What do lawyers do?

Lawyers come in different shapes and can use their legal skills in a wide variety of industries. It helps to know these differences as you think about whether law school is the right place for you. This is especially the case because in the media, lawyers are portrayed mostly as litigators, which can distort the profession and discourage many people who could enjoy being lawyers from entering the profession. This distortion in the media can also send to law school many people who would be really happy being litigators, but who instead get jobs in other areas and find that being a lawyer is not as exciting as they expected it to be.

• Litigators: Litigators are the lawyers who are most portrayed in the media, such as in Suits, Boston Legal, and Damages. These lawyers fight for their clients in court. Litigators can also be a diverse group. Some focus on civil cases, where the case is between 2 individuals or companies. While others defend clients in criminal cases. Some work for public interest groups such the Legal Aid Society for indigenous (poor defendants) defense in criminal law cases or the ACLU for civil rights cases. And yet others work for government (such as a U.S. attorney, a state attorney general, or a  district attorney) and prosecute criminals (including white-collar criminals who commit fraud, insider trading, etc. - see Preet Bharara). Litigators can focus on jury trials (where soft persuasion and simplifying evidence for jury is important), bench trials in front of judges (where evidence plays more of a role), appellate advocacy (where evidence does not play much of a role and the focus is on making logical arguments about what the law really says), or settlement negotiations. Litigators frequently begin their careers by clerking for a judge. 

• Regulatory attorneys: These attorneys keep themselves updated on new laws passed by Congress, and rules based on these laws coming from various U.S. agencies, such as the SEC (securities regulation), the Federal Reserve (banking laws), the EPA (environmental laws), the USPTO (patent and trademark laws), or the USCIS (immigration laws). They interpret regulations and guide individuals or companies on how to comply with the law. They also represent their clients in front of these regulators. Sometimes the skills required can be one of soft persuasion if the matter is small, and on critical matters, the skills required can be quite adversarial, such as for proceedings in the USPTO office. Having a good long-term relationship with the regulator is always helpful.

• Transactional attorneys: These attorneys guide clients on how to structure business deals or otherwise conduct business with various parties while minimizing legal risk. They may identify regulatory obligations and explain legal risks to clients. They will likely prepare and negotiate contracts on deals with the client's counter parties. They may even suggest that the client conduct deals through its subsidiary (child company). Transactional attorneys may generally maintain such subsidiaries, and thus pay their taxes, file their licensing documents, and update their corporate documentation. Transactional attorneys require diverse business and legal skills, including knowledge of various potential legal obligations (that specialist law firms can then explore in depth), listening to clients' needs and flexibility to adapt documents on case by case basis, strategic thinking in designing deals with various potential future outcomes in mind, and negotiation skills. Frequently, transactional attorneys enjoy the relatively non-adversarial nature of their role in which they work with their clients and deal counter parties to build a deal together. Transactional attorneys can work in a diverse array of industries, including banking, finance, technology, healthcare, manufacturing, services, consumer goods, or government (such as advisors to President in the State department or to state or local governments). 

• Professors: These attorneys have a passion for law's theory, and frequently have a doctorate or masters in law or a doctorate in a different field. These attorneys may practice for a few years before deciding to enter academia. As Professors, they may teach law to students, research law's impact or influence in particular areas and have it published, and may practice law for select important matters where the law may be evolving. Some Professors may also enter university administration and manage the direction in which the law school should grow or spend it's funds.
  
• Policy-makers: Lawyers can also make and execute laws. For example, they can draft bills and resolutions for Congress, both as Congressional staff and with a career in politics themselves- as federal, state, or county Senators, Congressmen/women, Governors, etc. Most Presidents are lawyers too.

Law firm memos to clients

Imagine that your company is considering expanding its products to a new geographical market. Your company is excited to proceed, and you reach out to a law firm to ask what, if any, licenses are required. Two weeks later, when your firm is ready to sell its first product, the law firm sends you a 20-page memorandum, full of legal jargon, which you now have to sit and decipher. And you still don't know if any licenses are required! 

Unfortunately, in my stint at a law firm, I found that lawyers frequently communicated with their clients this poorly. In fact, law firm culture encourages communication to be in the form of a lengthy memorandum, so that all possible legal risks, relevant or not, are documented. However, this format of communication leaves the client frustrated and confused. 

I would advise law firms to:

1. Replace lengthy memoranda with clear, concise emails. For instance, in this case, the law firm should have stated: "we recommend that you obtain 3 licenses, X, Y, and Z."
2. Law firms should organize their emails by headings, so that clients can skip sections that they do not wish to analyze. 
3. Law firms should replace legal jargon in their communication with conversational language that clients can easily understand. 
4. Lastly, attorneys should call their clients while sending a complex response, so that they can walk the client through the complex issues involved. 

By simplifying their communications, lawyers may find that they save time and turnaround faster on client requests. Lawyers may also providing superior service to clients while billing lesser hours, which can help them either charge their clients a lower amount, or bill at a higher rate and take on more clients. Ultimately, the most important benefit to law firms is of retaining happy clients who bring continued business to the law firm.

