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.

-- KatherineMackey - 21 Mar 2012

You're right; there are some pretty big holes in describing Greenfield's career trajectory that this article doesn't cover. I think that's what makes me question whether this is actually the kind of venturing out that Eben is really talking about, though. I don't know how she got from being the typical corporate lawyer until January 2011 to owning her own matrimonial law firm by 2012. And the description of this "nontraditional" firm still appears pretty traditional to me in the sense that her firm's objective is still trying to keep the rich people rich. Now thinking about it, my view is that her work is pretty analogous to Cerriere's because they're both essentially getting paid by powerful clients to keep them out of sticky situations. In Greenfield's case, it seems more like this is the goal she's working toward, but it's pretty clear she has the personality to get there. So in terms of the work she does, I wasn't that inspired by it because I didn't get a sense whether this was an area that she was particularly passionate about before or whether she was working for the broader goal of justice. I mean, I was looking for some indication that she took some leap of faith when she left her cushiony job at Gibson Dunn. Yes, there's risk when you open any business, but this situation smells more like it's trading one corporate job for another. But what I did love, and always love when reading about powerful women, is that she has drive and seems to never played the role of a victim. Take what her friend said about her in the article: "I don't think she's a victim or some scheming femme fatale, either. To me she's living on a kind of heroic register: she isn't going to let what other people think about her affect her choices, and there's real bravery in that." This is exactly the type of woman I view Martha Tharaud to be--the kind that won't let any person get under her skin. Or even if this person does get under her skin, she'd never let you know it. So awesome.

-- LizzieGomez- 22 Mar 2012