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Professor Katrina Lee and the business of law

For today’s #PracticeTuesday post, we’re very excited to bring you a Q-and-A with #AppellateTwitter mainstay Professor Katrina Lee (@katrinajunelee). Professor Lee is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where she teaches business of law, legal negotiations, and legal writing. She is also the author of several scholarly articles which you can find here. Before joining the ranks of academia, she was a litigator and law firm equity partner in San Francisco.

This summer, Professor Lee taught Business Negotiations at the University of Oxford as part of the University of Oxford-OSU summer law program. The picture of her on the left was taken in her Oxford flat. And the picture on the right is of her fantastic new business of law book, The Legal Career: Knowing the Business, Thriving in Practice. This innovative new textbook explores a constellation of topics in the business of law that are often a black box even to practicing attorneys, to say nothing of law students. Professor Lee’s book is unique in the academic textbook market, and it overlaps nicely with many of the topics we often discuss on #PracticeTuesday, so we asked her if she’d be willing to answer a few questions for us. Happily, she agreed! My questions to Professor Lee appear below in bold; her responses follow. Continue reading “Professor Katrina Lee and the business of law”

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On asking for help

One day when I was a junior (but not brand new) associate, I logged into Westlaw, took one look at the search bar, and started to cry. On the one hand, I cry often. On the other hand, I love Westlaw, and crying is not my typical reaction to seeing a soothing blue screen full of databases ready to be searched. After all, I didn’t even cry when, after I steadfastly refused to install Westlaw Next for years, Westlaw finally just stopped supporting Classic and forcibly migrated me to the new system (I’m still bitter). In any event, when my reaction to opening Westlaw involved tears, I knew something was wrong.   Continue reading “On asking for help”

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Say “yes” to the firm: making an informed decision

Even though classes haven’t started yet, at this very moment, 2Ls across the country are making decisions about where they will spend next summer. * This decision, which many 2Ls already feel unqualified to make, can be even scarier because of the peculiar way that the legal job market is set up: after just one year of law school, students are faced with what rightly feels like a high-stakes decision about where to start their legal careers. If this sounds familiar, rest assured that it’s not just you; this feeling is real and valid.

Before I share my tips for how to navigate this situation, here are two preliminary thoughts. First, if you have the luxury of deciding between multiple offers, you’re already in a good place. Many students—for a variety of reasons—aren’t looking at that kind of a choice. It’s a good problem to have. Second, while this decision is important, if you spend next summer at a firm and determine it’s not a good fit, you will have learned something important about what you should look for the next time you’re on the market. Nor is a bad 2L summer the end of the road; although it’s a tougher path, many 3Ls find jobs at firms where they haven’t worked before. A clerkship can be a particularly good opportunity for a “re-set.” And even if you spend just a year or two as a young associate at a firm you don’t love, you can still use that time to position yourself well to make a move.

With all of that said, here are my tips for minimizing the chances of accepting a summer associate position at a firm that isn’t right for you. Continue reading “Say “yes” to the firm: making an informed decision”

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Callbacks, continued

It’s OCI season, which means that it is—or soon will be—the time of year when many law firms subject many law students to that time-honored endurance test: the callback interview. Typically, this experience consists of 4-6 consecutive one-on-one interviews, each with an attorney of varying seniority, sometimes followed by lunch or coffee with even more attorneys. Needless to say, it’s often an overwhelming and exhausting experience, particularly when students run the gauntlet of multiple callbacks in a compressed time frame. 

Callback strategies were one of our #PracticeTuesday topics last week, and as part of that conversation, I started this thread:

Following up on that thread, I thought I’d use this post both to provide some context for my tweets and also to elaborate a bit on what I said. Continue reading “Callbacks, continued”

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Hello, world!

“Beginnings are always messy.”  
John Galsworthy, The Eldest Son.

Hello, world!

That’s how you’re supposed to start these things, right? But this one’s a bit of a puzzle, because while this blog is new, the hashtag that spawned it—is that even a thing? Can hashtags generate blogs?—is not.

The #PracticeTuesday hashtag was born in November 2016. Before that, Sean and I—who, as of this blog’s launch date have yet to meet in person—were both active participants in one of the nerdiest corners of the internet: #AppellateTwitter. Like a handful of other frequent fliers in that community, we had each been posting occasional tweetstorms on topics relating to the practice of law, primarily framed as advice to young lawyers. For example, Sean posted this thread about getting oral argument opportunities as a junior associate and I wrote this one on saying no as a young attorney.

Not only were these threads generally well received, but more importantly, they prompted excellent, substantive conversations. Those conversations were especially rich in light of the broad range of practice experience within the #AppellateTwitter community, participants’ generosity in sharing their knowledge, and everyone’s eagerness to learn from each other. And then, because we’re lawyers and we like certainty, Sean and I thought: what if we could both (1) ensure that these conversations became a regular occurrence, and (2) capture their valuable content in a way that made it accessible to an even broader audience?  Continue reading “Hello, world!”