Sybil Dunlop, BridgeTower Media Newswires
A few years ago, I was taking a deposition of a third-party witness in Indiana. I had never met opposing counsel before. I had never met the witness. I arrived early (as is my style) and met the court reporter.
When my opposing counsel entered the room (late), he immediately took up all the space in it. He was about 40 years older than me. He announced that he had been practicing law since before I was born. He told me that he knew everyone in town (including the court reporter). And he called me “little lady.” He called me “little lady” three times. The third time he did it, he said “little lady, I’m going to have to take a lot of bathroom breaks because I have old man disease. Do you know what that is?”
And so help me, a snarky answer just welled up inside of me. “Is it that you have to be the center of attention at all times?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just have to go to the bathroom a lot.”
But something happened in that moment. The tone of the deposition changed. And as I began the questioning the witness, I felt good. I had prepared well. I was getting the information I wanted (and making the points that I wanted to make).
My opposing counsel looked at me suspiciously in a bit and asked, “What law school did you go to?” (Like it had just occurred to this man that I had attended law school.) A bit later he asked, “and what undergrad did you attend?”
At the end of the deposition, he came over to me and shook my hand. “You’re a really good lawyer,” he said. And I was so mad. Because he was surprised. He was surprised that I was a good lawyer.
I’ve thought about this interaction a lot over the years. This interaction has taught me about power and control in depositions. It led me to learn about implicit bias: Why was this man surprised that I was a good lawyer? But it has also got me thinking about our profession’s bias about law schools. When I began outperforming this man’s expectations he immediately asked what law school I attended.
Of course, the ranking of your law school does not correlate to how good a lawyer you are at all. So why do so many lawyers care about it?
When I summered at a big firm in Washington, D.C., my law school (Vanderbilt) was the lowest ranked school that the firm hired from. The massive group of Harvard law students would have lunch together once a week, whereas I cobbled together a lunch bunch with the Cornell law student and the Duke law student. My own rag-tag crew. And it’s not just big firms in D.C. where this is an issue. I moved to Minnesota in 2008, and, since then, I have witnessed folks issue snobby pronouncements about every single law school in town.
I wonder whether this happens because our profession lacks real objectivity. In the hard sciences, of course, outcomes can truly be measured. Results can be graphed. In the legal profession, it is almost impossible to parse outcomes from underlying facts and the law. We will never truly know whether we won a case because we had the better side or just out-lawyered the other side.
The best lawyer in the world can lose a case. The worst lawyer can win one. And I wonder whether this lack of objectivity leads us to look for answers where none exist. And so we start ranking things. We rank LSAT scores. We rank law schools. We rank ourselves in our law school classes. We rank law firms. But we are deceiving ourselves if we think these rankings are objective.
I attended Vanderbilt. It isn’t ranked as highly as Yale or Harvard. And yet I am confident that I received the best legal education possible. I had strong relationships with my professors (one of whom recommended that I apply to a clerkship with a judge in Minnesota). I had strong relationships with my peers. And at my big fancy law firm in D.C., there were Harvard students who couldn’t find a professor to write them a recommendation for a clerkship. They simply had never met any of their professors.
None of this is to knock Harvard. There are great attorneys out there who went to Harvard. But there are also great attorneys out there who went to state schools and night schools, and to assume that the quality of the lawyer corresponds to a U.S. News & World Report ranking is error.
And it is an error because it means that we end up underestimating folks and possibly hurting ourselves.
A 2016 study found that hurricanes named after women kill more folks than hurricanes named after men. Indeed, “[f]eminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to a lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness,” a team of researchers explained in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
I never want to be the person that is less prepared because I assumed something about my opponent. And yet I surprised my opponent in Indiana, who was willing to perceive risk differently based on my age, gender, and school. I hope to do better than that—for my clients as well as myself.
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Sybil Dunlop is a partner at Greene Espel.
