Inside A Lawyer’s Arsenal

-- By PushkarChaubal - 17 May 2023

Boardgame nights can be fun but also frustrating when most players do not know how to play the game. One can hardly blame them; most adults don’t remember the rules of Monopoly from their childhood days. Thankfully, there’s always one friend who knows the rules of the game down pat.

I was not that friend when it came to board games, but I appreciate the fact that lawyers play a similar role in society at large. My first year of law school has taught me that the content we are learning is not necessarily conceptually difficult. However, it requires a tolerance for sifting through what seems like endless pages of difficult-to-decipher text. Few have such patience, but that was the appeal of law school for me. Effective lawyers, to me, are masters of the use of words and are able to wield language skillfully to deliver justice, manage risks, or close deals on behalf of her or his client.

My Relationship with Words as an Adult

My relationship with written language, however, was corroded as soon as a graduated from undergrad. After majoring in finance and management information systems, I went into the management consulting field. As a young consultant, I quickly fell prey to the partners and managing directors. These partners used their oral and written skills to cover up rubbish and manipulate people exactly the way they wanted to. Promises made yesterday were null and void the next day.

The disgust these partners inspired in me infected my relationship with words themselves. As someone who excelled in subjects like literature, history, and political science, the fact that words could be wielded for such self-serving objectives made me incredibly cynical to the point where I thought my relationship with words was fractured forever.

However, during the lockdowns brought on by the epidemic, I found myself with spare time and was drawn to my parents’ copy of the Bhagavad Gita. This Sanskrit literature gave me the strength to make it through COVID-19 and effectively ended my literary depression.

Now that I am in law school, I conceive that lawyers wield words as weapons to get their clients what they want.

What now?

My first year of law school has shown me how effective lawyers can wield words as weapons to get their clients what they want. As recent high-profile cases have showed us, talents like these are powerful, and can be used for a myriad of purposes.

All my life, I have sought to achieve success in the corporate world, and I came to law school squarely with that mission in mind. Indian Americans have it instilled in them from early childhood that they must be masters of their domain, and my upbringing was no different. Due to said upbringing, I am acutely focused on how I can embrace the masterful use of words to advance my career trajectory.

Using words for my career

My goal since undergrad was to end up in private equity. While business school might have been the more straightforward path, I was drawn to law school because I wanted to be powerful with my words and have a more tactical understanding of the underlying legal framework that drives the business world. The idea is to be well-versed in a wide variety of corporate law, such as securities, transactions, and intellectual property.

Put simply, my ultimate vision is to be a trusted advisor to C-suite executives. I want to bring my strategy consulting and my legal experience to bear so that I can give my clients the advice they need to exceed their business objectives, while adhering to securities law and industry-specific regulations. I see myself fundamentally in a business strategy role, with the law as a guiding framework.

The more I ponder my career path, however, the more I doubt whether a role in private equity will allow me to have that cross-sectional function of business strategy and law. From what I have read recently, the job of a PE associate is mostly a financial one, with little to no touchpoint with the law. I would need to have more conversations with private equity associates to understand more about what their day-to-day entails, and to what extent I would be able to add value with my diverse skillsets. While making money is important to me, I want to be in a position to drive differentiated value by bringing all my experience to bear.

What would bring me even more happiness and long-term career fulfillment is if I could start my own practice. As we discussed from various readings over the course of the semester, having the courage to start one’s own practice allows one to shape it exactly the way one wants. My ideal firm would be a hybrid law firm and management consulting business. Put simply, I want to be my clients’ go-to advisors for anything their business might need. For example, if an electronics manufacturing client wants to expand into a hot, cutting-edge product category, I want to be poised to advise the client on the best way to go to market, while making sure that they are keeping abreast of legal regulations in that business line and they are structuring any new legal entities properly in order to reduce their tax liability. While a practice of this nature is relatively unique and thus may be high-risk, it is the kind of practice would give me lasting joy and fulfillment. I really enjoy solving complex business problems, and I believe that having a transactional legal practice attached to it will allow my firm to implement the strategies and see it come to fruition.

In this way, I can use mere words to effect large-scale business outcomes, all while deciding the direction of my consulting and legal practice. My next steps would include understanding how to acquire my first clients.

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