — perhaps because its

  bumps are not as palpable as those on the road we took.

  For some the obsession becomes debilitating — that’s all

  they think about. I have a close family member who stays

  awake at night wondering how different her life would

  have been if only. . . . She realizes it is a waste of emo-tional energy, but she can’t help it. The reality, of course, is that there are few well-marked forks on the actual

  road of life. They only appear as forks after it is too late to return to them. The important forks are those that remain before us. And we must learn to recognize them

  based on our experience in missing the earlier ones.

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  Alan Dershowitz

  One clue is to understand the difference between a

  genuine fork in the road and a temporary shift in prior-

  ities. Every decision has consequences and few are en-

  tirely reversible, but there is a considerable difference between those kinds of decisions that lead to a point of

  no return and those that simply slow down progress to-

  ward one goal in the interest of another. An example of

  the former would be leaving a large law firm while well

  along the partnership track in order to go to Holly-

  wood and write scripts. Even David Kelley — the most

  successful law scriptwriter of the age —could not now

  return to the partnership track of most major institu-

  tional law firms. An example of the latter would be to

  take a leave from a big firm to accept a position in gov-

  ernment — or perhaps to help raise a child.

  The Greek philosophers extolled the life of balance.

  Two and a half millennia later, we still have not devised the perfect formula for achieving it. That is so because

  the formula is different for each individual, and because none of us has been given the gift of perfect insight into our own life and foresight as to the priorities that will maximize its fulfillment. Life is an adventure, with no

  preordained course. We will all make mistakes, do things

  and fail to do things we regret. The best we can hope for is to learn from our experiences and not to obsess over

  our bad choices. There are no do-overs in life, but you

  do generally get more than one strike. So think about

  your likely deathbed regrets well before that fateful day, and do something to avoid them.

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  D o n ’ t F o l l o w

  “ O f f - t h e - R a c k ” A d v i c e

  Start your own firm. Work your way up to partner in a

  big firm. Join a small boutique. Be a government lawyer.

  Do public interest work. Run for Congress. Write Hol-

  lywood screenplays. Go into business. Write for a news-

  paper. Become an investment banker.

  I’m sure you’ve been given most, if not all, of the above advice. I know professors and other lawyers who give the

  same “off-the-rack” standard advice to everyone who

  asks — and even some who don’t. But as I’ve said, advice, if it’s to be useful, has to be tailor-fitted to each individual person. There are some young lawyers who are born

  to be big-firm partners. They have the temperaments

  and skills necessary to reach the top of the bureaucratic ladder. Others are solo practitioners by nature. They

  thrive on the independence of working alone, without

  supervision or hierarchy. Still others belong in govern-

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  Alan Dershowitz

  ment jobs. They need to wear the white hats and the flag

  on their lapels. Some must oppose the government, the

  corporation and all other authority figures. The great

  thing about law is that it is a job that fits almost every need. And if there isn’t an existing job, you can create it.

  That’s certainly what I’ve tried to do in my own life.

  But don’t accept advice that reflects the personalities

  and priorities of the advice givers, unless you want to be like them. Figure out which kind of situation best suits

  you as a unique individual with very particular needs and tastes. There is no career path that suits everyone. There is no one right way, though there certainly are some

  wrong ways. The worst way is to try to fit yourself into

  someone else’s job description. Live in your own skin,

  not someone else’s.

  It’s OK to do someone else’s job for a limited period

  of time as a means toward another end. Sure, go to work

  for a big firm in order to learn how they do things even

  if you know you’re not suited to that kind of life. But be sure to have an exit strategy and timetable, lest you be

  trapped by inertia, and by becoming dependent on the

  seductively huge salaries and staff support that are more typical of big firms than of most other forms of legal

  practice.

  Another good thing about a legal career is that you can

  try different things, either one at a time or sometimes

  even at the same time. Some of my former students have

  tried the big firm, government, the corporation, the

  small firm and politics — all within the sphere of a

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  decade. Others have written novels or screenplays

  while working at a firm. You don’t want to develop a

  reputation as a dilettante, but the line between a “dilettante” and a “renaissance person” may be in the eye of

  the beholder.

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  D o n ’ t L i m i t Y o u r O p t i o n s b y

  M a k i n g a L o t o f M o n e y

  There is a disturbing phenomenon that I have observed

  over the years among friends and former students. All

  their lives they aspire toward a particular dream job, say a judgeship or a professorship or a job as a top prosecutor. In the meantime, they go to work in a law firm,

  achieving partnership and a high salary.

