Elite law school grads should consider South
Six months ago, I was finishing my final year at Harvard Law School when 1993 alumna Wendy Davis came to speak. The room was packed with eager minds, a majority of whom were women, people of color or LGBT – or all three.
Everyone wanted to be like Texas’ Wendy Davis.
That is until it was time to be like Wendy Davis a few months later when my class graduated and moved everywhere but the South.
We were no different from the classes before us. Only 5.1 percent of Harvard Law’s 2016 class chose to work in the states of Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. Yet, 63 percent went to New York, California and Washington, D.C.
Other elite law schools tout similar statistics for those southern states: Yale Law 2016: 5.16 percent; Stanford Law 2016: less than 7.95 percent.
Graduates of our nation’s elite law schools are consistently forgoing careers in the South, writing off the region as a backward place fit only for noncompetitive lawyers.
Minorities, and politically liberal law graduates in particular, find themselves torn between their admiration for the Wendy Davises of the South and their exhaustion at the prospect of facing racism, sexism and homophobia on a daily basis. Indeed, as a Latino, Asian, gay man myself, I struggled with moving to Dallas after Harvard.
But what I now know is that new law graduates — especially minorities and liberals — should consider a legal career in the South. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the opportunities for young lawyers to prove themselves.
At Harvard, my classmates would talk about how impossible it was to stand out because everyone was so competitive. Now that those same peers have moved to New York law firms alongside hoards of other top law graduates, they are finding that even the most talented young lawyers are relegated to small tasks with little opportunity to prove themselves.
At my Texas firm, however, my fellow associates and I are managing document reviewers, drafting and filing motions and even directly communicating with clients. Life as a young lawyer in the South is good.
For one thing, most big law firms pay their associates identical salaries with lockstep raises nationwide. That means, despite that New York City’s cost of living is 2.27 times higher than Dallas, my salary is exactly the same as a first-year associate there.
Young southern lawyers also have more of what money can’t buy: time. Big law firms typically assess their associates by the number of hours they bill clients, so I work a lot. But I experience far less pressure to outwork my co-workers than do my New York colleagues.
It sounds counterintuitive, but the South also presents a genuine opportunity for minorities and liberals — the chance to make a real difference.
First off, not everyone in the South is racist, homophobic, sexist or even conservative. But yes, the South maintains more conservative policies, and the legal profession itself is decades behind in diversity. So it’s totally understandable for minorities and liberals to decline the work required to fight for what they believe in.
But someone has to do it. And, armed with their legal education, graduates of the best law schools are the people most equipped to change policies they disagree with.
To be sure, I have encountered frustrating moments of racism and homophobia in the South. It’s not for everyone. Nor is it the job of minorities to educate their oppressors.
Still, positive change in race relations, politics and equal opportunity requires progressive-minded lawyers to stop siloing ourselves in liberal enclaves. As it stands, every current U.S. Supreme Court justice is a graduate of an Ivy League law school. Clearly, the impact their graduates can have on society is unquestionable.
The South is brimming with opportunities for young lawyers, and it’s time that graduates of top schools start realizing that. After all, the reason Wendy Davis is Wendy Davis is not just because of what she stands for, but where she stands for it.