the inconsistency and injustices of families.

🎶 Seaside Vacation - Hu Ito (Miyuki Inaba from 13 Sentinels)​

I've been feeling really positive lately, which is funny only insomuch as it highlights how negative I must have been feeling previously. My brain feels brimming with ideas, my heart feels full of possibility, and my life feels chockfull of opportunities in a way that I haven't felt for a while. And what's the cause for it? External success, yet again--which sucks, because I know I cannot continue living my life tethered to the whims of others. But that's a podcast episode for another time...

This week, I write about why family abolition is so provocative of a topic for me and American society, more generally. I also answer two questions from readers, one about skills that one can undertake to prepare for biglaw and another about whether I still recommend becoming a lawyer and biglaw since having left. Finally, I round off with a few articles that I've been reading--you know that the Twitter drama is one of them. Have a great week!!

why is being in a family so hard?

I have always had a complicated relationship with the concept of the family. While I knew that my parents loved me, that knowledge was more intellectual than applied. My parents had never said anything to this effect, but I earnestly felt the conditionality of their love--or perhaps more accurately, my perception of their love (and my own self-love). That "unless" hung in the air, suspended in the seemingly permanent space between us, at the end of the few I love yous exchanged. (My family has since gotten more liberal with our words of affirmation, but saying I love you just wasn't within the ordinary vocabulary of my household, growing up.)

To me, familial love was nothing if not a set of confusing contradictions. My mother was incredibly supportive of me; She once told me that if I ever killed someone, she would help me dispose of the body. At the same time, when she was in her anti-gay marriage period, she off-handedly remarked that she would disown me if I ever came out as a lesbian. With every word, every action, I tried to calibrate my internal sense of the rules of family, woefully ignorant to the fact that consistent rules--and application of those rules--are hardly ever hallmarks of most families.

I used to think that my family's inconsistencies and injustices were unique in some way, a manifestation of "Tiger Mom" carryovers from China, but I now see that the history of families anywhere in the world is rife with inconsistencies and injustices. The Supreme Court once held that it was appropriate to exclude women from the legal profession, and the concurrence even waxed poetic about the natural "respective spheres of man and woman" and a woman's duties of mothering and being a wife in accordance with the "law of the Creator." Under the common law of England (which was imported to the U.S.), women did not exist as legal individuals. Rather, in accordance with the legal principle of "coverture," a woman was one with her father (if unmarried) or her husband (if married). She could not enter into contracts, own property, or earn independent wages, for those activities were "covered" by her male counterpart. So the next time we see a relaxing TikTok of a stay-at-home girlfriend and wish that lifestyle for ourselves, should we reconsider aspiring towards someone saying to us, "Be with me and you'll never have to work a day in your life?"

There has always been an interesting tension between independence and family. We are born into this world dependent upon others for survival. We spend our adolescence learning how to be independent, struggling against the very guardrails which helped ensure our survival in the first place. And then what? I think for many of us (myself included), we don't know. We analyze our attachment styles (I have an anxious attachment style, obvi) and enter into co-dependent or distrusting relationships. We become sugar babies and tell ourselves that being financially dependent on someone else is independence (which maybe is true?). We recoil from the first moment that we begin to trust someone else, lest that be the death of our hard-earned independence. After years of learning that we need to be independent as adults, it's a sick surprise that life then demands that we be dependent on others in order to feel the safety that is commonly only associated with "family." John Mayer has sung about wanting to settle down and have a "home life" for 20 years, and Adele admitted that marriage gave her the "safest" feeling she'd ever had. I spent so many years trying to be independent and get away from my family, only to realize that I needed a family in order to not be alone. What gives?

This bait-and-switch is why I'm so fascinated by the idea of family abolition. The idea isn't new--Marx and Engels made arguments for abolishing the family in connection with their critiques of capitalism, and Plato has even alluded to the idea. Family abolition as a concept is also incredibly ill-defined at this stage--more of an abstract feeling than concrete implementation. Sophie Lewis, the academic and author, envisions family abolition to be more akin to family expansion, where care and nurturing is available outside of the private sphere, where we all can choose to take care of people with whom we are not biologically related, where we can rely on our chosen families (a concept taken largely from queer communities) as much as we do our legal ones. The political commentator David Brooks even wrote an article in March 2020 about how the nuclear family is inappropriate for modern society and advocating for multigenerational households once again and "big tables" for communal living.

Whenever I think about my ideal living situation, it's always some form of "me and my friends with houses all on the same cul-de-sac" or "me and my friends in apartments on the same floor of an apartment complex." It seems so theoretically easy to do, but why then is living outside the confines of the nuclear family so hard to implement? Is it American culture's emphasis on individualism and manifest destiny in the form of hundreds of acres of one's own? Is it, as Marx and Engels posit, the never-ending capitalistic impulse towards generating private wealth for one's family? Whatever it is, I don't like it. I don't need hundreds of acres of land to look out upon. I'm with Virginia Woolf on this one--I just need a room (and bathroom) of my own.

