She Was Fired for Refusing to Make Coffee, Then Went to Harvard Law

Sarah Isgur was 21 and six weeks into her first real job in Washington, as a press secretary in a congressional office on Capitol Hill, when she got fired. She does not drink coffee, and Isgur said she thought it was sexist to have "the young woman in the office" make coffee she did not drink. So she refused.

That stand sent her to Harvard Law School. Isgur, a Texas native who later worked in Republican campaigns, the Justice Department, and political media, said the episode was self-righteous and obnoxious, and "the worst reason to go to law school."

The movie Legally Blonde had just come out, and Isgur was still indignant about being fired. She remembers thinking, if she had a degree from Harvard Law School, they would not have fired her. She compared the logic to a Toby Keith revenge song, the idea that a fancy credential would prove her old bosses wrong.

She arrived in Cambridge with no plan and almost no legal vocabulary. She did not know the names of big law firms, and she did not know what a clerkship was, a yearlong job assisting a judge.

She had also never seen or used the word for appeals. The only example she gave was Baker Botts, saying she probably could have named the firm because she had seen its name on a building in Houston.

That gap was surprising for a lawyer's daughter who did not know legal basics. Her father was a lawyer who became a federal bankruptcy judge the year before she started law school. She said it was a type of judgeship he sought without going through the usual confirmation process, and when he told her he was putting himself forward, she told him he would not get it.

She walked into Harvard, by her own account, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed. She had an idea she would stay in politics and perhaps become a campaign lawyer, then quickly decided that filling out election paperwork all day sounded boring. For the moment, she was simply thrilled to be there to see what would happen next.