“I have found that I experience the most success when I step back from what is expected of me and choose the path that puts other people first.”
Katie DeReus
University of Tennessee College of Law Class of 2025
When I decided that I wanted to go to law school, my main motivation was that I wanted to help people. At the time, I was a a junior in college, and I didn’t really know what helping people meant yet. I had seen also sorts of documentaries about the Innocence Project and watched movies like “Dark Waters” and “Erin Brockovich.” Helping people at this magnitude seemed so unattainable, so it was hard to picture what helping people would look like after three years in law school.
Once I started my first year, it felt like all those dreams of helping others flew out the window. To do well in law school, I felt like I had to only focus on myself. I had to work harder than everyone else to get good grades, and our exams focused more on the principle of not helping the people around me. When On Campus Interviews came around, I was pitted against all my classmates as we competed against each other for the same small number of jobs. There was also pressure to go after the Big Law jobs if you could get them, even if that wasn’t what you actually wanted to do. And after that, there was lots of pressure to join a journal and try to get a clerkship, again at the exclusion of those around me. Again and again, it felt like I was incentivized to do the opposite of helping people because that was what would help me get ahead.
Having experienced much of the above, and after watching others experience the rest, I find myself striving to get back in touch with my desire to help people. And in fact, while it seems like a career in the legal field requires being self-centered, I have found that I experience the most success when I step back from what is expected of me and choose the path that puts other people first. If lawyers are truly interested in being successful leaders in their community, the first step should be learning to put others first.
People are the most important thing in life. No matter your religion, creed, or belief system, everything comes back to how you treat others. The legal community is not an exception to this rule. A lawyer’s entire career involves working to further the goals of others. In this sense, it makes sense to de-center our success, and focus more on what success looks like for our clients. When we make this shift, we are instead incentivized to focus on helping others. By keeping our careers client centered, we become more ethical and increase client satisfaction, which will in turn help us be more successful as lawyers. The structure of the legal field makes this hard to do, but it is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. I know that I am more satisfied with my career and education when I focus on helping others rather than bettering myself at their expense.
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