Bonuses!

I know why people hate lawyers. In fact, I’ve been watching a bunch of lawyers stage an elaborate and twisted public allegory in which they bitch about huge Biglaw bonuses as if the people receiving the bonuses somehow deserve bonuses at all and act like getting months or even years of pay for the average American is somehow an insult. Wait…what? It isn’t satire?

People hate lawyers because they think lawyers are greedy. They think we’re all a bunch of privileged little brats who’ve lived our entire lives in a world of endless opportunity. They think we went to private schools and had tutors. They think we entered a mysterious old money system at an early age and got fed straight from prep school into colleges adorned in ivy. They think that, after we finished our useless undergraduate degrees, we weren’t equipped to do anything capable of supporting our lavish lifestyle, the only one we knew, so mommy and daddy funneled us right into another ivy-covered institution for law school.

In short, people think lawyers have never had to sit in a shitty apartment with a bunch of other poor kids wondering how the hell they were going to scrape together rent. They think we’re all a bunch of rich, entitled punks who are out of touch with the rest of the country. Publicly whining about bonuses in a recession isn’t doing much to dispel that notion.

I have nothing against bonuses. People who do good work and earn money should be rewarded. Bonuses for lawyers, however, don’t seem quite the same as bonuses for most other people. The nature of our job, specifically the fact that we earn our keep by representing clients, separates us from many other fields. We are paid by people and entities to do work for them. When we celebrate big bonuses and lament those that seem inadequate, we are in essence celebrating the money we’ve taken from people who trust us. Those people are probably struggling or at least price-conscious in this economy, and they’re paying our rate because we told them it’s our rate. Nobody is so stupid to believe that you can’t practice law without a marble foyer on the top floor and a library of leather bound books. Some people like to know they’re hiring an overpriced lawyer, but more people want to know they aren’t being overcharged.

If I owned an investment firm and made a fortune investing wisely for my clients, I doubt any of my clients would hold a big bonus against me. I get rich to my client’s benefit. It’s similar if I own a company that makes a product. In that case, I get rich because lots of people decide my product is worth buying. They want my product, I want their money. There’s nothing strange about celebrating the money people have given to me because I used it to make more money for them or because I made the best version of something they wanted and were going to buy anyway. There is something different about celebrating profit with huge bonuses to associates whose primary contribution is padding the bill with a bunch of 0.2-hour emails and useless memos about obscure bullshit. Lawyers and clients may get rich together, but not always. When they don’t, the lawyer is the one who still ends up with a payout.

My beef with bonuses really comes from the lack of any real value I see in a lot of what these big firms do. If I’m wrong, let me know, but what I see from Biglaw is a lot of nickle-and-diming institutional clients. They employ armies of people vetted in the hallowed halls of a select few institutions and use those automatons to squeeze every little penny out of the companies that hire them. If I owned a company that was struggling through a recession and paying Biglaw to help me out in a lawsuit, I’d be pretty pissed seeing my money used to give a bunch of twenty-something associates several thousand dollar bonuses that they’ll probably blow on coke and hookers and iPhones. I’d wonder about the value I’m getting from that firm. I’d wonder if they couldn’t have knocked down the hourly rate a little. I’d start looking elsewhere if I saw their young associates publicly bitching that they didn’t get a big enough chunk of my hard-earned money for their essentially worthless contribution to something I didn’t want to pay for in the first place.

The bonus obsession doesn’t just reinforce the negative stereotypes most people have about lawyers. It also highlights the fact Biglaw is probably a broken business model. People in general aren’t so stupid that they’ll never figure out Biglaw as it is right now just isn’t worth it, are they? If it does happen and all the fees dry up, it’ll be interesting to see where the associates who used to whine about bonuses go to complain about unemployment. I wonder how all this bonus talk will look to them then.