David Zaring

In the Shadow of the Law -  I liked the book - spends a lot of time examining what kind of people might be willing to work at a law firm, and what kind probably shouldn’t. By structuring the plot around two cases, one in which the firm wears a black hat and tries to prevent a corporate client from paying out in a terrible toxic tort case, and one in which it wears a white hat in trying to get a defendant off of death row, Kim Roosevelt acknowledges that big firm legal practice can be diverse, both substantively and morally.

But leaving firm practice turns out to be a worthy goal for all but the most dastardly lawyers at Morgan Siler. I won’t give away much of the plot, but some of those characters change their identities, blow their whistles, go on to their great reward – one of them even becomes a law professor. Anything to get out of the 9 to 5.

Is large firm work so bad? It is certainly plausible that law firm profitability – and perhaps even prestige – is inversely related to desirable working conditions like interesting work, realistic billable hour requirements, and firm family friendliness. But this doesn’t mean that the decision to join a large law firm is a bad one. That decision may be an entirely rational sacrifice of shorter working hours and a different partner-associate relationship for a higher salary, more prestigious job, and a brighter, post-firm future.

Anyway, the book is a popular one among the people I meet. It also seems like it must have been a fun write, as much as any writing project could be. For Kim’s account of how the characters in the novel map, Bruno Bettelheim style, on the characters of Star Wars, see here. In Henry VI Part 2, a rebel suggested that “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Early in Shadow, after an explosion in a chemical plant, one of the company executives says “That’s the first thing you do. You call all the lawyers.”

You have to respect a shout-out to Shakespeare. I’ll note only that I didn’t catch a parallel celebration of the works of Bruce Ackerman. Kim, if law professors aren’t going to allude to one another in their novels, who will?

Vic Fleischer

During my first week of law school at Columbia -- in a crash course named "Legal Methods" -- Professor Peter Strauss would read aloud from One L.  Strauss taught a superb class.  But his daily reading from Scott Turow struck me as needlessly cruel.  (As if we weren't freaked out enough already.)  Strauss was aiming for humor, but achieved only nervous laughter.  Funny, but not.  The LAW, Strauss seemed to be saying, all laughter aside, was this noble, powerful, distant object, an object to be both respected and feared.

From One L and the Paper Chase onwards (Cf. the recent Anonymous Lawyer), popular culture treatments of lawyering tend to view the law as a powerful external object.  It's sometime merciful, sometimes brutal.  It can be manipulated through artful lawyering, or it can turn on you and twist the truth to prevent justice.

Kim Roosevelt's superb In the Shadow of the Law fits neatly into this tradition, and there is much to be admired in this novel. Roosevelt captures the moral ambiguity of modern law firm life.  The title of the book to see what really causes the difficulties encountered by the characters:  the dark massive shadow cast by THE LAW.

But that's exactly where the book left me feeling unsatisfied.  There is no external, powerful evil force out there.  We make and re-make the law everyday.  I put in three years myself at a big firm (including both corporate finance and death penalty work).  My classmates are now making partner at the very law firms we used to jokingly refer to as the "Death Star" and such.  If the legal system has its weaknesses, we must take it upon ourselves to fix it.  Treating the law as a villain excuses us from the hard moral choices we face.

And so Roosevelt misses some opportunities to bring us deeper into the jungle of moral ambiguity.  (I wish Apocalypse Now, not Star Wars, had been his model.) Roosevelt never quite forces his hero, the young Mark Clayton, to make a difficult moral choice. His characters, while lively and sharp, lack the nuance of a serious novel, leaving the book suspended somewhere between the beach reading of The Firm and the gravitas of Begley's About Schmidt.   By casting the law as an evil, external force, Roosevelt can't quite bring us into the heart of darkness.

Christine Hurt

Any law professor knows that each incoming class contains a few of the same stock characters, much like a Shakespeare play -- The Gunner, The Slacker, The Little Engine That Could.  Those same stock characters go on to populate law firms, so any incoming class of first-year associates will also have stock characters, mostly variations on the first group.  Kim Roosevelt's engrossing novel In the Shadow of the Law breathes life into some of these characters.  We have the scholar, who is getting by on brilliance alone until the job talks start rolling in; the grinder, who compartmentalizes working and running, with a splash of idealism; the slacker, who really just wants the job to meet women; and the earnest one, who really tries to make some sense of things and put forth a good faith effort, but who doubts his place there.  I'm sure we all recognize ourselves and our colleagues in these characters.  We get the sense that if any of them stay and make partner at the firm, it will be the slacker.  Because that's life at the big law firm.