✍️ ask cece

what are skills that prelaw students should learn for biglaw recruiting?

Q: What are smart things 0Ls should learn while they have a lot of free time? I wish I took Coursera courses on Excel and PowerPoint before consulting/banking recruitment, so I wondered if something like that was good for Big Law recruiting.
- Scott

A: I totally sympathize with the backwards-looking regret of not being more familiar with Excel and PowerPoint before consulting--who knew that consulting would require so much PowerPoint! The good news is that for biglaw, there really isn't a program as all-encompassing as Excel or PowerPoint that is needed. Of course, Excel and PowerPoint skills are useful in biglaw, but biglaw firms generally have document services teams to whom you can send spreadsheets and presentations. Associates can focus on the substance--which is typically reading and writing--rather than calculating or formatting within any application.

Of course, working in biglaw does involve the use of applications--notably, in litigation, e-discovery platforms, and in corporate, virtual data rooms. The problem with trying to learn how to use these platforms ahead of time is that none of these applications are publicly available, and which exact e-discovery platform or virtual data room you use will largely depend on the client. While clients and firms have preferred platforms, there isn't a "dominant" platform like Excel or PowerPoint for legal work yet--and even if there were, the platform wouldn't be publicly available in the same way, so it would be hard to learn how to use them ahead of time. You--and everyone else--will necessarily have to learn how to use these platforms on the job, for better or for worse, so don't get too hung up on the notion of "getting ahead" in law with technical skills.

​That being said, there are certain non-technical skills that you can work on that will likely help you in law school, law, and beyond. First, accounting--biglaw is surprisingly a lot of looking at balance sheets and income statements, so the more familiar you can get with accounting principles and documents, the better. I took an "Accounting for Lawyers" class in law school and found it highly useful as a litigator and corporate attorney. Second, reading faster and more critically. Law school itself is a hilarious amount of reading, and while I rolled my eyes at my mom signing me up for a speed reading course back when I was younger, being able to read something quickly and with decent comprehension has helped me immensely in all facets of life. I use a modified version of hand pacing to read nowadays--I'll take a bookmark/piece of paper to hide all of the lines of a page other than the one I am currently reading, moving it down line-by-line, or put my finger by the edge of the line that I am currently reading. To assist with comprehension, I keep post-it notes to write summaries and lingering questions at the end of every chapter and stick those notes into the book. The idea is to force yourself to explain what you are reading to yourself and engage with the text, rather than just reading it and moving on. And lastly, project management. Biglaw involves a ton of project management, even though they don't really teach that in law school. Familiarizing yourself with Gantt charts, Scrum, and other workflow management processes can help a lot with being efficient in biglaw, as well as with managing upwards (super important for maintaining an outside-of-work life in biglaw!!).

would you redo your higher education differently?

Q: If you could redo your higher education, what would you do differently? Would you have chosen a different undergrad major or not gone to law school? Also, what would your advice be for someone who is on the fence about pursuing law? After your experiences with Big Law, would you still encourage someone to pursue the legal profession?
- Niharika

A: I always find it a little amusing when people ask me if I wish I hadn't gone to law school because I left legal practice. To me, it feels like asking if I'm upset that I went to college because I graduated from college. Law school and becoming a lawyer were necessary steps in my journey to feeling safe in life. Given how anxious about my life and finances I was back in college, I don't see how I could have embarked on any other path except for law (and by extension, eventually biglaw)--I simply was too risk-averse for most other career pursuits (e.g., journalism, event planning, entertainment) and too uninterested in the other reliably lucrative career paths which did exist (e.g., investment banking, consulting). At the same time, you can totally tell that there's a part of me back then that yearned for something other than career and financial stability--after all, my choice to go to Harvard for law school over Columbia with scholarships clearly shows that there was more at play in my mind then than pure finances.

But imagining that I could redo everything over again with what I know now, with the feeling of safety and stability that I have now--I would definitely have done things differently. I would have majored in a liberal arts major (probably American Studies or Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) instead of Economics, had I known that majors at Yale didn't really matter for getting a job after graduation. (There are so many stories of Theatre Studies majors going into consulting or banking.) I would have likely interned in organizations and positions that weren't related to Economics--and maybe I would have really loved one of those internships and chosen not to attend law school right away so that I could pursue this other thing that I really enjoyed. I do think, though, that had I run into any friction-- such as not liking my first job or getting laid off from that first job--I would have decided to go to law school. Law school just felt so safe and straightforward and relatively interesting, y'know?

My biggest piece of advice for those who are on the fence about pursuing law is to really ask yourself why you are interested in it. My YouTube video on this topic covers a lot of the reasons that I find people drawn to law school, and I talk about when they make sense and when they are likely merely salves for a larger concern. I had a really fantastic experience in biglaw, truth be told, and I would certainly encourage people to pursue law and the legal profession provided that they have really given it adequate consideration, spoken with lawyers, and seriously considered alternatives. I would still be in biglaw if there weren't something else I wanted to do more that I am now able to seriously pursue--thanks to biglaw, for giving me that career and financial safety net.