You Might Be Wondering How I Got Here…

It’s graduation season! Whether it be 1st grade or medical school…allllll of it is happening now. Yay!!!! Congratulations to everyone stepping into a new era of their life! Graduation is such a happy, yet bittersweet experience. It’s one full of so much hope and holds many doors into the great unknown for new graduates.

For me, it is also the season of lots of inquiries from folks curious about what to do with their lives as they approach these doors. I have soooooo many people asking how I have gotten here in my career and if they should pursue a legal career or search out a different path for themselves. It’s such a hard question for me to answer, but like everything else I try to be brutally honest about my own path and career so that nobody feels like they are “doing it wrong.” My career path was long, winding, and kinda full of a lot of serendipity. Clearly, I love the regulatory space and I love working on things that most lawyers would shudder at, but that wasn’t always the case.

Imma just start by saying off the bat that I never wanted to be a lawyer. Never. Ever. Growing up I was obsessed with animals. In 3rd grade, I started a baked goods sale to save koala bears. I had every species of pet imaginable growing up (what, like having a pet deer is weird?) and from the age of 12 on I spent every school day afternoon working at an exotic animal veterinarian’s office who worked with the Columbus Zoo. Everyone thought it was a foregone conclusion that I would be a veterinarian. Then I hit college. Dun dun dunnnn.

Actually getting to (and into) vet school is hard. You have to take classes like Organic Chemistry and years upon years of physics (dear G-d I haaaaate physics.) This flew directly in the face of the advice my mother had given me about college which was “take classes in things you enjoy learning about.” My parents did not care about my grades in college, only that I was using my time in college to foster my sense of curiosity.

Long story short…after taking classes in almost every subject imaginable, I graduated and the good news was that I also got into vet school. The bad news? I quickly found out it wasn’t for me. Like very quickly. After a morning of excitement, no meals, and many smells associated with cauterized skin, I promptly fainted in my first class. When I later came to in the admissions office, everyone agreed that this was probably not the career for me. Welp.

I won’t lie, I spent a few months in a daze. I loved animals. They were my life. What went wrong??? I avoided anything close to a solution to my conundrum. I left the United States and spent a significant amount of time working at a very famous and historic winery outside of Beaune, France in the hopes of finding winemaking to be my new passion. Instead, I ended up with a lot of Romanée-Conti wine and a deeper Burgundian wine knowledge than most sommeliers in the United States. But, still had no real clue what I wanted to do with my life when I returned home.

Then I made the decision that many folks make when they don’t know what the fuck they want to do in life: “I’m going to law school.”

I knew many lawyers growing up. My mom was a lawyer who previously worked for the FBI and was a skilled white-collar crime litigator. All those years of playing Pac-Man on a Game Boy in the back of courtrooms had not gone to waste. I knew I was good at arguing. I also was already doing most of the external relations with regulatory agencies for our family’s farm after a few high-level internships for the Ohio Department of Agriculture and the USDA. (Yep…I have been doing regulatory work since I was une bébé.) I made up my mind that would become an agricultural and environmental lawyer. If I couldn’t be a veterinarian, this was as close as I thought I could be to all the animals in the world.

I told my parents. They cried. I mean actually criiiiieeeed. My mother thought that I should pursue something creative. (I am not creative.) My father thought that I should go work in finance since I was skilled at our farm’s commodity trading work. (Ehhhh…I don’t think I wanted this as a full-time job.)

And let me just say now (before we get into the heart of this story) for everyone that assumes only smart people go to law school…well let me just say…

THE SMARTEST AND DUMBEST PEOPLE I EVER MET WERE FROM LAW SCHOOL. I’m sorry to say but anyone who holds every lawyer in high esteem has not met that many lawyers.

