We are law students and lawyers who believe that the law has the potential to be a force for justice.
We also believe the legal profession manipulates the law on behalf of the powerful to make corporations and their lawyers richer at the expense of workers, consumers, and the public at large.
As lawyers, we bear moral responsibility for our work. This project highlights the moral stakes of legal work, emphasizing the harmful impact of big law firms in particular. We want law students, lawyers, and the public at large to understand three things.
First, legal work has a huge 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. The choice to do some work and not other work has consequences.
Second, law is adversarial. When big corporations win, represented by big law firms, there are losers. The job of lawyers at big firms is to ensure that big corporations win in a systemic way.
What does it mean for a corporation represented by a big law firm to “win”? Winning means using the law to serve your bottom line. Often, this means skirting liability and continuing to engage in harmful practices, whether it’s preventing workers from unionizing or getting permits to build a polluting facility in a low-income community.
Who exactly is losing? All of us. The generic drugs many of us depend on to live comfortably are more expensive. Our rights in the workplace are limited. Our electoral voice is ignored in favor of corporate donations.
Third, 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.
If you are a law student wondering if you should work in Big Law, this website is for you. This project is about unveiling the cases that power the profits behind the high salaries Big Law firms offer. You can explore individual firms and issue areas to better understand what Big Law firms do and how they make their money.
Most of the information can be viewed in the briefs filed by these firms. That means you can read the very type of brief you might be asked to help write as a first-year associate.
Looking for alternatives to this kind of work? Visit our career resources page and contact your school’s public interest career advising office.
We want this site to help combat corporate influence over the law. If there are additional cases that you think we should highlight, please let us know. If you have a career opportunity you would like to share, please let us know.
This project aims to demystify the legal profession and provide resources to fight the influence that corporations and Big Law firms wield over the law.
Whether you’re a worker whose boss hired one of these firms to mislead you about your rights at work or a community member wondering if you can trust a lawyer asking you to sign away your right to sue, you should at least know what they’re really up to.