By Steven Becker<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until I started at HLS that I realized plaintiffs’ law was kind of an unusual path. Granted, I came into law school with a pretty underdeveloped conception of the different legal careers that people pursued\u2014partly because I already knew about the path I wanted to go down, and that was enough for me. But from my near-layperson perspective, it seemed logical to assume that at least, I don\u2019t know, maybe a quarter of students would pursue careers in plaintiff-side civil litigation (\u201cAfter all,\u201d I thought innocently, \u201claw is, of course, one half criminal and one half civil, of which half is plaintiff and half is defense, right? So, naturally, 50% * 50% = 25%\u201d). It didn\u2019t take long for me to realize how wrong that was. It\u2019s taken longer to accept the bitter reality that, no, not only is plaintiff\u2019s law not a commonly pursued career path, but it\u2019s not even a commonly known<\/em> career path at a place like HLS. So what\u2019s responsible for this imbalance? Put simply: it\u2019s a matter of corporations defining \u201cprestige\u201d to meet their needs. After all, the concept of prestige is one that is almost by definition tied to the interests of the ruling class. It\u2019s not complicated: if those with money systematically<\/em> and universally<\/em> disfavor something, it\u2019s gonna be harder for that thing to gain status as prestigious. This is a problem for the plaintiff\u2019s bar for two reasons: first, there\u2019s nothing that influential corporations systematically and universally hate more than being sued; and second, there\u2019s nothing that elite law students love more than prestige. You can actually write it as a chain of causation: plaintiff\u2019s law \u21d2 bad for corporations \u21d2 not traditionally prestigious \u21d2 not favored by law students.<\/p>\n The way I see it, the key to making plaintiff\u2019s law as popular as it ought to be among law students is to break one of the links in that chain of cause and effect. But which one? Well, plaintiff\u2019s attorneys are never going to (and never ought<\/em> to) be liked by corporations; and students at a place like Harvard Law School are never going to not<\/em> chase prestige. But there is a link we can break: we don\u2019t have to let prestige be defined by corporations<\/em>. Already, dozens of plaintiffs\u2019 firms across the country are severing that link\u2014building crisp public presences, making their deep legal impact and rigorous expertise known, and cementing their status as on par with any other giants of the legal field. But that by itself won\u2019t be enough to break the law-school-to-defense-firm pipeline unless law students know<\/em> about that status. And that\u2019s where we, the plaintiff-side community\u2014students, professors, and practitioners\u2014have our work cut out for us. It\u2019s a long job, but it\u2019s an important one.<\/p>\n Steven Becker JD \u201923 is Communications Chair of HPLA.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Steven Becker It wasn\u2019t until I started at HLS that I realized plaintiffs’ law was kind of an unusual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-board-posts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.law.harvard.edu\/hpla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nTo that, I want to make a (perhaps not-so-bold) proposition: this didn\u2019t just happen<\/em>. The expectation-defying imbalance I found in the prevalence of plaintiff and defense-side careers among top law school graduates is not some kind of natural, politically-neutral-but-unfortunate development. The intuition I had that the field of students who go into civil litigation should be about evenly split between plaintiff and defense may have been naive, but it wasn\u2019t stupid. After all, I assumed that many people would have gone through the same essentially reasonable thought process I did\u2014that being choosing whatever career best marries a) the thrill of high-stakes litigation, b) the stimulation of working with complex and cutting-edge legal issues, c) the security of making a comfortable living, and d) the satisfaction of knowing you are helping every-day people who have been harmed. The way I saw it\u2014and still see it\u2014no legal path other than plaintiff-side litigation can meet all four.<\/p>\n