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< | Interviews and Rationales | >
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< | -- By ElizabethBrandt - 18 Feb 2016 | >
> | Using Law School Intelligently | | | | |
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> | -- By ElizabethBrandt - 13 June 2016 | | | | |
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< | Mock Interviews and Transcendental Nonsense | >
> | There is no doubt in my mind that I am meant to be in law school. For some of my classmates this seems like an extension of undergrad or even a last resort. I spent years trying to decide if law school was worth the investment, but I now feel very much in my element. I have everything left to learn, but I couldn’t be more thrilled about the opportunity. The real quandary for me is how to use this experience in law school to launch a career in the legal field that I will find meaningful. | | | | |
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< | A mock interviewer recently informed me that I should “develop” a better story about coming to law school based on my unique resumé experiences. The suggestion was that I needed to 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 resisted 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. | >
> | Get Away from Law School | | | | |
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< | 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, and 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, you can explain away just about any seeming deviation or detour in your career. However, these connections, at least for the vast majority of us, are created only in hindsight. We might move 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.
Realities and the Thinking Man
The reality of my choice to attend law school has little to do with anything that appears on my resumé. 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. Any good Thinking Man would stay the course. But I had an afternoon with my grandfather that I just couldn’t forget. 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 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, imprisoned the man for five years, he had some trouble getting a job. Ever the pragmatist, my grandfather loaned 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.
Life Beyond Transcendental Nonsense
I came to law school with the intention of working with start-ups both because it’s a field in which I am interested and because it makes for a compelling narrative given my background. Recently, I find myself wondering if working with start-ups on a broad scale will make me feel like my life matters any more than my previous work did. A start-up certainly changed my life, and I believe for the better. However, that type of company is rare, a more truthfully described “unicorn.” The likely only way to ensure that I am helping those companies that I believe have the potential to similarly change peoples lives is to have the ability to choose my own clients.
Before coming to law school, multiple lawyers explained that successful start-ups would never choose to work with anyone other than an established firm. This might be true for start-ups that are relatively mature, but it’s probably less true the less mature the start-up is, which also likely correlates to its ability to have significant impact on the people that work there. Ultimately, I believe that there are start-ups that can have a significant and positive effect on their founders, employees, and surrounding community. These companies can foster important conversations within communities, provide jobs, and improve life for others. While these companies are few and far between, it’s important to me to develop a framework for finding these companies and creating a pathway to make them clients.
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. | >
> | The people with whom I am interested in working typically shy away from attorneys. My boyfriend, who works for a company at the intersection of wine and technology, recently took my suggestion of pitching an in-house counsel role to his Board. Alcoholic beverages are still highly regulated and he, a non-lawyer, is spending an inordinate amount of time trying to wade through individual state regulations, federal regulations, two lawsuits, and a myriad of other legally-related work. It seemed like a no-brainer to me.
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. | | | | |
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