Playing Video Games For Fun And Profit

From practicing at Proskauer to prospering as a provider of social mobile games.

Video games and the law are quite a combination. Sometimes games spawn lawsuits, like Zynga’s case against the makers of Bang With Friends (which should really just change its name to Bangville, as Joe Patrice suggested). Sometimes the law spawns games, like Primordia, created by Harvard Law grad Mark Yohalem.

Are you a lawyer who enjoys playing video games? And do you like making money?

Here’s one lawyer’s story of how he took his interest in gaming and monetized it quite nicely….

After graduating from Fordham Law, Chieh Huang went to work at Proskauer Rose, where he focused on fund formation and sports law. He enjoyed working with such stellar young partners as Chip Parsons and Jon Oram, and he liked his time at Proskauer: “I was doing work that I wanted to do with people that were nice to me.”

But the exposure to the business world that he obtained as a transactional lawyer led him to want to start a business of his own. Huang explains how he made the jump from practicing law to launching Astro Ape, a maker of mobile social games that was acquired by Zynga in 2011, in this interview with Bloomberg Law’s Spencer Mazyck:

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Can you believe it took just ten months from the close of Astro Ape’s funding until its acquisition by Zynga? Isn’t that a nice chunk of change for Huang to have earned (even when shared with his co-founders and employees)? And doesn’t his next venture sound quite promising?

As he notes in the interview, Huang definitely took a risk in leaving the law. He parted with Proskauer in 2010, a time when it would have been hard to break back into Biglaw if his startup hadn’t worked out. But fortunately it did — and his law degree and training came in handy to him as he built his business.

Congratulations to Chieh Huang on turning his legal background and his love of video games into a winning combination.

Earlier: All Your Base Are Belong To… This Harvard Law Grad And Former SCOTUS Clerk
Non-Sequiturs: 08.01.13

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