| | One of the main reasons I was interested in taking this class is to learn more about unconventional legal careers. I don't think of myself as being a very entrepreneurial person, so I've found myself listening to some of what Eben says about working for yourself and doing good while doing well with skepticism. The path he describes sounds great, but I don't see myself who has what it takes to strike out on my own (I imagine other people feel the same way--after all, at least some of us are in law school because we are risk averse). That's why I found this article to be so interesting. The article is fairly light about Casey Greenfield's actual legal qualifications. She went to Yale Law School and worked as an associate for a short time at Gibson Dunn. She also took some time off to work (though it's unclear how relevant her work experience was to her legal career). The article also doesn't tell us too much about the personal traits she has that might make her an exceptional lawyer. The article does emphasize how pretty, privileged, charming and tenacious (at least regarding her own high profile custody battle) she is. I came away from this article with complicated feelings. On the one hand, Casey Greenfield has managed to strike out on the path Eben has been describing to us. She has done so at a fairly young age and without spending a lot of time doing work that she was not interested in. On the other hand, by giving us so little information about her actual legal career and qualifications, the article makes it seem like she has been able to do this because she is very privileged and because she had an out-of-wedlock baby and a high profile child support/custody battle with a famous, married legal commentator. I'd be interested in getting a more nuanced and informative perspective on Casey Greenfield's career and I'll be interested to see where she and her firm are in 20 years. | | | --Main.JanePetersen-28 Mar 2012 | |
<
< | Like Jane, I've been struggling to reconcile what I know about myself (quite risk averse and not very entrepreneurial) with what it would take to have the kind of practice Eben has described in class and which I thought he summed up poignantly in another threat (http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/twiki/bin/view/LawContempSoc/MutualDependence). "Try, as a perceptual exercise," he said, "to imagine that the end of your work here isn't a job, but a law practice. Your practice is signified by your license, which entitles you to have and solicit clients. You drive your practice, so that it produces the mix of social benefit and material reward that you define as necessary. ...Thoughtful, adventurous people, who can see that there are many things amiss about the system that is dying—which made a few people wealthy, lots of people miserable, and society very little better off—will not only entertain but will actively seek out the road to a more humane, thoughtful, independent, socially fulfilling way of using a law license." | >
> | Like Jane, I've been struggling to reconcile what I know about myself (quite risk averse and not very entrepreneurial) with what it would take to have the kind of practice Eben has described in class and which I thought he summed up poignantly in another thread (http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/twiki/bin/view/LawContempSoc/MutualDependence). "Try, as a perceptual exercise," he said, "to imagine that the end of your work here isn't a job, but a law practice. Your practice is signified by your license, which entitles you to have and solicit clients. You drive your practice, so that it produces the mix of social benefit and material reward that you define as necessary. ...Thoughtful, adventurous people, who can see that there are many things amiss about the system that is dying—which made a few people wealthy, lots of people miserable, and society very little better off—will not only entertain but will actively seek out the road to a more humane, thoughtful, independent, socially fulfilling way of using a law license." | | | | |
<
< | I like plans and paths and respond well to thinking that I'm on one, so I've struggled to find real-world models who are doing what Eben describes. I agree with the posts above that Greenfield probably isn't it. Yes, she is soliciting her own clients and likely using her license in a more independent and thoughtful way than she would have been had she stayed at a firm where her time was dictated by others. However, as Lizzie points out, even with the autonomy to define a mix of social benefit and material reward in her practice, the article doesn't suggest that she's too concerned with the former. Another example that I've found more helpful is the blog of this anonymous young lawyer who couldn't find legal work in a firm after graduating, accepted a non-legal job, but decided after six months of that to quit and start his own practice. Above the Law recently posted about him, so many of you may have seen it, but for those who haven't his blog is here: http://hangshingles.wordpress.com/welcome/. Even though monetary constraints obligate him to accept whatever work he can generate, which is primarily criminal defense work, he is driving his own practice. Also of interest is how he runs his practice: cheaply, through use of a PO box and technology, and by building a network (most of his first cases came from referrals from judges with whom he had cultivated relationships). | >
> | I like plans and paths and respond well to thinking that I'm on one, so I've struggled to find real-world models who are doing what Eben describes. I agree with the posts above that Greenfield probably isn't it. Yes, she is soliciting her own clients and likely using her license in a more independent and thoughtful way than she would have been had she stayed at a firm where her time was dictated by others. However, as Lizzie points out, even with the autonomy to define a mix of social benefit and material reward in her practice, the article doesn't suggest that she's too concerned with the former. Another example that I've found more helpful is the blog of this anonymous young lawyer who couldn't find legal work in a firm after graduating, accepted a non-legal job, but decided after six months of settling to quit and start his own practice. Above the Law recently posted about him, so many of you may have seen it, but for those who haven't his blog is here: http://hangshingles.wordpress.com/welcome/. Even though monetary constraints obligate him to accept whatever work he can generate, which is primarily criminal defense work, he is driving his own practice. Also of interest is how he runs his practice: cheaply, through use of a PO box and technology, and by building a network (most of his first cases came from referrals from judges with whom he had cultivated relationships). | | | The young lawyer isn't exactly what Eben describes, and his experience is not entirely predictive of what it would look like if any of us decided to go into practice for ourselves, but its interesting to learn from and helpful just to see that even though its not without struggle (I doubt any line of work is), it isn't impossible, either. |
|