30 Under 30: The Top Young Lawyers And Policymakers (2016)

See a name that you know? If so, congratulate them!

onJanuary 5, 2016 at 5:47 PMJanuary 5, 2017 at 1:10 PM

Old Style Photo. Champion gold cup trophy Let’s offset the winter chill by offering warm congratulations to the 2016 “30 Under 30 for Law and Policy,” announced yesterday by Forbes magazine. They are a dazzling and high-powered group — and some of them are actually lawyers!

I stand by my prior assessment that the “30 Under 30 for Law and Policy” group is weighted a bit too heavily towards the “policy” side. At the same time, given how long it takes to establish oneself in the legal profession, it’s hard to draw distinctions between lawyers under 30 — after all, they’ve barely started their careers. So one can understand why Forbes leans towards techie types and government gurus; technology and politics are more open as fields to prodigies than the law.

Still, by my count, there are eight lawyers — i.e., people learned in the law, as holders of law degrees — on the list. They are (in alphabetical order; click on each person’s name to access the Forbes write-up):

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From Pilot and Above The Law

Daniel Harawa. This Georgetown Law grad, former Covington & Burling associate, and current appellate staff attorney at the Public Defender Services for the District of Columbia won a case before the D.C. Court of Appeals in which the court overturned its own 140-year-old precedent.
Haben Girma. A staff attorney at Disability Rights Advocates, where she works to protect and advance the rights of the disabled, Girma made history when she became the first deaf and blind person to graduate from Harvard Law School.
Christopher Koopman. A fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Koopman focuses his research on the intersection of regulation, innovation, and competition. He earned his J.D. from Ave Maria School of Law and his LL.M. from George Mason School of Law.
Roy Moran. As lead corporate counsel at FanDuel, Moran is quite busy dealing with the many legal and regulatory challenges faced by the fantasy sports company. He’s a graduate of Columbia Law and a former Wilson Sonsini associate.
Joe Mornin. The Forbes list welcomes disruptors — last year’s list, for example, featured Daniel Lewis, CEO and co-founder of legal research startup Ravel — and Mornin falls into this category too. The Berkeley Law grad is the CEO and founder of BestLaw, a free and open-source platform that helps lawyers with tasks like research and Bluebooking (and he also finds time to work as an associate in the IP practice of Winston & Strawn).
Ryan Radia. The Forbes list tends to lean rightward, reflecting the magazine’s free-market philosophy, and you can see this in some of the honorees. Radia, a graduate of GW Law, is the associate director of technology of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a leading libertarian think tank.
Anisha Singh. The Forbes list has some liberals, too — like Singh, campaign manager at the Center for American Progress, a prominent progressive NGO. She’s a UVA Law graduate and active in advancing Muslim and Sikh rights.
Kendall Turner. There seems to be about one SCOTUS clerk in each “30 Under 30” batch — last year it was former Kennedy clerk Joshua Matz, now elevated to “All-Star Alumni” status — and this year, Turner gets the nod. The former Breyer clerk is currently working on a book about money management for women in their 20s and 30s — protip: get a $300,000 Supreme Court clerk signing bonus — before starting work at Jenner & Block.

Finally, although he’s not a lawyer, let’s give a shout-out to Timothy Hwang. Featured prominently in Forbes editor Daniel Fisher’s intro to the list, Hwang is co-founder of FiscalNote, a legal search engine focused on elections and legislation that has raised over $18 million in venture capital.

Congratulations to these legal eagles and to all 30 honorees (picked by a panel including leading lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, as well as political power brokers David Axelrod and Karl Rove). You can check out the complete “30 Under 30” list over at Forbes.

30 Under 30: Law & Policy (2016) [Forbes]
White House Advisors, Tech Leaders And Politicos Dominate Law & Policy 30 Under 30 List [Forbes]