Introduction

One of the benefits of externships is that students are typically exposed to a wide range of lawyers and other legal professionals. As discussed earlier, there are many opportunities to learn substantive law, problem solving, and other knowledge and skills. As noted above, there is also ample opportunity to learn about professional identity through observation, discussion, emulation, and other means. We investigate professional identity formation further in the next section.

What is professional identity?

Before diving into professional identity, it is instructive to think about identity more generally. Many theorists have engaged with construction of identit(ies), many drawing a complex picture of the shifting and highly contextual nature of identity in different contexts.

James Paul Gee writes about the complex and changing nature of identity and what “kind of person” we might be in certain times and places:

“When any human being acts and interacts in a given context, others recognize that person as acting and interacting as a certain “kind of person” or even as several different “kinds” at once… A person might be recognized as being a certain kind of radical feminist, homeless person, overly macho male, “yuppie,” street gang member, community activist, academic, kindergarten teacher, “at risk” student, and so on and so forth, through countless possibilities. The “kind of person” one is recognized as “being,” at a given time and place, can change from moment to moment in the interaction, can change from context to context, and, of course, can be ambiguous or unstable. Being recognized as a certain “kind of person,” in a given context, is what I mean here by “identity.” In this sense of the term, all people have multiple identities connected not to their “internal states” but to their performances in society. This is not to deny that each of us has what we might call a “core identity” that holds more uniformly, for ourselves and others, across contexts… Different societies, and different historical periods, have tended to foreground one or the other of these perspectives on identity… In a rough way, Western society has moved historically from foregrounding the first perspective (we are what we are primarily because of our “natures”), through the second (we are what we are primarily because of the positions we occupy in society), to the third (we are what we are primarily because of our individual accomplishments as they are interactionally recognized by others). The fourth perspective (we are what we are because of the experiences we have had within certain sorts of “affinity groups”) is, I argue here, gaining prominence in the “new capitalism”… It is crucial to realize that these four perspectives are not separate from each other… Rather than discrete categories, they are ways to focus our attention on different aspects of how identities are formed and sustained. Another way to put the matter is this: They are four ways to formulate questions about how identity is functioning for a specific person (child or adult) in a given context or across a set of different contexts. Yet another way to put the matter is this: They are four stands that may very well all be present and woven together as a given person acts within a given context. Nonetheless, we can still ask, for a given time and place, which strand or strands predominate and why.” (“Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education” (2000-2001) 25 Review of Research in Education 99 at 99).

Sociologist Erving Goffman who wrote about the conflict (or lack thereof) that occurs when we take on roles that are close to our perception and experience of self versus those that are more “detached” from our experience of self. For Goffman, humans are constantly taking on performative roles to control how others view them. This will always require presenting certain parts of one’s self and hiding or de-emphasizing others – as Goffman called it, “impression management.”

Both Gee and Goffman’s ideas are highly relevant to a professional environment. Hoffman would argue that humans adapt to a professional environment in some way, but that no one presents all of themselves in every situation including the workplace. In short, people are always performing. However, the degree to which a student or lawyer feels they must “perform” and manage their public impression has significant impacts on the congruency between their personal and professional identities.

Professional identity is a seemingly easy concept: In essence, it is comprised of the characteristics, beliefs, and ways-of-being that make up one’s profession. But examining one’s identity is deceptively challenging. As Carrie Yang Costello (now Cary Gabriel Costello) wrote in “Professional Identity Crisis: Race, Class, Gender, and Success at Professional Schools” (2006),

“The fact is, our identities are like icebergs. The large bulk of them lies invisible to us below the surface of consciousness, while only a small part of them are perceptible to our conscious minds. Sociologists refer to the nonconscious bulk of identity as ‘habitus’, a medical term imported into sociological usage by Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 1997). According to the standard definition by Loic Wacquant, habitus is constituted by ‘cognitive and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation and action that agents engage in their practice’ (1990; 401)…. Formal identifying schemes, while simple to apply objectively, often fail to capture the subjective reality of identities. Asking individuals to identify themselves reveals conscious identity, which is open to agentic manipulation. This is important… But it is equally important to remember that the bulk of identity lives below the level of consciousness… The invisibility of habitus and its resistance to conscious manipulation create a problem for people working to alter their identities-such as students at professional schools…. “

An externship placement will ask students to reflect on their location and its relationship to burgeoning professional identity. Reflective questions (such as those found throughout this text) might require digging into ideas that are – as Costello notes – both open to manipulation and also below conscious understanding. Entering a placement in a professional role requires a significant shift in a student’s identity. Indeed, many students report that only a short time in law school alters how they think about the world: A dangerous crack in a sidewalk raises questions of municipal law and limitation periods. Whether to intervene in a bar fight leads to a complicated analysis of risk and liability. This new way of thinking is one step in the path to professional identity formation.

However, beginning to “think like a lawyer” is often insufficient in being accepted and acknowledged as a “lawyer”. Again, Costello writes:

“Formally, all a student need to is to acquire a professional identity is graduate from the appropriate professional school and pass any required certifying exam. Being formally certified… is still insufficient for acceptance by employers, peers, and clients…. A certified professional school graduate who cannot ‘walk the walk and talk the talk’ will not seem like a true professional to others and will not be successful. Consider whether you would be likely to return to a therapist who giggled during your confession of sexual difficulties… Professional labor requires… a suitable, subjectively internalized professional identity…. Individual agency in working to become a successful professional is limited by structural forces that are internalized in the form of habitus… Agency is real and important, although constrained, and many students succeed despite the structural forces arrayed against them. Moreover, identities are not uniform and there is a great deal of individual variation in how people experience their genders, religious identities, ethnicities, and the like, and thus in how their identities will interact with a new professional identity.”

As Costello notes, professional identity formation is not uniformly experienced. In a qualitative study of law students’ professional identity formation, Professor John Bliss builds on Goffman’s work by interviewing students going through the job search process during law school:

“Among the law students interviewed for this study, experiences of professional identity varied strongly by students’ job-decision paths during law school. Students who pursued public-interest careers generally maintained a central conception of lawyer identity, which often overlapped with political, racial, religious, and gender roles. In contrast, students who pursued positions in large firms tended to describe substantial distancing from professional identity in their 2L interviews. For students who had initially stated a preference for positions in the public-interest sector but later decided to pursue large firms, this distancing was often accompanied by a distressing sense of temporariness and fraudulence in their professional identities. This raises questions as to whether we can—and whether we should—foster a more integrated conception of professional identity among new corporate lawyers.”

In an externship placement, students might be working in a context that is very closely aligned to their personal identit(ties), including one’s burgeoning professional identity. However, students might also have moments (or many moments) where their personal and professional identities feel incoherent and conflicting.

One’s personal identity and its relationship to professional identity can and will shift over a lifetime. We may become parents, we will become disabled, we will deal with loss and grief, success and failures. All these mean that self-exploration is not a one-time event but a lifetime of practice.