Using Law School Intelligently

Get Away from Law School

The first thing anyone said was, “Not here. Never.” Without providing a single actual reason for not wanting to hire a lawyer, they shut down the conversation. While their opinion is shortsighted and lacks a basic understanding of the industry in the United States (the company was started in the UK and my boyfriend is the only American on the leadership team), there are companies of all shapes and sizes that have the same perspective.

My role as a future attorney servicing, hopefully, companies like his is to prove that I am not only a lawyer, but can act as a trusted advisor about issues ranging from real estate to employment to litigation. People that have such a reaction to lawyers hold the view that lawyers are inflexible, unrelenting, and generally obnoxious people whose only skill is to say, “No, you shouldn’t do that.” In order to break that stereotype, I have to learn the business side of a prospective client’s work, understand their goals, and speak intelligently about how my services help them achieve those goals rather than just check the boxes or jump through the hoops. This sort of holistic outlook requires me in some ways to keep a healthy distance from law school.

There are many amazing opportunities outside of JG that can provide connections to thought leaders in the technology space, angel investors and venture capitalists, and people putting in the work to build their businesses every day. Whether it’s working part time for the type of company I’d like to one day make a client, interning for the New York Angels in the Fall, hanging out in the business school with friends who are actively building their own businesses, or attending conferences like LegalTech? and chatting with the industry thought leaders, it’s essential to acknowledge the world outside of legal academia in order to build the skill set for a viable practice.

But Also Take Full Advantage

While it’s important to recognize that there’s an entire world outside of JG, I’m paying for the opportunities and connections that are available within the Columbia community. More importantly, though I don’t want to be only a lawyer, I still need the expertise and skills of a lawyer. Within the halls of JG are an incredible number of resources both to learn how to think about the law and to connect to those in the profession who are actively doing what I hope to do. I plan to take advantage of the faculty as well as my peers in better understanding the path to a viable practice.

As we’ve discussed, for the type of practice I would like to build I will need expertise in far-ranging topics, including employment law, contracts, basic intellectual property, and corporate governance, just to name a few. It’s impossible to become a true expert in each of these fields, so my goal is to sample as many of them as possible this summer and during the next academic year. Once I have the basic idea of each of the different subject matters and can speak intelligently about the big topics, I will spend the following summer and my last year of law school immersing myself in one or two of the subject areas. I will choose these subjects based on what I feel are either most important to practice-building based on the use cases I see through time spent “in the real world” or the topics that I find the most interesting and might therefore lead to a more meaningful and engaging practice.

A grasp of the subject matter of particular aspects of the law is necessary for a lawyer in this field, but it is not sufficient. In addition to a deep dive into particular aspects of practicing with start-ups or small businesses, building a network of people that can connect me to prospective mentors, clients, and thought leaders is the most critical aspect of my time at law school. Columbia is perhaps the ideal law school for me in that it is rich with business-minded faculty. A quick search of the faculty pulls up experts in labor, technology, tax, and real estate law – all important aspects of a future practice. The professors with whom I interact in the next year will likely play the single largest role in my choice of which fields to pursue. Therefore, it’s imperative that I seek out courses and professors that can help me navigate their particular area of focus and who have a willingness to connect me with other leaders in their field.

With a little luck, a lot of research, and careful planning this summer, my next semester at Columbia will provide me with the opportunity to sample a variety of potential fields and to begin to develop a practical skill set that I can eventually use to grow into a practice.

Why are very early-stage businesses overwhelmingly likely to fail a better place for a community-aware lawyer to put her effort than less immature businesses? Why, really, is "startup" a category? For investors, and for a certain kind of "solutionist" entrepreneur, one can see the attraction. But would you feel more effective if you were Elizabeth Holmes' lawyer at Theranos than if you represented an Ethiopian immigrant who has built from absolutely nothing a chain of dry cleaners around Washington DC?

It seems to me that the draft itself recapitulates that process of leaving the personal ostensibly behind. The riff on interviewing and Felix Cohen doesn't really need to be there anymore: it's taking space rather than shedding light. The center of the essay lies in the "how to be a startup lawyer" quandary. Which isn't really a quandary. Knowing how to get results, which is building your license, and knowing how to relate to people who help you find clients, which is building your network, are accessible skills: you can wonder less in the large and act more confidently in the local. Acquire the ability to get results for businesses: know from the inside what they require to deal with subject matter regulation, finance, labor law, immigration, real estate: some combination of the problems that all businesses deal with. Lay your networks among investors, if you want to represent the hamster-wheels for interesting people that VC call "startups." Meet bankers, public servants, real estate handlaers: all the sorts of people who affect through their decisions the destinies of businesses. Those are your network as well as the lawyers who have been doing things you want to do longer than you have. Worry less about how to do some particular kind of practice building, and more about acquiring the skills and experience that every practice-builder needs. Use law school intelligently. But you're at the beginning. So for now, write about how. Then come back in a couple of months and start doing it.

