Making the Move: 
Switching from Government Work to the Private Sector

by Emily K. Johnson

I think it was my Torts professor who explained to me the difference between a lawyer and an attorney.

Aren’t they the same thing?

No, he shook his head. A lawyer is a subject of the law. To the law. Lawyer means one versed in the laws, or a practitioner of law. It comes from the Middle English word "lauier." Essentially, "to law." Being a lawyer means holding a vocation without reference to politics. Attorney, on the other hand, comes from the Old French for to appoint. It is a much narrower term, denoting a legal agent retained by a client in the transaction of business.

During my tenure as a deputy prosecuting attorney, I often recalled this exchange, and was careful to refer to myself as a lawyer. My "client" was the public interest. So when I decided to take a position as an associate at a private firm in civil practice, I wondered, Will I now be merely an attorney? Will the noble title lawyer be forever lost from my vocabulary? As I reflect on the differences between private practice and government work, it occurs to that while many of the most striking differences seem superficial, they point towards the heart of the difference between being a government lawyer and a private attorney.

My lifestyle has changed in very concrete ways since changing jobs. Look for example, at the experience of entering the workplace.

Entering the King County Courthouse, one immediately smells buttery popcorn wafting through the lobby, cloying to the bodies passing through the metal detector. This has the unintended benefit of covering the personal odors of those courthouse denizens whose smell is more offensive to delicate noses. The Courthouse chimes with the din of humanity. Every kind of person steps into the elevators: politicians who wink and shake the hands of the courthouse security; lawyers weighed down by their files and briefcases; middle class jurors wearing their badges; retirees and high school students out to watch a juicy trial; county employees who joke while clutching their lattes; and the accused who are sometimes recognizable by their worn-down demeanor or second-hand clothes or their youth, but who so much more often are indistinguishable from the other visitors. There are few uplifting reasons civilians pass through the revolving doors: a civil marriage; a week’s respite from work served on jury duty; to get a case dismissed. The other reasons comprise the traumas and dramas of our modern existence – drug addiction, divorce, disputes trifling and large, and crime. The Courthouse is a building ripe with emotion.

In front of my new building is a piece of public art -- a sculpture in the shape of a tulip, an enormous metal tulip. I want desperately for the tulip to symbolize something positive about American capitalism, or even my future. In fact, the tulip signals nothing about the bankers, stockbrokers, and attorneys who populate the building. It does, however, hint that this is a place devoid of the highs and lows of the Courthouse. Things happen more slowly here, and mood swings can be predicted far in advance. Reserved is the name of the game. A gentle grand piano greets visitors in the lobby. Occasionally someone will play it spontaneously, but most of the time it is silent. Two styles of dress distinguish workers here: men wear either khakis or suits, women wear either blazers or lilting floral skirts. They speak in whispers, if at all. They nod hello to co-workers, then clench their briefcases or look down at their newspapers. Occupants strain to exude an aura of seriousness, battling the whimsy of the misplaced tulip outside.

While these characteristics have little to do with the practice of law, they do combine to create a particular lifestyle. At the Prosecutor’s Office, every day I acquired a new entertaining story to tell. Like the time a man spit on my leg, then proudly declared his deed and called me a whore. This simply does not happen in private practice. In private practice, people seldom cry. In criminal work, a week doesn’t go by that you don’t see someone crying, be it an abused child, or a defendant protesting her fate. In my new job, sometimes my eyes tear up because my contacts are bothering me.

This is not to say that civil practice is without intensity or passion. As an attorney, an advocate for my clients, many times I feel my clients have been wronged – wrongly injured or wrongly sued - and that makes me angry. I feel this way in my new position particularly because most of my clients are small to medium-sized businesses whose business has been injured by a multinational corporation. Second, of course there is always pressure to win – or to get a "fair" settlement. This is difficult because sometimes your client is going to lose big, and your job is to break this news to him and see that he doesn’t pay too much or hate you in the process. Much of civil practice rests on long-term client relationships, so you lose a trial and you risk losing a client.

As a result of this dynamic, civil practice is much more detail-oriented. In contrast to the 60 days criminal lawyers have to try a case, civil practitioners have the luxury of years to resolve a dispute. But the luxury that time bestows makes attorneys much more focused on the minutiae of a case. The fine-toothed comb is alive and well in private practice, making the practice more tedious than government work. In government work, there is too much work for too few workers, so the details are absorbed into the big picture. These trade-offs are perhaps the biggest problems with each type of practice – government work is overwhelming and exhausting, civil work can be tedious and mundane.

I have also noticed that each side views the other with some amount of suspicion. Private attorneys are aghast at the conditions I describe at the Prosecutor’s Office – two weeks to prepare a trial, limited secretarial support. When I see my Prosecutor friends they ask me "Are you bored yet?" Sitting in an office all day is like a prison sentence to them.

I used to feel confident that when I rode in to the courtroom, I wore a white hat. The roles of the players were clearly defined – good guy (me, the police officers), bad guy (the defendant). But now, more times than not, I feel that I am still wearing the white hat. Now, though, I am not the hero of an entire town when I shoot down the bad guy, I am the champion of my client. The problem is that many times the good guy has also wronged the bad guy somehow, and disputes hinge on a matter of degrees.

Civil practice is the business of forging and dissolving relationships. The guy who is your client’s best hope today may be her worst nightmare tomorrow. Roles are much fuzzier, and the law can be less clear-cut. Perhaps the fact that civil law is so much more complex leads to the assumption that attorneys manipulate it to suit their client’s advantage. In fact, what I see now is that civil practitioners also serve the law rather than merely manipulate it for their client’s case.

Today I try to wear the white hat, I think I wear the white hat, but just as often that hat is black, or even brown. But I feel that I can still call myself a lawyer.

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