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Wurtzel on BigLaw: ?Really Just the March of the Dunces?

By Ashby Jones

Reading Elizabeth Wurtzel’s piece in the WSJ today, we have to admit, brought a smile to our face. It’s not that we necessarily agree with Wurtzel’s take — that for lawyers in many big law firms, the last 12 years have been one big waste of time — but we couldn’t help fall for the brazen chutzpah of the piece.

Wurtzel, as many of you might remember from this LB Q&A from last fall, decided to put on hold a successful writing career and go to law school shortly after 9/11. She now works at Boies, Schiller & Flexner.

Her take goes like this: The market has lost a dozen years worth of wealth in a matter of months. As a result, all those lawyers and bankers who worked tirelessly assembling buyouts and mergers, packaging up securities and facilitating public offerings have essentially nothing to show for themselves. Wurtzel writes:

Millions of hours of manpower put in by investment bankers on Wall Street and the lawyers who enabled them — the kind that brought home those bright shiny bonuses that are now causing a populist uprising in the hinterlands — have been wasted away by what is kindly called the credit crisis. . . .

[T]he traditional life of a law lackey . . . has meant virtual residence at the firm. Meals were delivered by Seamless Web and the roll-top desk was used for catnaps, because whatever it is that had to happen had to happen immediately, or yesterday. The emergency-room atmosphere that permeated the processing of derivatives deals, corporate takeovers, and whatever else has been going on at Goldman, Bear, Citi and Merrill for the past decade, could rival that of an operating room during open-heart surgery. Only, of course, it was a matter of money — not life or death.

Perhaps money and mortality are all the same to some. But as a way of making the former, this hysterical ER-approach has proved futile. All those lost nights of sleep are now lost 401(k)s. So what was the point? Corporate lawyers could have been sunning in St. Bart’s and ended up with the exact same result, plus a tan.

Have the lawyers and bankers learned their lesson? Not exactly, continues Wurtzel.

. . . I don’t believe any of the major players are re-evaluating their ethos — only their decision to invest in subprime mortgages. And this is foolish, since the problem is not just that the financial instruments were bad bets, but that the corporate structure and the feverish rush of it all are fundamentally flawed.

I would love to call the system despicable or detestable or something evil-sounding, but that would be giving it too much credit. It’s really just the march of dunces.

LB Readers, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 09, 2009 (boomark / email).