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The Road Less Taken

By 4L

One of my favorite poems is Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken. So, when I saw ATL's link about Sen. Barack Obama's decision to forgo the clerkship route for greener pastures, I thought it would make an interesting read. And it certainly does. See The Man That Got Away: Judges Dreamed of Having Barack Obama as their clerk. Why did he turn them all down?

Since I went the appeals route, and will be heading to a big firm next year, I sometimes wonder if this is the correct path or not. That, however, calls for a much longer entry and right now I simply do not have to the time to give it to the due diligence that it deserves. I did hear a story the other day of a similar choice made by another clerk years ago. Allegedly, this particular clerk had an offer from Skadden: New York and decided after a year of clerking that he was less enamored with the prospect of corporate law and decided to go work for the public defender's office. Good for this clerk.

Myself, I don't have that luxury for two reasons: one, I highly doubt I would be a public defender, and two, I think I am going to enjoy big firm life and big firm work. While this answer may be different five years from now, I can only hope that it's not. Nonetheless, being in a somewhat similar position (although not from Chicago), I can certainly respect not taking the lesser traveled path and forging through one's own. As Frost says, sometimes the road less traveled makes all the difference. The caveat, as Jerry Seinfeld put it, is that sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. To each his (or her) own.

Full post as published by The Once and Future Lawyer on December 13, 2007 (boomark / email).