Should you go to law school?

I think going to law school is the best decision I have ever made because I really enjoy my classes, I love moot court, and I've met some of my closest friends here. Even so, law school has been an expensive investment resulting in heavy law school loans. And if I did not enjoy the material, the 3 years in law school would have been really long.

So how do you know, without going through law school, that you would enjoy it? Here are a few ways of sampling legal work:

• Advocate: Try an internship or a club position that requires you to advocate for people. For instance, I worked in constituent services for a Senator that allowed me to interact with underprivileged clients, understand their circumstances, and advocate on their behalf with various US agencies. Various community service projects can also involve you advocating on behalf of underprivileged students or tenants with a school administration or landlord, respectively. Advocacy lets you sample various legal skills - like listening to your client, spotting issues with their applications, writing and speaking in persuasive manner with agencies, and understanding and organizing supporting documents.

• Debate: Try activities such as public speaking, debate, and mock trial in high school and college. Legal skills include being able to identify reasons for various rules, and persuading various parties - your client that your advice is sound, the opposing party that your client's case is strong or perspective in a transaction is the right one, or a judge or regulator that your client should receive a particular judgement. 

• Get legal experience: To get a better idea of how lawyers operate, I would recommend trying an internship or a paralegal position at a law firm. As a summer intern, I got a brief exposure to how litigation works - what happens in depositions, at the negotiation table, and at trials. However, my exposure was really cursory as a summer intern, as 2 months is a really short time, workload over the summer is generally light, and interns generally do not get to delve into real legal work. I worked for 2 years in the legal department of a company, and this experience proved a lot more realistic.

• Explore classes: Take a class on philosophy, political science, or economic theory. In law school, you learn rules by understanding the reasons for having such rules. As such, different theories about human nature and the role of society become important. Some schools also allow you to audit law school classes, particularly introductory constitutional law classes. Do take advantage of these.

• Research: Take a class that requires you to write a research paper, or conduct independent research with a professor. This experience will help you analyze data, research different authors, and accumulate the information with a new perspective of your own. Also, importantly, it will give you a glimpse into citations. Lastly, if you can get experience publishing a journal, magazine, or newspaper, even better. Law school and your legal career will require you to write analysis based on research - whether it's a memo to a client, brief to a judge, or analysis of a legislation/regulation. Research, citation, and analysis are valuable legal skills.

• Write a story: Try writing a fictional story or even start a personal journal, writing the same story from different people's points of view. A valuable skill in law school is reading the court's opinion and trying to decipher the facts of the case. The court may put a particular spin on the facts, and in class you try to think about what may have really happened. And as a lawyer, you will frequently have to present your client's story in the best light (as a litigator) or imagine your client's facts in the least favorable light so you can let you clients know about the risks with their transaction (as a transactional lawyer/advisor).

• Explore the LSAT: Study for the LSAT. The LSAT can be a pain because it requires you to do a lot of thinking in a very short amount of time, but it does test many of the skills that are built in law school - such as reading comprehension, analytical thinking, logic, and persuasive writing.

• Network: Talk to current lawyers and law school students. You can visit law schools you are interested in attending, and some students there may give you genuine feedback. Talking to lawyers in your family, friends, or alumni of your school will likely be most helpful.

Obviously you don't need to try all of these activities out, but most law school students have a mixed bag of experience in some of the above. These activities can both help you sample law school as well as persuade law school admissions officers that law school is the right place for you. And if you can show good results from the above activities, your resume becomes that much stronger for law school and legal jobs.

What is law school culture like?

It's like high school. My law school is small - technically it's four buildings, but are all connected to form a single quadrangle structure. Students have lockers! Yeah, that was a welcome change for my back!

I have Professors who actually care about me - my understanding of the material, performance in class, and career prospects. In college, I did see a few Professors who similarly cared, but in law school, more Professors seem to care. The administration is similar; I have a feeling it's not as altruistic as it is for the Professors though. After all, the better we feel, the better we do, the higher the school's rank. But still, it's a great feeling to know that I have a support network to rely on.

The students are similar to those in high school, maybe just more "professional" about it. I am finding some close friends - people I would love to tell all my "secrets" (if I still have any). And many people who are hard to trust. People who tell you they like you and want to study with you, have dinner with you, etc., but all the while, who seem to be competing with you.

After all, the whole 1L class is setup to compete with each other. Classes are curved - so even if your section is full of geniuses, as soon as you hit the say 20% mark, the next genius gets a B+. Performance does not matter, relative performance does. And jobs go to the highest grades... the rest have to work twice as hard to recover and still risk going into a field of law they do not like! There is no middle ground. Many people are constantly aware of and pressurized by this setup. It's hard to build genuine relationships with such people.

What do I think of the competition setup? Well, you could say this setup reminds one of Aristotle. Aristotle said truth exists in your experiences. The more you experience life, the more you know about people, the closer you get to the truth. There is an urge to constantly gauge our abilities against that of our classmates'. That's one way of trying to get feedback in a law school semester where we get no feedback in our regular classes till the final (well, maybe except for that practice midterm when we didn't know any of the material that would actually be covered on the final)!

