David Maister has posted a commencement address delivered by Stephen C. Ellis, the managing partner of a successful mid-sized law firm.  While he’s focused on the law (the address was at Case Western’s law school), it’s great advice for any professional, and I’m circulating it within my own firm and clients.  He has some great nuggets in there, including this interesting assessment of why the law can be such a miserable profession today:

The fact is our profession has become increasingly unhappy over the past couple of decades. I am convinced the vast majority of that unhappiness derives from a singleseemingly innocuous event in the late 1980’s: The American Lawyer magazine began publishing the AM LAW 100, and listed the profits per partner of the 100 largest firms. Virtually all of the firms in this country immediately bought in to that statistic as the only credible measure of success. The game was on - we lawyers would now take our measure almost entirely from money, at least in terms of what was publicly discussed. Without question, integrity, service and professionalism were important, but how we measured ourselves was money.

There’s also this great advice for aspiring lawyers:

If you’ve decided to become a lawyer solely to make money if to you it’s simply a job I fear you’ll hate it. As a career and a calling it’s great, and unbelievably interesting, but as simply a job, it’s way too hard and stressful. It’s the people, the pace and the endless puzzles of the law that make being a lawyer fulfilling. If you want tons of money for working twenty hours a day and nausea-inducing stress, Wall Street investment banking may be just the thing . In that business the grand old men are burnt out at 45.

I’ll frequently refer to investment banking as selling your youth - they pay you a fortune, but you spend the time in you have in your 20s and 30s working, and for many, large law firms have taken on the same climate.  But the people who don’t love it and just want the money won’t be able to work as hard or effectively as those who are passionate about their field, and subsequently, will never grasp the same rewards.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Law