A letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, from Severson’s Mark Joseph Kenney

(Last updated April 17, 2009)

“Big Law” – the medium was the mistake.

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s painful lament over years of wasted talent and energy in the crucible of “Big Law” (Twelve Years Down The Drain, Op-Ed April 9) coincides with daily reports in these pages of juggernaut law firms laying off employees, rescinding offers to top new talent and staving off defections of cherished rain-makers. The salacious details of these upheavals are reported in the legal “vanity press", local legal newspapers and countless websites.

One might never know that there remains, quite intact, and in every jurisdiction in the Country, a very different community of counselors at law. These outnumber by far those who designed and wrought the wretched excesses Ms. Wurtzel describes. Instead, each has chosen to become (or remain) part of a service profession rather than a legal-industrial complex akin to factory farming. These lawyers measure their success by lasting relationships of trust with clients large and small. Their stock in trade is judgment, not billable hours. They are committed to their firms, their colleagues, and the employees who support them. They know the men and women to their left and their right, and do not head for the exits at the first sign of trouble.

I am honored to have worked with just such a firm of attorneys for nearly thirty years. (At some 150 attorneys and staff, we are hardly to be called “big law” but we are doing just fine – growing in fact, and you would be amazed at the resumes on my desk.) I count my colleagues, along with those described above, as proof of Oliver Wendel Holmes’ reflection that “that a man may live greatly in the law as well as elsewhere.”