One of the strangest things about becoming a lawyer – and one of the main reasons I stopped working as a lawyer – is that you stop believing facts and start believing fiction.
I remember this well from my time working in Big Law. One of the first things you learn as a new litigator is the basic structure of a legal brief. An overview is generally divided into two primary sections. First, the statement of facts, a clear recitation of the facts underlying the case; Second, the argument, all your editorializing on top of that. In other words, you tell people what happened, and then you tell them your interpretation of it.
There is an intuitive logic to stating facts before explanation: something happens in the world; Rational people offer contrary explanations; The best explanation wins.
Of course, this is also a fantasy.
There is no such thing as a clear presentation of facts. Every recounting of events comes with an interpretation. Interpretation is when you decide what facts to include or leave out; This is when you decide in what order the facts should be reported; This is when you decide what words will be used to describe them.
I am doing this Here. I told you I worked at a big law firm (fact) because I thought it would elicit a stronger reaction than telling you I worked at WilmerHale (also fact). I told you that the structure of the brief is one of the first things (facts) you learn because it sounds more dramatic than telling you about all the less interesting things you learn first (also facts). I told you that there are two primary sections (facts) in the abstract because it was easier than telling you that there are three or four more primary sections (also facts). And I chose this particular version of the facts because it was helpful to the point I’m trying to make:
Our legal system is broken and in desperate need of repair.
My perspective on this is inspired by my own experience. I came to becoming a lawyer relatively late – at the ripe age of 30 – and upon arriving at law school, I immediately found myself immersed in a world that was omnipresent and utterly confusing in its blind faith in and love of the law. The students jumped with excitement; Administrators constantly told us how important we were; The professor seemed to believe wholeheartedly in the efficacy of the judicial process. It was like signing up for an education and joining a cult.
But it is difficult to stay inside any environment for more than a few months without becoming a part of it. And so I fell in love with the law, too: with its beautiful complexity, with the way it served as a meeting point between lofty philosophical ideals and real-world problems, with the power of its storytelling, which refined narrative and logic to a brutal effectiveness. But I never lost that initial skepticism – especially when it was my turn to enter the coveted arena of a big law firm.
there is a big law The term is used to describe the 100 or so large companies in the United States and the vast ecosystem of wealth, jobs, and power that revolve around them. This is a force I found myself gravitating towards both because of its early hiring program, which is much earlier than most other employers, and because it seemed like a logical place to start a meaningful career, while also having some financial security.
Nearly every lawyer in the United States acknowledges the centrality of elder law to our society. For example, large companies litigate the majority of Supreme Court cases, and former big law lawyers overwhelmingly fill federal judgeships, administrative state offices, and corporate leadership positions.
So when I arrived at WilmerHale fresh out of law school, I felt like I had reached the qualitative pinnacle of the profession: a group of brilliant intellectuals working to help each other better serve our country’s legal system. The people I worked with were completely ethical and largely believed in the same liberal ideals that I did. Collectively, we worked on many cases that sought to better the world, often pro bono, and sometimes we succeeded: helping secure reproductive rights in Ohio following the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and stopping the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of Virginians were meaningful victories.
On the other hand, the day-to-day reality was this: using our very expensive knowledge to manipulate the legal system in the service of making the rich even richer. Because no matter what the intent or how many pro bono cases it handles, a big law firm spends most of its time fighting to set legal precedent that will strengthen the power of those who already have it.
If these two things seem incompatible, that’s because they are. The fact that WilmerHale was a great place to work was part of the problem. Big Law has the sense that your firm’s immense power and wealth, which directly benefits you, is the logical result of everyone’s hard work and abilities. It was the blending of the democratic responsibilities of advocacy with our position at the top of a highly profit-driven industry that ranked, and still does.
Because, despite all our good intentions, the country we wanted to improve ended up getting worse. The legal system – which we were responsible for protecting – got worse.
I graduated from law School In 2020. Even a casual observer can name a few ways in which the legal system has deteriorated since then, from dismantling long-standing individual liberties in favor of academic theories of interpretation, to the wholesale repurposing of the federal government solely for personal gain, and 100 other things that cover our phones every day.
And when all this happens at the same time that you see your colleagues – colleagues who are some of the brightest legal minds in the country – doing their best to maintain the integrity of the legal system, it ultimately forces you to confront an inescapable truth: It doesn’t matter how many individual good actors there are in a system, if the system in which they work is broken, the work they do will only make things worse. Or to put it more bluntly: If all the good lawyers are spending 99 percent of their time making sure that our legal system benefits a select few, the remaining 1 percent of their time won’t make much of a difference.
