The Creative Lawyer

My brush with future fame: South Carolina report

I have never been fully satisfied in my wish to hang out regularly with celebrities, but occasionally I have brushed up against them.  And even shaken hands!

In 1986, at the tail end of my senior year at Harvard, I interviewed for an analyst position at the boutique investment bank, Lazard Freres.  One of my interviewers was a second-year analyst who had majored in finance at Georgetown named .... ta da! .... Jenny Sullivan.  A few years later she married Mark Sanford, who eventually became the governor of South Carolina.  Now they are both REALLY famous, whether they want to be or not.  

I did manage to get an offer from Lazard (my only actual offer that year, so thanks, Jenny!) but then turned it down because I was scared about moving to Manhattan, didn't know anything about finance, and thought I should live near my family in California.  (I would have done well to examine all three beliefs, but there you are.)   So I moved to L.A., worked as a temp for a few months, and finally got a job in a small investment bank, which job I never quite understood.  But then I got the call from the Foreign Service, joined, and moved off to Calcutta.  So I guess things worked out for the best.

Incidentally, Jenny Sullivan Sanford in her Lazard analyst days seemed to be extremely hardworking and serious, to the point of total physical exhaustion.  I remember her telling me that her days consisted of getting up, going to work, coming home, sleeping, and going to work again. 

That's my celebrity report for today.  Go, Jenny! 

A podcast on surviving, nay, thriving in the recession

I recently did a podcast for the ABA website on moving ahead during the recession, everyone's favorite topic.  Thanks to my lawyer-coach buddy Barbara D'Amico, who served as David Frost to my Richard Nixon. 

You can listen to it here.

Welcome, Happiness Project Readers!

One of my favorite blogs is The Happiness Project and one of my favorite people is the blogeuse of said site, Gretchen Rubin (who is a creative lawyer herself).  So a big welcome to all the Happiness Project readers who have ambled over here as a result of a recent shout out.

Gretchen's blog achieves the extremely rare combination of being earnest and honest yet intelligent and wildly entertaining.  So check it out if you haven't already.  It's now carried on Slate (home of another creative lawyer and Stanford Law grad, Dahlia Lithwick, who incidentally worked with me on the law school musical back in the day), and all I can say is, Slate should consider itself blessed.  And why not start with an entry inspired by you-know-who?

Why thinking like a lawyer is bad for your career

Lawyers often think that their problems relate to the practice of law. However, in many cases, lawyers are just experiencing problems and questions similar to those experienced by people in other careers. Lawyers don't always realize this because many of them have not spent much time in other careers.

But there is one aspect of lawyerly life that does particularly shape how lawyers engage with (or chafe against) the world. This is the deeply ingrained habit of issue-spotting. Issue-spotting is good when you're analyzing legal issues, but damaging when you apply it to your career and life.  Read my trenchant analysis here, in the ABA Journal.  Controversial!

p.s.  I didn't mention it in my article, but other professions can fall prey to this kind of misdirected, soul-killing, faux-comprehensive method of detached thinking:  academia and journalism come to mind.  It may have something to do with extreme INTJ/INTP homogeneity. But that's speculation. 

A simulacrum of Michael Melcher travels to Seoul

Last night I participated (virtually) as an honored guest at an event at the American Embassy in Seoul. Korea is opening up 18 new law schools in the next 10 years -- basically adopting an American model on legal education -- and I spoke on career development issues.  It's my basic talk, all the factors that affect your success and happiness as a lawyer that have nothing to do with legal analysis.

As I sat in the NY conference room thoughtfully supplied by White & Case, I contemplated the mysteries of modern technology (who knew that you could do such things? and over the internet?) and the unexpected positive twists that relationships can offer you on your particular path through life.  The conference was arranged by Robert Ogburn, my Korean former roommate from my foreign service days (we shared an apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia), who is just finishing up his stint as a public affairs officer in Korea before preparing for his next posting in Iraq.  

It was just like old times, only instead of eating Vietnamese food in Rosslyn and contemplating going to Tracks, we were communicating via giant televisions, the better to help peppy young brilliant Korean law students build meaningful careers. Good times, good times.

Recession, yes. Armageddon, no. So let's keep moving

For a quick how-to, see my recent post on the ABA Journal about ways to focus on long-term growth while attending to short-term survival, "5 Tips to Plan Your Career to Beat the Recession."

The 80's are finally over, and Career Action Groups are back!

A large portion of the handful of people who read my blog met me in the context of career coaching, and many of them took workshops that I ran in New York from 2002 to 2006 known affectionately as Career Action Groups, until I got tired of marketing them and focused on other things.

But guess what?  Career Action Groups are back. And are the perfect thing to jog you or your recession-depressed friends into better energies. Led by my esteemed colleagues at Next Step Partners, they are going to run in:

New York City

Wilton, Connecticut

Philadelphia

San Francisco

Santa Clara

Berkeley

and for the first time in Seattle!

New York and Berkeley start the week of May 4; all the rest start the week of April 27.

All the details about the four-week workshops -- or shall I say four-week transformative career experiences -- are at the link.  Suffice to say here that if you sign up by April 15 you will get such a good deal I can't even bear to mention it online.  

Stop complaining and learn from your elders!

A great set of interviews in the New York Times about how people made ends meet during the Great Depression.  

What to do when you lose your job?

This was the somewhat odd title ("when?"  how about "if?") for a blogpost I did for The New York Times recently.  

Read my trenchant advice here!

New York wins. And will outlast the Sunbelt.

From an article in the Atlantic Monthly, "How the Crash Will Reshape America":

New York is much, much more than a financial center. It has been the nation’s largest city for roughly two centuries, and today sits in America’s largest metropolitan area, as the hub of the country’s largest mega-region. It is home to a diverse and innovative economy built around a broad range of creative industries, from media to design to arts and entertainment. It is home to high-tech companies like Bloomberg, and boasts a thriving Google outpost in its Chelsea neighborhood. Elizabeth Currid’s book, The Warhol Economy, provides detailed evidence of New York’s diversity. Currid measured the concentration of different types of jobs in New York relative to their incidence in the U.S. economy as a whole. By this measure, New York is more of a mecca for fashion designers, musicians, film directors, artists, and—yes—psychiatrists than for financial professionals.

The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.

In this sense, the financial crisis may ultimately help New York by reenergizing its creative economy. The extraordinary income gains of investment bankers, traders, and hedge-fund managers over the past two decades skewed the city’s economy in some unhealthy ways. In 2005, I asked a top-ranking official at a major investment bank whether the city’s rising real-estate prices were affecting his company’s ability to attract global talent. He responded simply: “We are the cause, not the effect, of the real-estate bubble.” (As it turns out, he was only half right.) Stratospheric real-estate prices have made New York less diverse over time, and arguably less stimulating. When I asked Jacobs some years ago about the effects of escalating real-estate prices on creativity, she told me, “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.” With the hegemony of the investment bankers over, New York now stands a better chance of avoiding that sterile fate.