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Finding Your Passion Above The Law (Part 3)

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What if you could have the best of both worlds? Not being a lawyer, exactly, but being in a professional position that still takes advantage of your lawyerly inclinations and skills. For the final part of my “Finding Your Passion” series, I hope that you will feel inspired by the people below to search for that niche, if your current practice hasn’t been feeling right and leaving you a little half empty. There has got to be a full glass somewhere.

SONYA MAYS (Detroit, MI)
1. What is your current job? And what type of field or industry?

I currently serve as Senior Advisor to the Emergency Manager of the City of Detroit. In March 2013, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr (former Jones Day bankruptcy partner and fellow Michigan Law alum) as the Emergency Manager (“EM”) for my hometown. Michigan law permits the appointment of an EM once it has been determined that a municipality is in “financial emergency.” An EM supercedes local government and controls both the fiscal and operational aspects of government for at least 18 months.

2. Why did you go to law school if you didn’t plan on practicing law?

In hindsight, I was shockingly naïve in how I approached the decision to attend law school. My understanding of legal practice was heavily colored by popular culture. This was compounded by the fact that I did not have any practicing attorneys in my family or immediate social circle that could give me useful insight. It was not until I was enrolled that I began to grasp exactly what a legal career would look and feel like.

At some point toward the end of my first semester of law school, I became a little uneasy with the prospect of starting out in a career in Biglaw. My solution: I doubled down on graduate school and applied to business school. By the end of my first year, I had no intention of practicing law immediately following graduation. However I did make sure to leave the legal door open by taking courses with long-term, broad value and by taking/passing the NY bar. (Biggest course regret: not taking either bankruptcy or administrative law!)

3. How does your law background play into the kind of work that you’re doing now?

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I draw from my legal education constantly and across a wide range of topics. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. First, and most obviously, Detroit is currently working through a chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy process that is being driven by the country’s leading bankruptcy attorneys. Second, government really does touch on just about everything covered in the law school core curriculum. The final reason is more specific to my particular role. Counting myself, the EM staff in Detroit numbers just three people – two attorneys and a media director. This translates into my personal involvement in an incredible range and depth of legal issues. In a given week, I may negotiate/draft/review land purchase agreements, interpret state and local statutes, revise ordinances, review litigation claims and/or court filings, negotiate and draft intergovernmental agreements and professional advisor contracts, and work with investigators on criminal and civil issues. Without my law background, I would be far less effective in this role and probably would not have been tapped to join this team.

4. What legal skills or knowledge do you regularly end up using, if any, and what non-law background did you bring to the job, if relevant?

As mentioned, I use my legal education extensively in my role. I draw heavily from the foundational topics – property, tort, contract and constitutional law. Additionally, I draw heavily from the core legal skills of drafting, interpretation and negotiation. That being said, my role winds up being only about 33% legal.

After law school, I spent several years as an investment banker at a bulge bracket investment bank in NYC, where I executed mergers, asset acquisitions and financing transactions. In Detroit, about a third of my job involves skills that I developed as a banker. The City has had to sell assets and raise long-term financing, so I get to draw from my previous career quite a bit in connection with those efforts. Finally, I spend the balance of my time on core city operations – the restructuring of service delivery and management processes – which allows me to leverage my pre-law school, non-profit management background.

5. Could you describe what aspects of your work make you feel passionate about what you’re doing?

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I grew up in Detroit, so I actually cannot think of a more personal connection to a job than my current role. I left Detroit nearly 20 years ago, but my family still lives here, meaning I have kept close ties to the local community. Nailing the financial and operational restructuring work is deeply personal for me – it matters in a very real way that we are able to lay the foundation for the restoration of normal city services.

When the EM began his appointment, we confronted a City with profoundly broken systems. Nearly half of the City’s streetlights did not function. Police and EMS response times far exceeded national averages. City buses ran irregularly in a City where 40% of the population relies on public transportation. Fixing Detroit means fixing these things for the 700,000 residents that rely on our government.

Strictly from a career perspective, I love how “real” and “tangible” government work feels, and I am particularly passionate about restructuring work. It turns out that I like fixing broken things. As a banker, I had no real sense of why a particular bond issuance mattered – financial transactions felt like moving around numbers on a page. But the process of municipal restructuring leaves no confusion. I am constantly aware that our actions have a direct consequence for City residents and the effective use of their tax dollars. Every problem that I fix here in Detroit is a problem solved for all Detroiters.

