Three Things to Know Before Starting Your Law Career

Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

You’re sitting in contracts class, and you have a question, but you’re terrified to ask it because everybody in the class is going to turn around and look at you and you’re going to feel stupid.

Sound familiar? Eleanor Tyler, senior legal analyst with Bloomberg Law, shared this anecdote during the webinar. But Tyler, who earned her J.D. at Georgetown University, went on to say that the biggest mistake she saw people make during her time practicing law at a large firm was to hold on to the fear of seeming stupid or asking the wrong question when entering the workplace.

“Asking questions is absolutely crucial. Asking questions is how you avoid wasting time, which is the new thing that you’re selling – time,” Tyler said. “It helps you understand more about the way the people you’re working with think, and understand a whole lot more about the assignment you’re getting.”

“I think that we’re all taught to value people who will go and do a job without needing help from others or asking for help,” said Scott Cohen, currently a clerk for Judge Richard Wesley in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. “But we’re all in this new environment with work we’ve never done before. You can take 10 years of law school and still on your first day encounter a practical issue that you would have never dreamed of in your academic career.”

Cohen said his first instinct was to show initiative and do his assignments the way he thought was best. But what often happened was that at some point he’d make a wrong assumption that led him in the wrong direction.

“You would save a lot of time by asking important questions before you lose track of where you should be,” he said.

Kurt Mathas, a litigation partner at Winston & Strawn, agreed.

“More often than not, what people do is they don’t go and ask, and they end up spending 20 or 30 extra hours on something that the assigning lawyer didn’t really want them doing,” he said. “That time ends up going on a bill and then the client doesn’t like it. So it’s to nobody’s benefit to have that period of time where you’re spinning your wheels.”

Mathas said it shows good judgment to recognize that you might be starting down a rabbit hole and to go and talk to the person who gave you the assignment to make sure you’re on the right track.

“And at the end of the day the practice of law is iterative and collaborative,” he said.

Mathas admitted that he’s given out assignments when perhaps he didn’t clearly express what he was looking for – or maybe didn’t know himself exactly what he was looking for – and the associate goes off and tries to find something that was never clearly explained in the first instance.

“But if that associate comes back after spending [a few] hours and says, ‘here’s what I’m seeing and what I’m not seeing,’ that helps me frame the assignment better,” Mathas explained. “And we can collaboratively get to a more efficient and effective research plan.”

Mathas encourages new associates who are given an assignment to offer to check back in with the assigning attorney after spending an hour or two. Some senior attorneys will say yes, and some may say no, but he still recommends the practice.

“That’s a way better conversation to have than the conversation when the time report comes in and I was expecting you to spend seven hours on a project and instead I see 70 hours on the project,” Mathas said.

Give different areas of law a try.

During her summer associate experience, Tyler wasn’t assigned to one section of the firm. Instead, she was given opportunities to try out various areas of law.

“I was very grateful for that. It gave me great opportunities to meet very different people and look at very different parts of the law,” Tyler said.

She explained that it’s hard to know which style of law is the right fit for you before you have a chance to get your hands dirty on an actual assignment.

“You just really don’t know until you try things whether litigation or appellate is more your style,” Tyler said. “Do you like everything to be inside of the box, which it will be in appellate, or do you like to have to go out and beat the bushes, which is more litigation?”

Cohen, who worked as a summer associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore after earning his J.D. from Cornell Law School, agrees that seeking assignments and opportunities to work with different people throughout the firm is key. He also recommends seeking out pro bono cases, through which he was able to work on interrogatories for discovery, depositions, and a motion to dismiss, all as a summer associate.

“There are things that I wouldn’t have had such a large part in doing for a paying client that I was doing right away,” Cohen said.

Taking on pro bono work as a new or summer associate is a great way to gain experience and hone your skills early on in your career.

“And it gives you exposure to elements of the practice of law that you might not necessarily see for a substantial amount of time when doing regular client work,” Cohen said.

In general, try to avoid spending your summer with only one practice group.

“If you have any control over the flow of your assignments, try out as many different partners at the firm, as many different groups in the firm, as you can, because you can’t be terribly sure where you’ll fit in best,” Tyler said. “Summer associateship is a fabulous time to try out a bunch of different things.”