Going to law school is an experience - to put it mildly. On your first day as a 1L (AKA 1st year law student) almost every student hears “Look to your left. Look to your right. By graduation one of you won’t be here.” That’s just to say it’s a wildly competitive and artificial environment. That being said, I don’t think I actually learned much in law school. Reading cases and understanding the logic behind them is very important and necessary for being a good lawyer…but in reality, law school does not teach you how to actually be a good lawyer. (I did have some amazing professors and went through alllllll the law school traditions we have in this country, but alas, that’s not why I get paid the big bucks.)

Now, with all that being said, you shouldn’t be shocked when I say that I didn’t exactly enjoy law school. Deep down, I knew almost immediately that I had made a mistake. The people I was surrounded by were exhausting. I was in a strange town with no friends. I was away from my loved ones. To be closer to home on a regular basis, I started working for Columbus-based White Castle as a law clerk almost immediately after classes began. I literally googled Columbus law jobs, applied for a job, and got said job. Simple, yet effective. Since I still wanted to be an environmental lawyer at that time, it made sense to work at a company that had environmental impacts and was concerned about their carbon footprint.

Working at White Castle was such a life-changing experience. And this was during the Harold & Kumar era of White Castle, so work was honestly a blast! White Castle is a family-owned and operated company. I had an amazing boss who was giving me exciting projects to work on that crossed over with every part of the company. I worked on environmental, real estate, litigation, and sponsorship projects all within a day. I enjoyed a great deal of mentorship and agency from everyone at the company.

I worked at White Castle throughout law school until one day I had a pretty important realization—if I continued working at White Castle, I’d be stuck at home for a longggg time. After graduation, I’d most likely move back home with my parents, working nearby in Columbus, and just live that life. To me, it seemed kinda sad. I knew I had outgrown that person.

I had started traveling quite a bit for my work with White Castle and was deep into company strategies. My brain had started thinking bigger and bigger in a way that I had never imagined. I knew I wanted something far away, so I looked at legal clerkships overseas and I applied for a clerkship with Fiat S.p.A. in Turin, Italy. (In case you haven’t noticed…I am the person that literally looks for and applies for jobs online. I don’t do all those weird job-seeking strategies that Twitter Thought Leaders tells you to use like stalk current and former employees online or whatever. So remember that when you’re recruiting y’all!)

I knew I would love Fiat as soon as I spoke with them on the phone. I held dual citizenship with Italy since my grandparents fled Florence for San Francisco and Los Angeles during the Holocaust. I was more than familiar with not only their car brands (Fiat, Ferrari, and they were in the process of acquiring Chrysler at the time) but also their agricultural equipment (Case, New Holland, Caterpillar,) which was more of a financial bellwether for the company than people realized. They needed someone who understood agriculture, business, and manufacturing. I think everyone knew it was a perfect fit almost immediately and I became their first law clerk.

Like White Castle, Fiat S.p.A. is a family-led business. The Agnelli family is very operationally active in the company and has made it the global conglomerate that it is today. They are active in the company’s day-to-day operations and were always there to answer questions on company history or strategy for employees. However, unlike White Castle, this was a global company that was operating at a scale beyond my wildest dreams.

Again, I was lucky enough to find myself somewhere that valued me and allowed me to work on exciting legal projects and important cases that were changing the legal landscape around the world. I was traveling around the world, meeting with global regulators and lawmakers at a time when my peers were stuck doing legal research and discovery administrative tasks.

At Fiat, I began my cryptocurrency journey when we became the first automobile company to explore crypto (igniting a small fire within my economic-leaning brain, which later became a large fire that inspired my Ph.D. journey.) I was able to work on not one, not two, but three cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court. I wrote amicus briefs and public filings that many people will never even begin to be able to comprehend. I was working on deep legal philosophy and diving deep into M&A and litigation theory. It was exciting and fulfilling. (The fact that I was also back in Italy, a land that my family had fled under horrific circumstances, was also meaningful and allowed me a certain level of peace and closure that many people never receive.)