  Now, finally, they are offered their dream job. But

  they feel that they now have to decline it because they

  “can’t afford” the salary cut. Ten years earlier, when they were making much less money, they could have afforded

  their dream job and they would have taken it immedi-

  ately if it had been offered. Had they accepted the job

  then, they would now have less money in the bank. Now they have more money in the bank, but they can’t afford to fulfill their life’s dream, because they have become ac-customed to a high standard of living.

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  Alan Dershowitz

  If wealth is measured, at least in part, by one’s ability to afford certain desirable objects, then the irony is that my friends who turned down judgeships or other dream

  jobs were richer when they had less money and poorer

  when they had more.

  It is crazy to let wealth stand in the way of your

  dreams. Of course, economists talk about “opportunity

  costs” and in that sense, it “costs” more to accept a

  $150,000-a-year judgeship when you’re earning

  $500,000 than it was when you were earning $175,000.

  But even back then — when you would have taken the

  judgeship — you would have been foregoing the oppor-

  tunity to earn the $500,000 you are now making. So

  then from a purely economic perspective you are better

  off today accepting the judgeship after having earned a lot more money in the intervening years. The difference

  is largely psychological or lifestyle. Now that you have

  gotten used to the $500,000-a-year lifestyle, it’s a lot

  harder to go back to $150,000 (plus the income from

  what you’ve saved). Your dream job may look different

  now, because you’re older and more mature. That’s OK.

  But if it looks different only because of the money,

  there’s something wrong. And are you sure that you can

  really tell the difference?

  Unless you prefer your incrementally higher lifestyle

  over your dream job, don’t let your wealth make you

  unable to afford what you could have afforded when you

  were poorer. That’s just nuts!

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  This is part of the much larger question of why

  lawyers — at least elite big-firm lawyers — make so

  much money. I’m not begrudging them their phenome-

  nally high incomes — except in comparison with other

  professionals (like schoolteachers, nurses, psychologists, social workers) who do so much good and are paid so

  little. We live in a market-driven economy where supply

  and demand determine compensation. My focus here is

  not on the fairness of the system, but rather on its im-

  pact on career choices. Money distorts priorities. Don’t

  get me wrong. Money matters, and there’s nothing

  wrong with wanting to live a comfortable, even finan-

  cially independent life. But too many rich people I know

  end up living financially dependent lives. Their choices are too often determined by the need to make more and

  more money. I notice that in our vacation spot on

  Martha’s Vineyard, the wealthiest people tend to have

  the shortest vacations, because every day away from their work costs them more money than it costs the rest of us.

  When money enslaves rather than liberates, something

  is wrong.

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  D o n ’ t R i s k W h a t Y o u D o n ’ t

  H a v e E n o u g h o f t o G e t M o r e

  o f W h a t Y o u H a v e P l e n t y O f

  I was once asked if there was a common thread among

  the criminal defendants I have represented. Although

  each case is different and each client warrants individualized representation, I have discerned one thread that

  seems present in a great many of my cases — especially

  those involving the wealthy and the powerful. Each of

  these defendants has virtually unlimited quantities of

  some things, such as money, power or access to sex or

  power. They, like everyone else, also had limited quanti-

  ties of other things, such as life, health, duration of career, reputation, time with family, etc. They got into

  trouble by putting at risk what they had limited amounts

  of in order to increase the quantities of those things they had unlimited amounts of. Even if they were innocent of

  the crimes they were eventually convicted of, they came

  close enough to the line to provoke prosecution. A

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  wealthy, aging woman like Leona Helmsley had limited

  time with her dying husband and a limited life ex-

  pectancy; yet (according to the government’s evidence)

  she risked all that — and served several years in prison

  — to save a few dollars on taxes at a time when she was

  worth billions of dollars. The same could be said of

  many other of my wealthy clients. Mike Tyson had a

  limited number of years to earn money in the ring, but

  he placed those valuable and irreplaceable years at risk

  by going into a hotel room at 3 o’clock in the morning,

  alone with a woman he hardly knew, at a time in his life

  when women were falling all over themselves to have sex

  with him. (Some even wanted to have sex with him while he was in prison!)

  This phenomenon has certainly been true of many

  public figures, ranging from President Clinton to Hugh

  Grant to Congressman Condit.

  I’m certainly not suggesting that you engage in a

  Harvard Business School–type cost-benefit analysis over