Introduction

The practice of law is not monolithic. Professional directories for the United States sort one million lawyers and 50,000 law firms into some 65 core practice areas. In Lawyers at Work, I interview fifteen lawyers in fifteen practice areas selected to be representative of the lawyering spectrum: employment law, corporate defense, criminal prosecution, financial services, international project finance, family law, international law, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, antitrust, intellectual property, entertainment, nonprofit, civil rights, trusts and estates, and civil litigation.

My interviewing method has been to elicit from this ensemble of lawyers their own stories in their own words. My aim has been to get at what makes them tick: why they went into law, how they matched their personal traits and values to their chosen practice areas, how they built their careers and developed their styles of practice, how they manage the tensions between their professional and private lives, and what drives them to lawyer on.

The lawyers I interviewed gave me a variety of reasons for becoming lawyers. About half of them became lawyers because of a strong family legacy in the law. One became a lawyer in spite of her family. Some found inspiring role models and others thought they would enjoy the intellectual rigor of the law. Some knew exactly what they wanted to do even before entering law school. Others stumbled into their area of expertise after leaving law school.

Some of the lawyers interviewed in this book are “true believers” whose practices reflect personal ethical imperatives to redress social inequities. Sean Delany, for example, has spent his career in the area of public service representing the indigent. David Whedbee has always reached out to protect the civil rights of the least affluent. Anne Vladeck never doubted that, as an employment lawyer in her family firm, she would represent unions and employee plaintiffs against big employers, just as her parents had done.

You can’t imagine a “true-believer” representing the other side without a crisis of conscience. By contrast, a “shades-of-grey” lawyer such as Jon Streeter is equally at ease prosecuting or defending the same classes of litigants. And Jim Sanders, tongue firmly in cheek, avers that moving from a public defender role to a corporate defense role can still be considered indigent defense if your client doesn’t pay.

Some lawyers, such as Arthur Feldman, enjoy taking on a broad array of cases. Many others—like Ken Kopelman, Jacalyn Barnett, Wayne Alexander, and Shane Kelley—opt not to stray from their field of expertise. Some have taken their practice onto an international stage, like Nandan Nelivigi, Peri Lynne Johnson, and Kate Romain. Others have acquired their legal expertise in practice and then applied it to academia and authorship, like Chris Sprigman, or to entrepreneurship, like Adam Nguyen.

In interviewing these fifteen lawyers, I discovered that, despite the diversity of their practices, priorities, and personalities, they all shared one trait in common. Each had taken an aggressively proactive approach to his or her career. When they saw opportunities, either professional or personal, they went for them. They took risks and followed their instincts in selecting paths that were often neither straight nor continuous. Falling in love or raising a family can redefine a professional path without derailing it.

In twenty years of legal recruiting, I’ve seen the market seesaw back and forth between jobs looking for good lawyers in times of economic growth, and lawyers looking for good jobs in times of contraction. It is no secret that since 2008 law schools have been producing more lawyers than there are jobs and that the median salary for junior attorneys has dropped.

For those considering law school, it is always risky to predict what the job market will look like years down the road. What prospective lawyers do know is that a shrinking market swells the ranks of unemployed and underemployed lawyers, against whom they’ll find themselves competing after law school.

In the face of a weak and highly competitive market, it is imperative for prospective lawyers to chart a realistic career plan before investing in a JD. Law is no longer a fallback profession for dilettantes and temporizers. If you understand what it means to practice law and you still want to do it—do it. If not, do something else. Being a lawyer is hard work for those who love it. It is not a life for those who do not.

The practitioners in this book all love their work, and all of them have weathered economic storms and market turmoil. Collectively, they prove two complementary propositions. First, lawyers can have exciting, remunerative, and personally satisfying careers. Second, before taking a shot at the first proposition, a prospective lawyer had better research deeply the practice areas that interest her, take brutally honest stock of her own temperament and abilities, and satisfy herself that the two are in perfect alignment.

So, if your passion is law, take what lessons of the head and heart you can from the words of these fifteen legal practitioners who honor the legal profession and love what they do.