Well, it is and it isn't.  What's missing are the people who really are excited to be practicing law.  Those people actually exist.  Imagine Grey's Anatomy, but with lawyers.  They hate the grueling hours and menial tasks of a first-year associate, but they love the practice of law and are willing to put up with it.  The depiction of firm life in the novel rings true, sometimes too true in a post-traumatic stress disorder sort of way, but it really only depicts half of firm life.  Yes, there are times when you feel that your days are not your own.  You leave the firm to go to dinner only to return to it later.  You show up at work only to be told you'll wake up in a different city.  But there are other times, too.  Times when you really get into drafting a complex agreement and end up being proud of it.  Times when you are meeting with clients and they really seem to appreciate the work you are doing for them.  The partners here are evil, burned out, or cynical; the clients both abusive and dismissive.  Where are the other partners?  The young partners who work hard because they have a family and, although we don't like to think about it, practicing law is the easiest way to make a great salary, even per hour.  Where are the women?  The only woman we see is the first-year associate, who is the fantasy interest of almost every male we meet at the law firm.

The story (or the two stories) definitely held my interest and made me keep turning the pages.  Like Vic, I both practiced in corporate finance and did death penalty work, so I enjoyed the plot.  I was sad to see that special purpose vehicle financing became another evil stock character, though!  (Really, SPEs don't steal money; people steal money.)  I have to say that my favorite part came at the end when the managing partner's wife bumped into the burned out partner.  Very nicely done.

I have not read any legal fiction in awhile, but I'm very glad that I read this book.  I look forward to the sequel -- where Katya and Mark argue about who will leave to pick up the baby at 6:00.

Gordon Smith

In the penultimate chapter of Kim Roosevelt’s In the Shadow of Law, one of the minor characters sacrificed his legal career in a last-ditch effort to save a prisoner’s life. After explaining his choice to a stunned colleague, the novel’s protagonist, the lawyer “thrust his hands in his pockets and walked away.” (438) In the final chapter, the protagonist faces his own career-threatening choice and must decide whether justice and his own personal sense of morality demand the sacrifice. “I have seen that choice, thought Mark. Could I put my hands in my pockets and walk away?” (443)

In the Shadow of Law explores the alienation experienced by lawyers in a large Washington D.C. firm. Each of the lawyers in Kim’s cast struggles to reconcile the professional self to an alternative image of self. This is, of course, a timeless theme – the search for “integrity,” “wholeness,” or even “perfection” – but a large law firm seems like a particularly apt setting in which to explore the theme. After all, all lawyers represent clients, whose interests may challenge the lawyers’ own values, and big-firm lawyers may feel uniquely powerless to influence a client’s choices. In a blog post last month, Kim suggests that this is peculiar to the modern practice of law:

The basic change in the nature of legal practice is what you could call the industrialization of law. There’s a real parallel to the industrial revolution. In pre-industrial society, you have an artisanal mode of production, where craftsmen make entire products. And of course they have control over the choices that go into the making of the product, and they have a set of skills and a degree of self-sufficiency because they can make the entire thing on their own. Industrialization changes that: suddenly you have assembly-line workers who don’t have unique skills. And they aren’t making an entire product; they’re doing something like making a door handle over and over and over again. What they’re making is valueless in itself. They have no choice in how they do it, or control over what it is.

“Powerless” is not a word most would associate with big firm lawyers, but I can relate to this sense of being swept along by events. And when you feel like that, your options are pretty limited: learn to live with it or put your hands in your pockets and walk away.

Kim Roosevelt

It’s always an honor to have one’s work subjected to critical analysis, and in particular analysis from such a serious and distinguished set of reviewers. So I thank all of you for taking the time to engage with the book, for taking it seriously, and for holding it to the high standards that you did. I hope that I can do the same to your reviews.

Christine Hurt asks where the happy lawyers are, and also the women. Both are fair questions, and both relate to the question of realism, which is something I thought about both while writing the book (though I admit that enthusiasm sometimes carried me into satire) and when discussing it afterwards. I was trying to write a book that was a realistic look at law firm life in a way that, say, The Firm was not. But I was also trying to tell a particular story, and that meant that it was almost inevitably going to be somewhat one-sided. Too much balance lessens drama and makes it harder to keep the plot streamlined. (Which is not to say that my plot is streamlined, only that there wasn’t much room in the structure or the cast for the happy careerists.)

