Another Column About Career Advice For People Who Want To Do White-Collar Work
What works for one person won’t work for another. Try different things. Keep trying things until something works.
A lot of people ask me how they can build a career doing white-collar criminal defense work. I’ve written about this before (here and here) but have a little more to offer. So, below, you’ll find a dog’s breakfast of career advice from me.
Before turning to that, let me observe that it’s interesting to me when in the year those requests come in — it seems the farther from big firm bonus season we are, the more likely someone is to be considering a move. Though the romantic in me hopes that the promise of spring in the air simply makes people think about working to keep others out of prison. It could also be that my firm is now looking for an associate to do some of this work, and asking for advice is a backdoor way of applying (which I both admire and find a little frustrating).
I suspect the stuff below goes for other practice areas, or even other careers. Also, your mileage may vary. What works for one person won’t work for another. Try different things. Keep trying things until something works.
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In no particular order, here goes:
(1) Read a lot about other people who have built a career doing this kind of work. One great place to do it is at Susan Bozorgi’s blog, Women Criminal Defense Attorneys. She writes about women who are successful criminal defense attorneys — most of who are in the white-collar space. Many of the posts are interviews with these lawyers about their careers. Seeing what other people have done can give you a sense of what may work for you.
If you’re male and think that the career paths of women don’t apply to you, you’re wrong. In lots of ways, women building a career as a criminal defense lawyer have it a lot harder. You can learn a lot from someone who has been walking a harder path.
One of the failures of Susan’s blog is that she doesn’t talk enough about herself. She’s a great model for one way a lawyer can build a very successful criminal defense practice too. She’s really smart, tenacious, and cares a lot about her clients. If I got indicted in Miami, she’d be the first lawyer I’d call. Though it’s a little gauche to blog about yourself, and she’s a classy person.
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(2) Go to a good law school and milk that for all its worth and/or be lucky. Though it’s better to be lucky.
(3) Make friends with people who will be in a position to help later. It’s hard to know which friends of yours are going to later be in a position to help, so when you’re in law school — and, really, throughout your life — have friends and don’t be a jerk. Keep up with people, but not in a fake, “you could be useful later” way. Celebrate your friends’ successes. When your friends do well, regardless of whether it helps you, that’s good.
In Plato’s Meno, Meno defines a virtuous person as one who helps his friends and hurts his enemies. The second part is a little Nixonian, but try to run with the first part. There are worse conceptions of virtue.
(4) Be genuinely interested in criminal defense issues. Read and talk about them. Volunteer — you know, give time away for free — to either do some of the legal work pro bono for people caught up in the prison system or to help people in nonlegal ways (mentor people coming out of prison, work in a literacy center, etc.).
I think of white-collar criminal defense work as just criminal defense work that can be a little more factually complicated. I’d rather think about numbers or regulations than forensics, so I’d rather do white-collar work (also the pay is different). But the the motivation to do the work is the same (if you want just to make money, there are much more effective ways).
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If you’ve volunteered driving the kids of women in prison to visit their moms, that moves me a whole lot more than if you’re a CPA. That said, I’m just one guy — others hiring for work in this space may think moms in prison don’t matter.
(5) Think more about what can work than about what can’t. Any idiot who has been to law school can come up with a hundred reasons in his or her sleep for why an idea won’t work.
If that’s what you’re doing, congratulations — you’ve thought yourself into a miserable life. #winning
But I think you’ll have a better career and a better life if you look for opportunities — they’re more fun than failures that haven’t happened yet. “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once” and all that.
And, really, it’s more important to have a good life than a good career. Try not to lose sight of that.
Matt Kaiser is a white-collar defense attorney at Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon PLLC. He’s represented stockbrokers, tax preparers, doctors, drug dealers, and political appointees in federal investigations and indicted cases. Most of his clients come to the government’s attention because of some kind of misunderstanding. Matt writes the Federal Criminal Appeals Blog and has put together a webpage that’s meant to be the WebMD of federal criminal defense. His twitter handle is @mattkaiser. His email is mkaiser@kaiserlegrand.com He’d love to hear from you if you’re inclined to say something nice.
