I applied to work in legal research at a time when all eyes were on the police.

My hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, had become a national case study for the consequences of overpolicing, and I realized how little I knew about the legal systems meant to prevent such harm. My first research project, which I began during a separate internship in healthcare data science, focused on understanding the interactions between law enforcement, victims of violence, and healthcare workers in emergency spaces. While research allowed me to formalize my conceptual understanding of certain gaps in our legal system, I grew increasingly interested in litigation as a means to work directly with the affected stakeholders and establish precedents that might shape those systems moving forward. This led me to my postgraduate job in economic consulting, where I was able to apply my academic background in a setting where I could observe what attorneys actually do in litigation and arbitration disputes.

One aspect of casework that I hadn’t fully considered was that you do not typically choose your clients, especially not as a junior colleague. As a student research assistant, I took for granted that my colleagues’ and my own beliefs were similarly aligned with our legal center’s mission; why else would we all be there? But consulting was different. Consulting—like law—is a service-based field, and like anyone who has worked in the service industry can tell you, the client is always right. I was at an inflexion point where I now had to reconcile the intellectual satisfaction I gleaned from my work with the ethical ambiguities of working on behalf of clients whose values and goals I might not understand or even endorse.

This tension manifested clearly in one dispute over the appropriate compensation for expropriated land, including the value of that area’s biodiversity. When I was initially asked to join this case, I was thrilled. It was my first opportunity to apply the principles of environmental economics and business that I had learned in undergrad to a real-world case with potential real-world impacts. This type of case was rare in my practice group (financial markets), and I eagerly imagined applying long forgotten environmental pricing models from my college textbooks to value species diversity and justify its protection or ensure fair compensation for its loss. 

So, it was jarring to learn that our firm was representing the side that wanted to lower the value of alleged damages to biodiversity. Nonetheless, in order to represent our client’s interests, I had to push past my initial discomfort and critically evaluate the opposing side’s analysis for any weaknesses, even as I sympathized with their aims. In doing so, I uncovered serious analytical flaws, including a misapplied regression model, cherry-picked assumptions from non-academic sources, and even a basic arithmetic error that significantly inflated the valuation. The weaknesses from this particular valuation ultimately strengthened my conviction that better systems, regulations, and analyses are still needed to properly defend and protect natural resources. But this case is merely representative of many cases that forced me to take new, unknown, and sometimes uncomfortable positions on behalf of diverse clients; it’s also those cases to which I am most grateful. By slipping into positions that challenged my own, I was able to expand my knowledge on foreign subject matter and clarify my own beliefs. 

As future lawyers, we will inevitably work with people, clients or otherwise, whose values and perspectives differ from our own. So I’m especially grateful to my time in consulting for demonstrating why wrestling with those perspectives, especially the ones we might most resist, is when real growth occurs. Yes, law is a service-based industry, and yes, the client comes first, but the client-attorney relationship is not a one-way street. It’s worth reflecting on what lessons we as (aspiring) lawyers can and should take away from our clients.

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Alene Hanson is a first-year law student and brand new Impact blogger at BC Law. Contact her at hansoal@bc.edu.