Don’t Trust the Establishment with Your Self-Esteem
For most lawyers who make it into a large firm, the establishment has always been a reliable narrator.
Schools, employers, judges, professors, senior partners—all of them, for most of these attorneys’ lives—have dispensed approval steadily and generously. According to the establishment, these attorneys are smart. They are diligent. They have what it takes. And that institutional validation becomes a kind of oxygen one breathes without noticing, until the moment it stops.
The Washington Post wrote about this dynamic way back in 1982, profiling a Washington attorney named Harry Cole, who was passed over for partner at Arent Fox. The decision surprised Cole and everyone who knew him. His friends, anticipating a positive outcome, threw him a joint birthday-and-partnership celebration before the vote was official.
The party went about as well as you’d expect.
Cole described the aftermath in stark terms. He felt empty. He couldn’t concentrate. He wasn’t getting much work done. Having never faced serious professional rejection before, he had, in his words, “shaped his life according to the approved model”—Amherst, Boston University, the FCC, one of Washington’s best firms—and at each stop the system had affirmed him. “You trust the establishment with your self-esteem,” he said, “because it’s always told you good things about yourself. Then wham.”
That was forty-three years ago. The profession has loosened considerably since: lateral moves, in-house-to-partnership tracks, and alternative paths that would have been unthinkable a generation ago are only some of the seismic changes in how law is practiced in large firms. But the wham hasn’t gone away. It has just taken new forms. It might be a midyear review that feels more ambiguous or unexpected than it should. A partner who stops looping you in. A firm-wide email about economic headwinds. Large firms present themselves as an institution of permanence and order. In practice, it is one of the more volatile environments a young professional can enter. 82% of associates who left their firms in 2023 did so within five years of being hired—an all-time high, per the NALP Foundation.
The problem isn’t that the establishment is malicious. It’s indifferent. A firm’s needs shift. A practice slows. A partnership vote leans in a different direction. The economics require that associates bill 2,000-plus hours a year while generating revenue three or four times their salary, and the machine moves on whether you are ready or not.
One of Cole’s contemporaries who was also passed over for partner at another firm put it plainly: “It doesn’t get any better. My stomach still churns when I walk in the door. You learn sadly that no matter what they said about being on a team, it’s their game, their field, their ball, and their rules.”
Big law markets itself as a meritocracy. Perhaps. But if it is, it’s a meritocracy constrained within a hierarchy. Hierarchies are conservative. They reward predictability, deference, and narrow definitions of value. They are not designed to protect your sense of self. They are designed to serve the institution’s interests, and they will do so whether or not those interests align with yours.
The more prestige an institution carries, the more easily your identity gets absorbed into it. Losing your place can feel like losing your reflection. As an attorney quoted in the piece observed: “If you were to live with your colleagues night and day for seven years and then get pushed out, how would you feel? Like you’ve been betrayed. No one comes out whole.”
What’s striking about Harry Cole is how little, in retrospect, he needed any of it. He died in 2025. His obituary described a life of genuine range and accomplishment—the kind of person big, faceless institutions tend to undervalue because they cannot categorize them. He was a talented lawyer, yes, but he was also a guitarist and banjo player, a bandleader, a baker, and a passionate crossword puzzler. The partnership vote that devastated him in 1982 turned out to be a footnote in a larger and much more interesting life story. He just didn’t know that yet. When the wham hits, most people don’t.
It’s always been possible to be passed over; Cole’s story is proof. But hinging your identity on equity partnership is measurably more perilous now than it was in 1982. At the largest firms, roughly 8–12% of associates make partner, and the track now runs nearly nine years. Even “making it” increasingly means something different: as of 2025, non-equity partners are the majority—50.9%—of all partners at Am Law 100 firms. Meanwhile, the gap between the people grinding and the people profiting keeps widening: seventh-year associate compensation grew just $20,500 between 2021 and 2024, the smallest gain in a decade, while equity partner profits surged. The establishment isn’t lying to you, exactly. But the odds in wishful-thinking junior lawyers’ heads and the odds the system delivers are very different numbers.
The alternative to misplaced institutional trust isn’t cynicism. It’s a kind of professional pragmatism: treating big law as one chapter rather than the whole book, building portable skills, cultivating relationships that belong to you rather than the firm, and investing in an identity that doesn’t evaporate when a partnership committee reaches a different conclusion. Big law is not always a great place to be, but it’s almost always a great place to have been. Take what you want and need from it; leave the rest behind.
Trust the establishment to train you and challenge you. It will. It’s very good at that. Just don’t trust it with the meaning of your career. That belongs only to you.