I am trying to stay inspired by my favorite Plato. Truth exists inside us as a perfection in an abstract place. I don't know what the perfect law student would look like. But that's what I aspire to be. I am far far below - maybe that's why I am constantly disappointed. But it does make me not compete with my classmates but instead see them as fellow passengers on the same journey. When I see others struggling the way I do, it makes me feel that we are all in the same strange boat, and I feel less lonely. When I see others succeeding, I feel more confident - that like my classmates, maybe I will also get closer to the perfect law student.

I think my approach works better for me. I feel less jealousy with respect to my star classmates. I feel more humble when I succeed. I do much better than I would if I compared myself to real flawed people.

I see some of the 2Ls and 3Ls and find them to be like me. Maybe many of my classmates will feel the way I do in a year, when many of us will have reasonable jobs waiting for us. I can't wait.

Selling your dream

Over the past year, there has been the constant buzz about Facebook perhaps being sold to Yahoo or another huge company. It would certainly not be the first time that a start-up company that had become huge would be sold to a large corporation. What I don't understand, though, is how people can begin and raise a dream, bring it from nothing to something, and then sell it. How can any amount of money give value to a dream?

I left a club in college for which I designed the website, and it still pinches me whenever any changes are made to the website, even though I left the club voluntarily. It's because there is a non-rational part of me that feels that I own the website, even though it's the club that does so. If I cannot part with a website that I designed, which is about as virtual as it gets, how can people not only part but even sell their dream, dreams that take longer than bits and pieces of the freshman year of college building?

Tips for effective emails

The purpose of emails is to facilitate communication. Yet many of us find ourselves overwhelmed with incoming emails. When used correctly, emails can enable sharing of information and lead to high company performance. When used incorrectly, emails can cause relationships within organizations to crumble, or result in hasty decision-making based on incomplete information. Here are some tips to use emails effectively: 

1.     Is an email necessary? – It is difficult to read tone in emails. As such, emails do not assist people build relationships. When possible, it is better to discuss issues with people in-person, or secondly, via phone conversations. Emails are a good option only if the message is simple and does not require much discussion. For example, emails can be used to post colleagues with respect to non-controversial decisions. Or, for an ongoing project, emails can facilitate information exchange as a supplement to meetings. Lastly, emails can be used to share summarized information (such as in a spreadsheet). 





2.     What is your message? – Nothing is more boring than a long e-mail with a hidden message. Start brainstorming using the one-sentence message: if you could only write one-sentence to your recipient, what would you write? Then write out that sentence in your email. The rest of your email should be context that assists the recipient in understanding your message sentence. Once you have filled in the context, position your message sentence so that is easily readable, such as at the end of a paragraph, or as a stand-alone paragraph. 




3.     What will the recipient think/feel when they read your email? – Anticipating your recipient’s questions, concerns, and mood can be critical to effective emails. Are you requesting information within a tight timeline? If so, acknowledge it in your email, and offer to discuss strategies to meet the timeline. Does your email provide sufficient context and information for the recipient to understand your message? What will the recipient feel when they read your message? Many of these questions are difficult to answer for recipients with whom you do not have a relationship. As such, it is critical to develop such relationships outside of emails.

How do I hire?

I’d like to begin by talking about what I do not hire. I do not hire myself. In fact, I disagree with the currently popular recruiting technique of finding employees who “fit” into an employer's culture. 

I once met a candidate who was introverted, an achiever, and a team player very much like myself. I was tempted to hire her, because it was easy for me to talk to her. Further, I had been successful at my organization, and I felt that since she had common personality traits, she would succeed too. However, I found following this temptation ineffective, for three reasons: 

1.     In 30-minute interviews, we are often wrong in our assessment of qualities we share with candidates. Interviewees frequently try to please us by pretending to be similar to us, when in fact, they are not. 


2.     There is value in diversity. By diversity, I do not mean simply racial, gender, or socioeconomic diversity, but also diversity in backgrounds, personalities, and risk tolerances. I find value in discussing my projects with diverse peers, so that through a healthy debate, we can explore issues. 

3.     Company culture can and should evolve. Companies with a single, narrow culture can be efficient in the short-run, but their groupthink can make them vulnerable to being unable to adapt, or even survive, when circumstances inevitably change. Good examples are investment banks, many of which went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and others of which are still struggling to re-brand themselves post-crisis. 

So, how do I hire? I focus on 2 criteria: 

1.     Does the candidate have the requisite skills for the job? Before reviewing resumes, I make a list of skills essential for the position. Then, I review resumes to see which ones had experience in those skills. Lastly, during interviews, I ask interviewees about those specific experiences. 

2.     Is the candidate willing to learn? People obtain varied credentials, but the most relevant training occurs on-the-job. I have found that candidates who are willing to learn – from themselves and their managers, peers, and juniors – are the most successful. For companies with strong cultures, candidates who are willing to learn will be able to adapt. To ascertain learning ability, I ask interviewees about their learning experiences in various settings. I also sometimes give feedback to an interviewee during the interview, and observe how she reacts.