When this truth ultimately led me to leave Big Law in 2025, with even more selfish reasons — like not wanting to count my life in six-minute increments — I didn’t anticipate that the universe would immediately validate my decision. But then President Trump decided to make an example of the big legislation, and the industry’s response provided a vivid demonstration of how broken the system behind it was.
issues executive orders Mr Trump began raising the issue in March 2025, seeking to punish various firms for associating with his political enemies in what was supposed to be an unrelenting battle for Big Law. Not only were the orders clearly unconstitutional — meaning the text clearly violated the First Amendment even without factual support — but they also demonstrated the kind of shoddy advocacy that has become a hallmark of the Trump administration. Getting these orders canceled was the kind of case any of my former bosses would have assigned me and expected me to win.
And yet the industry largely chose to compromise. Only four firms, including WilmerHale, decided to take the administration to court; He did so successfully. In contrast, nine other large law firms decided to settle, including Five of the country’s top 10 ranked companies And The single largest law firm in the world With annual revenues in excess of $10 billion. It provided several early wins for the Trump administration to take advantage of over the past year, including nearly a billion dollars of pro bono legal services that Mr. Trump used to negotiate trade deals; An open and early commitment to address diversity, equity and inclusion policies; And a demonstration by some of the country’s highest-paid lawyers that the best way to respond to government abuses of power is to compromise.
What’s more, the lawyers did all this while explaining, as Paul, Weiss President Brad Karp did to their colleagues, that their “age-long legacy of standing up courageously for fundamental rights and freedoms, for fairness in the justice system, and for the most vulnerable individuals in our society … will never be subject to negotiation or compromise.” This was referring to an agreement that, as a reminder, was condemned by Deborah Pearlstein as “America’s rapid slide away from the system of constitutional democracy” and by law professors Avi Soifer, Judy McMorrow, and Paul Tremblay.embarrassing and worrying” Talk about a statement of facts.
It would be difficult to find a clearer demonstration of the way Big Law has undermined the democratic ideals at the heart of the profession – except for the fact that 2025 was, economically, a fantastic year for the industry. So great that the publication The American Lawyer had to increase the revenue per lawyer for the “super rich” firm from $1.1 million to $1.45 million. That “super rich” list includes both the companies that surrendered The companies that fought—all in a single year marked by “relentless, direct attacks on the rule of law and our constitutional rights,” in words Of the American Constitution Society.
Something is wrong.
health of The American legal industry and the American legal system are not the same. And Big Law, as the economic center of gravity of the legal world and the route through which most of the country’s top legal talent flows — look at the current Supreme Court, where all justices except Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas got through Big Law — is at the heart of the problem.
I wish I could identify a solution so easily. But I think getting lawyers to acknowledge the problem would be an important step. Despite the number of people raising these issues – I am far from the first person to disapprove of Big Law – we lawyers are still very resistant to admitting that our profession may be in any way inferior.
I’m sympathetic to that impulse, but I also think it’s time to abandon it. Because — to use a lawyerly twist — sticking to it mixes statements of fact with logic in a way that prevents lawyers from seeing the world around us and what our democracy really needs. And what it desperately needs is a full and impartial accounting of the legal industry, which at its core is supposed to protect the ideals.
another concept From The legal world that stuck with me: The legal imagination. A legal fiction enables the law to apply to situations to which it would not otherwise apply; A common example is treating corporations as people in some legal contexts. But I think there’s also a broader set of ideas to which we should apply it: lawyers’ self-concept.
It is fanciful to think that a legal landscape organized around the principle of concentration of power and profit could work to the benefit of our democracy. It’s a fantasy to think that a few well-intentioned free hours can compensate for the rest of our work. It is utopian to think that individual artists can compensate for the drift of a system that works tirelessly to strengthen those in power. And it is a fantasy to think that lawyers can still enforce, as Samuel Adams said, “a rule of justice for rich and for poor” when the legal industry has whatever impact it has on the real world.
These are fictions that we lawyers buy into because it is useful for us to believe them. But the fact that they are useful does not make them true. And the sooner we lawyers accept this, the sooner we can find a way to make reality the reality we have, something more like these fantasies we wish to tell.
Whether that’s a statement of facts or logic, I leave up to you.