It was a high-level job and most importantly…I was meeting lawyers and Judges who would guide and mentor me for the rest of my life. I was working directly with some of the top lawyers and Judges in the world while at Fiat. These lawyers were charging ungodly amounts of money for their services in the middle of an economic downturn. I was in awe and I followed their every word. I soaked up so much knowledge from them during our time together. I made a conscious effort to seek out their mentorship and these men (sorry, they were all men :/) ended up being my champions and without them, I would not be in the position I am in today. As a little legal Doogie Howser, these men became my protectors and educators in a vastly male-dominated world when I was much younger and more impressionable than my peers. I cannot thank these men enough for what they have given me in life.

By working at these two companies, I became a great lawyer. I left law school with skills that would take my peers years to learn. I had colleagues and relationships with people in the legal world that rivaled those of equity partners at biglaw firms. However, I still didn’t know how I wanted to apply what I knew and how to optimize the relationships I had cultivated. I had worked for three years on an important paper on the whaling industry and its legality around the world. I still impishly held on to the belief that I would be an environmental lawyer, but each day that reality moved farther and farther away from me.

There are a lot of parallels in the macroeconomic climate right now to when I received my Juris Doctorate. I graduated with my J.D. at the height of the great recession. Jobs were not easy to come by. Jobs as a lawyer were even harder to come by. Many people I went to law school with never actually practiced law because they struggled to find jobs that required a J.D. and it had unimaginable impacts on their lives. Trust me, you will see a lot of your peers suffer through depression, addiction, and in some cases, suicide because of the macroeconomic climate. When your career is derailed or doesn’t live up to your expectations, you are in for a rude awakening. (Seriously. I’m not joking. In 2016, I lost over 10 of my legal colleagues to suicide.)

I had offers from both White Castle and Fiat to come back and work full-time after graduation, but I knew deep down that I would get bored and I was facing a lot of peer pressure to go work in a traditional legal job (like at a big law firm or judicial clerkship.) The reality of environmental lawyer salaries (not high) and the ethics of working for something like an environmental organization that had protested my own family farm (eeek!) was a non-starter for me. I had worked on taxation issues for not only my family’s farm, but White Castle and Fiat as well, so I decided to continue learning about that after law school. That led to another few years of schooling with a few more degrees and some fun stops at cool places in my career, but those are stories for another time.

Ok, Now For Some Actual Advice

If you are considering law school the reality is that you immediately need to start thinking about how you want to practice law. If you don’t actually see yourself as a lawyer or have an easy pathway to a job as a practicing lawyer, I would think very critically about whether it is the right job for you. If you are at a non-top 25 law school or are unable to secure important positions on a law review, you will struggle immensely to gain a foothold in your career. If you’re just “meh” about the profession, I can tell you that you will lead a life of regret and misanthropy after graduation. Save yourself from a very tortured future—it’s a tough sector right now, unless you are okay with making a much lower salary in a secondary market, or you’re interested in public service. It’s not an easy career or life. You have been warned.

One of my later bosses was a fairly important (and recognizable) Judge who said to me…

My advice to anyone thinking about becoming a lawyer will mirror this. Being a lawyer is not for everyone. Don’t go to law school for shits and giggles. Go to law school because you are drawn to the profession. Go to law school and become a practicing lawyer because it is your calling. For most people, their profession and career become a major part of their personality. If being a lawyer will overtake your personality and values, then steer clear of this profession. Do something else that will allow you to be yourself in whatever way that makes you love yourself.

I can’t say whether being a lawyer is a fit for you or anyone else, I can only share my experiences and what defined my perspective on the profession now. Going to law school is expensive. Many people will drown in student loan debt for the first few years after they graduate. If you are lucky enough to get a full scholarship somewhere, do your homework to make sure it’s at a school that will allow you the best post-graduation career opportunities. A full scholarship at a school with shitty job placement rates is not the win that you might think it is.

I sincerely hope this whole, rambling ranty rant helps anyone thinking about law school or a a career in law. Let me know your own thoughts or questions about the legal profession and feel free to pass this along to anyone who might be thinking about the dark side as a lawyer.

xoxo

Stevie