How Qian Julie Wang’s Upbringing as an Undocumented Immigrant Informed Her Legal Career
For the keynote address of the LF Dealmakers conference, Validity Finance Founder and CEO Ralph Sutton, introduced NY Times Best-Selling Author and Civil Rights Litigator, Qian Julie Wang. Her memoir, Beautiful Country, was ranked a best book of 2021 by the New York Times, and has been well-reviewed by many distinguished outlets. Ms. Wang began by sharing her ‘most humiliating story’ from Big Law. She began her carer at a top-5 firm as a hungry summer associate eager to prove herself at this white-shoe law firm. She noticed that partners and associates kept coming to her asking her to take on various assignments, and didn’t realize that she should select which ones to work on, so she said yes to each offer, so quickly found herself working on 10 major litigation cases. For the next month, Ms. Wang skipped all of the orientation, lunches, outings, and buried her head in WestLaw doing research. It turns out, one of the training sessions she missed was quite important–because a senior partner at the firm called her into his office and asked her what the hell she had been doing for five weeks? Ms. Wang hadn’t been billing any of her research time, because she had missed the training session that explained that part of the process. So the vast majority of her work went un-billed. Through some self reflection, Ms. Wang realized that her problem stemmed from her belief that she didn’t belong. Her very first job was age 7 at a sweatshop in Chinatown, as an undocumented immigrant, and here she was in a fancy white-shoe law firm. She had spent her life afraid of anyone in a uniform, afraid they might be out to deport her. And so when she got her summer associate job at the law firm, she brought that insecurity in the door with her. Ms Wang described her family’s suffering under the Communist takeover of China, how they were imprisoned and tortured for reading banned books. She came to admire two Americans she read about–Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Thurgood Marshall. That was when she decided to become a lawyer, when she eventually came to America. However, like many lawyers, she fell into the trap of focusing just on the compensation. She billed and billed so many hours that she lost her sense of purpose. It wasn’t until she started writing her memoir, Beautiful Country, that she re-discovered the reason she became a lawyer in the first place. She realized that the little girl who had grown up working in a sweatshop dreamed of being a lawyer so she could help people, and here years later she had achieved that dream, but the allure of those billable hours had caused her to lose the plot. Ms. Wang took a sharp turn and decided to focus her efforts on helping marginalized communities. Her work now helps her find her way back to the child she was, and provides a sense of fulfillment about her career that she never previously experienced.