ANDREW SHEPARD (Hanoi, Vietnam)
1. What is your current job? And what type of field or industry?

I’m a U.S. Foreign Service Officer with the State Department. We work at embassies, consulates, and international organizations around the world (and often in Washington D.C.) to manage the usually complex relationships that the United States has with other countries. Many of us are “generalists” in a specific sub-category of international relations, and we take on two or three year assignments that have some correlation to our specific career track. My current position is Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam.

2. Why did you go to law school if you didn’t plan on practicing law?

I think a lot of people go to law school “all in,” meaning they may have interests in practicing law but they are open to many different career paths in law. Whether or not post-law school life usually reflects the diversity of the curriculum in law school is another question for another day. I came to law school with a really strong interest in international relations and public policy and pretty much knew that I wanted to work in that field after graduation, as a lawyer or not.

3. How does your law background play into the kind of work that you’re doing now?

I think that outside of the legal field, the usual perception is that lawyers have had good logistical training. As such, the State Department is full of lawyers, working as domestic attorney-advisers, civil service policy advisers, or diplomats. For my current assignment, my legal background has been helpful in analyzing environmental laws in Vietnam, as well as Vietnam’s status on relevant international agreements and conventions. But it all funnels back into supporting the U.S. foreign policy goals for our specific relationship with that specific country. Meaning that whatever legal analysis I do is somewhat on par with an in-house attorney – I have to answer the question, how do we get to the “yes” that the President, Secretary of State, or Ambassador is pushing?

4. What legal skills or knowledge do you regularly end up using, if any, and what non-law background did you bring to the job, if relevant?

This is an interesting question that ties very well to the other question of “how relevant/useful is international law?” Realists generally poo-poo it and liberals sometimes over-emphasize its importance. I actually sometimes have to actively ignore my legal instincts in international relations because there’s no Supreme Court sitting above independent countries with the ability to require adherence to their decisions. So the trick for diplomats is to figure out what the other country wants and how much it is willing to do to get it. State ideology matters but no more than jurists’ legal philosophies. The United States promotes democracy but has also been supportive of non-democratic regimes. China publicly adheres to a position of international non-intervention, a philosophy it ignores when state interests don’t align with it. Iran thinks of itself as the world’s defender of Shia Islam, but supported Christian Armenia over Shia Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh War (for geopolitical reasons).

The point is that, much like a company that has a bottom line where its attorneys must find legalistic ways to promote it, the State Department only has limited opportunities to address tough legal academic questions. At the end of the day, we are working around the world to promote our policy goals. I guess that’s a very long-winded way of saying negotiation and mediation are very useful legal skills in this field, while complex legal analysis isn’t usually. Unsurprisingly, a background in foreign cultures, languages, and geopolitics is very useful for this job.

5. Could you describe what aspects of your work make you feel passionate about what you’re doing?

There are so many aspects that make me feel passionate about my work. I get to think creatively about ways we can reduce demand for the illegal trafficking of threatened animals from Southeast Asia and Africa. I get to think of ways to work with Vietnam to improve their capacities for environmental protection of the air, the water, and the soil. I get to work with Vietnamese students in developing ideas of how their country could cope with climate change. These are exciting projects for me. Not all jobs in the Foreign Service are like this, but I feel lucky in that mine gives me a great feeling every day when I wake up and realize what I’m going to work on for the week.

Note: What is it about practicing law in a traditional law firm setting that takes away from the soul of many a lawyer? It seems that non-lawyers are perfectly happy with using their traditional legal skills, but through application in a non-traditional sense. My take away from these interviews is the following. (1) You’re more likely to feel passionate about your work when it’s the real deal affecting real people, where you can see the fruits of your labor in the flesh and know that you made it happen. (2) Variety is the spice of life and constant stimulation with new projects in new environments makes the daily grind a bit more manageable, even passionate if you’re working in a field up your alley. If you strive to go above the law and avoid the conventional route, you may have a better chance of finding that lawyerly passion in a not so lawyerly setting.

Sunny Choi is the 2013 Writers in Residence Coordinator for Ms. JD. She is a former participant in the Writers in Residence program, where her monthly column Legally Thrifty focused on beginners personal finance advice for law students and professionals. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, she currently practices commercial litigation and creditors’ rights while freelance writing and blogging in her spare time. She can be reached at contentdirector@ms-jd.org.

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