From the reader mailbag, echoing other garbage circulating the internet:

“How do you even stomach yourself….You joke that people call you a disgrace to the profession, but you should acknowledge they’re right. I actually DO work at a top 10 firm, I have for a long time…. People like you, lazy and inferior students who became lazy and inferior lawyers and blamed it on the system, are an insult to those of us who worked hard to go to top schools and make something of ourselves….You should be ashamed to show your face, though of course you’ll probably plaster it all over your absurd website….No wonder you can’t sleep at night.”

M
X’ XXXXXXX & XXXXX, LLP

Dear M,

One of the unique things I love about this blog is that I can rely on readers themselves to prove every point I make about law firm culture beyond a reasonable doubt. You and your slithering counterparts lunged for my jugular the minute my name was released, leaping at any chance to pull back my flesh and expose alleged bullshit underneath. You seem to think rants on the internet will hurt me or “put me in my place.” I heartily disagree - in fact, what you’ve all done is beautifully illustrate everything I’ve said over the past 10 months.

Yes, I practiced law for less than 2 years. I worked as a paralegal at two large firms before law school, and entered recruiting determined to avoid the collective misery of nearly every associate I had met. I observed everything during my time at those firms, kept journals, studied interactions.

The ironic twist to all this, M., is that during law school I in fact received an offer from your illustrious “top 10″ firm - I still have the offer letter stashed at the bottom of the infamous drawer-formerly-filled-with-change. I turned the offer down because I thought I could find the ultimate pipe-dream - a large firm that cared about associate lifestyles and entry-level professional development, and valued associates as more than just billable human commodities. First I went to a smaller group within a large firm, then the satellite office of a large firm. I never found what I was looking for.

What I did discover is that “Biglaw,” or whatever contrived oversimplified thing you want to call it, is a concept, an attitude. It exists in a place regardless of rankings or attorney roster sizes. So go ahead M, label yourself Better than Me, More Worthy of Daily Oxygen because you work at X’ XXXXXXX, I could give a rat’s ass. I certainly don’t regret my decision to turn your firm down - I’d bet that by now the partners committee would be plotting my downfall and burning me in effigy.

If you ask me (or even if you don’t, I’ll still tell you), law schools should reduce all the boring pedantic crap like Chirelstein and Calamari (no offense) and instead add to all first-year reading lists a book called “Dynamics of Faith.” Written by theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, it’s a basic but amazing primer on the secret to happiness. At the risk of waxing philosophical, I’ll boil the book’s message down to a few sentences:

Faith, or the key to man’s (and woman’s) happiness, is simply the state of being ultimately concerned. Concerned with what? Something that truly deserves it. If you spend life being ultimately concerned with things that are not worthwhile, you’ll end up in a state called “existential disappointment.”

M my friend, you are a living illustration of that state.

Existential disappointment is rampant in law firms. In the four firms I’ve worked for, it grew on the walls like mold and seeped into the elevator shafts. It’s in every scornful glance from a partner, every verbal sneer from an older associate, every snotty remark about another person’s lower-ranked summer firm or law school. The act of judging your own worth based on affiliations with an organization, peer group, income bracket - that is existential disappointment. Seeing those around you as only a series of labels, slotting them as better or worse than yourself based on shallow and meaningless characteristics. I bought into it many times, and each time I found myself crushed and hollow, hating my own priorities and my identification with those around me.

I don’t care if you like my writing, I don’t care if you insult everything I’ve said. I’ve taken more crap from you and your amoebic peers than you could stomach in your entire lifetime - society’s punishment for the double crime of being anti-establishment and (Horror! Gasp!) female. Had I accepted your firm’s offer, you’d be sitting here now digging through your serpent brain to find other ways to discredit me, of that I have no doubt.

But M, and your small brigade of raging lawyers rushing to rip me to shreds, answer me one question: If I’m so insignificant and unworthy, why are you so desperate to put down everything I’ve said? Is it because you truly believe the vitriol you’re spewing in my direction? Or is it because you’re terrified that I may have figured out more of the truth behind this vacant way of living in less than two years of practice than you have in your entire career? And most of all, is it sheer dread that I may be right?

Regardless of your answer, know that nothing you can say will ever stop me. Enjoy your life at the office.

Melissa

And to Carol Eliot at NCS: I never forgot.