Life Beyond Transcendental Nonsense

So everybody performs an unimaginative work that they have learned to do both sides of, but which is not the thing itself, which is something that has to be invented every time people meet in order to decide whether to have a relationship. Those skills, too, have fallen into such peculiar desuetude that people now try to establish using the computers that spy on them whether they are mutually attracted by such artificial narratives before they permit themselves to meet and to begin to perform their LinkedIn or Facebook profile, as the case of dating may be, as best they can under the disadvantage of presence as well as absence, also known as reality.

So you came to law school both in order to be a lawyer and to have a way of life that has meaning for good or ill in the society around you. Which means learning to bend reality by being fully present in it, rather than by making artificial "profiles" that abstract nicely from it and that can be packaged and promoted for sale to others the way every other commodity that has no effect on its society is sold.

This is a fine first draft, in that it clears the space for the excellent construction that comes next. You can now ask, what does it actually take in realistic terms both to escape the performance of these falsities and to continue moving swiftly and efficiently towards the sort of fully-involved life in the community you want to have? Thinking about that leads to planning and execution about that, which is better than all the successful performances of the profile of what you do not quite want in all the world.

Interviews and Rationales

-- By ElizabethBrandt - 18 Feb 2016

Mock Interviews and Transcendental Nonsense

A mock interviewer recently informed me that I should “develop” a better story about coming to law school based on my unique resume experiences. The suggestion was that I needed to somehow explain why someone would leave a “successful business career” (whatever that means) to embark on a debt-ridden and risky venture which, empirically speaking, leads to alcoholism, unhappiness, and an early death. I choked back my natural instinct to tell the mock interviewer that it really wasn’t any of his business, but that if he had to know I came to law school to become a lawyer. Instead, I smiled politely and thanked him for such candid feedback. His response was to remind me to ensure that my story ended in such a way as to make it obvious that I desperately wanted to participate in some sort of specialty in which the firm for which I was interviewing engaged.

I stewed on these suggestions for a couple of days before realizing that the interview and job process coming out of law school are another example of transcendental nonsense. Interviews favor those who can string together a narrative of disparate experiences you have had in a way that creates a story about who you are and places you on an inevitable path to this place, this interview, this job. This is not unique to the law school interviewing experience. Every interview process in which I’ve participated, in business, law, or education has required this narrative that we all recognize at some level is mere fiction, created for the sole purpose of hurdling the immediate obstacle, the interview. With the benefit of hindsight and a little creativity, we can explain away just about any seeming deviation or detour in our career. However, these connections, at least for the vast majority of us, are created only in hindsight and with a bit of creativity. We might be moving toward an abstract goal, but few of us know the route or the destination. We create this fiction, this transcendental nonsense, to explain our lives and make our success seem inevitable to the obstacle in our path.

Realities and the Thinking Man

The reality of my choice to attend law school has little to do with anything that appears on my resume. I had a great job making great money and was on track to do incredibly well in the impending IPO of my former employer. I even loved the people with whom I worked. By most objective standards, there was little, if any, reason to leave my boyfriend, my life, or the weather in California. The thinkingest of Thinking Men would stay the course. But I had had an afternoon with my grandfather that I just couldn’t shake. Sitting in his living room, someone stopped by to speak with him, a normal occurrence on any given day. The man stayed for about a half an hour, talking about his restaurant, his family, and generally checking in on my not-that-elderly-but-in-poor-health grandfather. When he left, my grandfather told me that the man and his wife were both incredibly hard workers and had done well for themselves in the restaurant business. It turns out that after my grandfather, a former Commonwealth’s Attorney, had put the man behind bars for five years, he had some trouble getting a job. Ever the pragmatist, my grandfather lent him some money to start a restaurant, which turned into three restaurants and jobs for all of his family. The man periodically checked in at the request of my grandfather to see how things were going and to catch up, as though they were old friends – and they were.

I thought about my work and looked around at my life and realized that my community was no better off with me than without me. My grandfather participated fully in his community and reaped benefits far beyond an IPO payout or a new title every few years. My grandfather was a profoundly unhappy man, but his life mattered in his community – good in some ways and bad in others. I came to law school because I want my life to matter, too, and it seemed like the easiest transition from the life I was leading to a life that can have meaning for a community. The risk is not the debt, though the debt is daunting as well. The risk is that I left a stable and easy life for a future that might matter, and might not matter in the ways that I want it to matter.

Truth Beyond Resume

Every interview will still require me to play the part of Thinking Man and make up my best transcendental nonsense with which to convince the interview of the inevitability of our meeting. There’s no getting around the performance art of the interview. I’ll leave out the story about my grandfather for risk of sounding more emotional than a good Thinking Man should. I’m sure I’ll even enjoy some of the conversations that I have with interviewers, but answering this question will probably never be one of those enjoyable moments for me. Maybe one time I’ll feel non-conformist enough to tell the interviewer to bugger off because it’s, frankly, none of their business.

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