As lawyers, we bear moral responsibility for our work.
The Law Firm Transparency Project highlights the moral stakes of legal work and the harmful impact of Big Law.
Photo by Sora Shimazaki via Pexels
We want law students, lawyers, and the public at large to understand three things:
1 - Legal work has an enormous impact on the lives, liberties, and livelihoods of individuals and communities. All too often, lawyers from elite law schools find themselves on the wrong side of these cases. Our choices about which clients to serve and which cases to take on have real-world consequences.
2 - Law is adversarial. When big law firms and their corporate clients win, communities around the world lose. The job of lawyers at big firms is to ensure that big corporations—not individual workers, consumers, or community members—win in a systemic way.
3 - There are justice-oriented, human-centered, well-paying alternatives to Big Law. Other career paths in the law can fit a variety of lifestyle and monetary needs.
On this site, you can review the work of Big Law firms, organized by firm and issue area. The cases we’ve chosen exemplify the type of high-stakes legal work that powers the profits of big firms. For each case, we’ve provided a brief summary of the litigation, and, where possible, a sample from the work product produced by the firm. For students, that means you can read the very type of brief you might be asked to help write as a first-year associate.
We have also collected a list of career resources for students interested in justice-oriented, human-centered alternatives to Big Law. The career resources on this website are not a replacement for public interest career advisors, but we hope to provide resources for students and lawyers interested in exploring options outside of corporate defense.