Osler's Razor

I have been using Wednesdays to profile my fellow classmates in the Yale Law class if 1990. Strikingly, most of them have found wonderful vocations. However, law is a difficult field, and the stresses in big firms, in particular, can be overwhelming.

When we all got to New Haven, Chuck McKenzie was in many ways like me: a state-school guy from the middle of the country in a place full of Ivy League grads. It was easy to feel unsophisticated-- I know that I did.

Chuck was a straight-A student at Memphis State who had all the academic tools necessary to compete in our weird environment. There weren't many of us from the "fly-over" states, and we tended to know each other.

After graduation, Chuck snagged a plum job at Cleary Gottlieb, the big New York firm (as did, at the same time, last week's featured classmate, Hiram Chodosh). At the time the big New York firms were paying the best of nearly any job available to us, and Chuck had about $40,000 in loans to pay off. Partners made about $900,000 a year-- in 1992 dollars.

It didn't go well. According to an article in the Washington Post, Chuck told his dad he was on pace to bill about 3,000 hours of billable work in 1991-- a workload that requires working at least 11 hours a day, five days a week. His wife did not see him much.

In October of 1991, McKenzie began to suspect that he was being targeted with tasks by partners trying to drive him out of the firm. It's unclear whether or not that is true.

He clearly was not doing well, and on October 26 Chuck's wife Janice went to talk to some of the partners. He was given a leave of absence.

At this point, I have to interject my own sympathy for Chuck. I worked for a big firm and have known many, many people who have. Some have thrived; many others have not. It must have felt like a terrible failure to him at that time, especially given the expectations we were sent out of school with.

In January of 1992, he jumped off the roof of an 18-story Marriott hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina. His suicide was widely reported. I remember hearing about it on the news and feeling flattened.

There is a truth here that I try to convey to my students: The "plum" job that pays the most and that everyone seems to want may not be the best job, or even a good job, for most people. Big law firms are strange beasts. In the future, I will profile some of my classmates who have done great and good things while working at big firms. However, those firms have particular dangers. Overwork is one-- they can be perilous to the idea of a work-life balance. Amorality is another: big firms take cases based on who pays them, not on what is right or good. They may be entirely ethical in their discrete actions, but that "ethical" conduct often favors the strong over the weak and the rich over the poor.

When a former student comes to me who is burned out from working at a firm, I always think of Chuck, the classmate who was a lot like me. I take time to work it through with those former students, and open their minds to different options. I make calls.  I suppose that if nothing else, Charles Ford McKenzie's death created that good thing-- that those of us who knew him and now teach took to heart the lesson of his death.