There certainly are happy lawyers in big firms—I knew several, and I was one myself. There aren’t so many happy lawyers in the book, I admit, or at least not happy and healthy lawyers who plan to stay at the firm  (Peter Morgan is fairly happy, though not in a healthy way; Walker enjoys his time at the firm but ultimately has to leave; and Ryan’s choice to embrace the firm as his identity might make him happy but wasn’t intended to be presented as the right choice.) The reason for this is that I wanted to say something about the evolution of legal practice, so the happy and healthy lawyers who find firm practice a satisfying career are mostly in the past. I thought that the suggestion that firm practice has become less satisfying and less lifestyle-friendly (which I think is clearly true) would be undermined by having happy careerists in the book; also, there wasn’t really a role for them in the plot I had constructed.

I don’t have quite as good an answer to the question of where the women are. Some of the characters really had to be male to fit the plot or the natures I had planned for them—Ryan Grady and Harold Fineman, in particular. I thought it would be implausible for Peter Morgan or Wallace, given their prominence in the world of 1960s and 1970s legal practice, to be female. Walker was a possibility, but I didn’t think that the hypertrophied intellectualism and lack of empathy would be as plausible in a woman. I tried to make up for this by giving more of the minor roles to women—the judge in the exploding car case, the capital defender, Walker’s co-clerks, but it still ended up a bit imbalanced. The script for the television pilot (which sadly didn’t make it to series) made Gerald and Larry Angstrom both female, which I thought worked pretty well, although it required a bit of a change to the bathroom scene. As for the evil SPEs, blame Lynne Lopucki, whose article “The Death of Liability” inspired the securitization subplot.

David Zaring also points to what could be considered a lack of balance by observing, rightly, that choosing to work at a big firm isn’t necessarily a bad idea.  I agree with that; I didn’t intend the book to be read as simply a criticism of big firms. As I point out when I talk about the book, it’s the big firms that have the resources to do significant pro bono work. What I was hoping to achieve on that tack was not to stop people from going to big firms but first, to inspire them to think a little bit about why they were doing it, and second, to encourage young associates, once there, not to think of firm practice as something that requires them to abandon their own moral judgments—and to point to pro bono as an opportunity to exercise both substantial responsibility and independent moral judgment.

I’m pleased that David caught the shout-out to Shakespeare. The first title I came up with was in fact “Call All the Lawyers,” but the feeling of embarrassment that overwhelmed me whenever I told anyone soon led me to realize that it was not, in fact, a very good one. As for the shout-outs to legal scholarship, there aren’t really any to Bruce Ackerman, but the cert. petition that Walker reads about exhaustion and procedural default is related to an article I wrote, as is his job talk. Perhaps those don’t count as shout-outs, because they’re to me, and actually they’re more a consequence of laziness than anything else—I needed some scholarship, and rather than invent it entirely, I took something I was familiar with. (I did the same thing with a fair amount of Walker’s biography, reasoning that his lack of admirability as a character would prevent anyone from thinking he was supposed to be a stand-in for me. That was shortsighted on my part, as a number of people seem to have made the equation and simply assumed that I also have no moral sense.)

In terms of comparing what a reader gets from a book to the effect the author intends, I think most of the responsibility lies with the author, who is after all the one exercising choice about the book’s content. So I consider it a criticism of myself to say that Vic Fleischer reads the book in a manner almost diametrically opposite to what I had hoped for. The point I was trying to make, to the extent that fiction is about points, was precisely that law is not an evil external force. Law is incomplete; law requires human action to have effect. Different characters in the book have different views on the sort of action that is necessary or appropriate, and also on the nature of law and of lawyers’ duties. Walker, for instance, believes that what law requires of him is simply intellect, which will allow the law to achieve its logical perfection and beauty. He feels a duty to the law as an abstraction with no moral content. Peter Morgan and Harold Fineman, though differing in some ways, largely view law as a way to advance the interests of the client. This view has some moral content, but it is defined and bounded by the lawyer-client relationship; it has no room for independent moral judgment. Ryan Grady has no real interest in the law or clients; to the extent he feels a sense of duty it is to follow the internal rules of the firm, such as billing in quarter-hour increments, even if what he does thereby serves neither the law nor the clients nor any moral value.

The moral choices that Mark is supposed to be facing are choices between these different conceptions of law and duties. How vigorously should he pursue his pro bono case?  Do his duties there run to the higher-ups who have assigned him to it, to the criminal justice system, or to Wayne Harper as an individual? And how should one respond if, as in the other plotline, it turns out that a client has been doing some very bad things? The answer that Mark and Katja come to, I was trying to suggest, is that one doesn’t have to dismiss the law as something unrelated to one’s moral sense. To put it in Gordon’s terms, living with it and walking away aren’t the only choices (which is why that framing of the problem comes up in the penultimate chapter). The law doesn’t want, as Walker thought, to be beautiful; the law wants to be just. And that is what it needs people for, because, as I say in the last chapter, it’s people who do justice.