Trainee

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Trainee
/treɪˈniː/ (n.)

Little basil fotherington-tomas before he is turned.

Every now and then an anguished howl will yammer across LinkedIn signalscape as some well-meaning thought leader or other — sometimes, an anonymous self-organising autonomous collective of them — lights a touchpaper to the apparently grisly working conditions for young commercial lawyers.

It sets off a predictable dumpster fire, which woofs, explodes and quickly burns out as people move on, forget, come to their senses, or are distracted by the next bauble, or whatever motivates the onworld herd these days. But until then it plays out like so:

“It cannot be right,” they wail, “in our enlightened times, to torture out younglings so. Fourteen hours a day! Sometimes more! They are not up to it. It will crush them. We must be humane.”

There will then follow a long and tiring diatribe about the fragile psychiatric disposition of the upcoming generation. It will culminate in robust accord that we must all, at every opportunity, speak loudly and tediously about our own vulnerabilities, thereby ending forever the stigma of airing our personal hang-ups.

Look, kids: keeping schtum about your frailties isn’t a travesty. It’s common sense. It’s personal branding 101. It is what people do.

The JC will spare you his usual Nietzschean quotes about military life, apposite though they are: suffice to say, there is nothing quite like a good “shoeing” at the bottom of the ruck every now and then to stouten a young attorney’s fibre. It builds a kind of resilience that whining about mental health on LinkedIn never will.

In any case, a better question is this: what sort of person regards any part of the big law military industrial complex — even its front-line of callow inductees — with even a twinge of sympathy? The same sorts of people who would cuddle polar bears, that’s who. They don’t tend to last long.

For, really: what do you think happens to those cute little Kirkland & Ellis cubs when they grow up? Have you not seen Stranger Things?

The Harvard Law School careers office is not the Russian front. These poor little lambs were not conscripted, press-ganged, nor marched at gunpoint down to barracks at Latham & Watkins.

To the contrary, these little blighters spent years clambering over each other to get to where they are now. This was their one goal, their guiding, blinding light. These people are trained killers. They eat the weak. They are motivated to this penury. They want it. They understand, the way LinkedIn grandees seem not to, that what does not kill you makes you stronger.

Five years of trench warfare is part of their plan.

And remember, these babes-in-arms — armed babies, at any rate — are charged out, from the moment they put down their joss-sticks and hacky-sacks and climb into the power-suit, at five hundred bucks an hour. And they know nothing. Their work is thus triple-checked by some slightly older cherub who is paid nine hundred bucks an hour and knows barely any more. You are paying an effective rate of sixteen hundred bucks an hour a kid you wouldn’t trust to look after your car.

It was, as we old lags are prone to say, ever thus. Our liberal metropolitan mores may wax and wane, but ever thus it will remain. The career path of commercial lawyering is not, never has been, and never will be, for milksops. Those who have clambered over enough scuffling bodies to earn a big law training contract has, we presume, a deliberative faculty, and options, even in a tight labour market.

If you don’t like hard work, young sir or madam, find something else to do. You’ll cope.

See also

• Molesworth
• Law firm