| work for someone else
or going to Vietnam, neither of which was very attractive to me at the time.
Law school also seemed to offer a useful set of skills to add to my resume,
while I figured out what to do with the rest of my life." Howard did well in law school. However, he says, "I think a two year apprenticeship at a law firm would have been more useful than the courses I had to take in years two and three. As I look back, those courses were totally useless in my legal career." In 1971, after law school, he joined a four-lawyer general practice firm. After one year, they put him in charge of their recruiting efforts, and over the next seven years, he recruited about forty-five young lawyers from top law schools. The firm was perceived to be highly successful and profitable which tended to make it easy to hire the best. In 1978, however, Howard gave up his recruiting activities. He recalls, "I didn't want to continue with it because first, I was thinking of leaving; and second, the promises, stories, and descriptions of the firm which I had been repeating to recruits for years no longer appeared true or accurate. The firm had changed, and it didn't seem fair to hide the truth from these young, eager graduates. The truth was I had become miserable." Three different realizations led to Howard's final decision to leave the law. He remembers, "The senior partners, ten years older than I, were not really interested in building a firm. All they wanted to do was to take out every dollar they could, and that attitude didn't seem to me to bode well for my |