Interviews and Rationales

-- By ElizabethBrandt - 18 Feb 2016

Mock Interviews and Transcendental Nonsense

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.

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.