Being a Lawyer

What was your career path from undergrad to being a lawyer?

I went to the University of Rochester undergraduate, and I majored in economics and political science. And I went to Duke Law School after that–not necessarily because I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. In my senior year of college, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I was thinking about pursuing a PhD in political science, but I had borrowed money already to go to school, and the prospects for jobs in academia are kind of unknown. So I took the LSAT, which is the entrance exam for law school, and I did well. So I was accepted at Duke, and I got a scholarship to go. I spent three years at Duke University Law School, [and I] really enjoyed law school–loved law school. It was very intellectually challenging, [and] I really liked the content. And so my third year, I had a decent amount of student debt accumulated by that time, so I interviewed exclusively with big law firms.

There’s a lot of different paths you can go after law school. You can go into public interest, you can go into criminal law, you can go into family law, smaller firms, you can work for nonprofits. But because of my student debt, I really felt like I had to make the most money that I could coming out of school, so that’s how I ended up in a big firm. I interviewed with firms in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, a couple other cities. I was offered a few different jobs, but I ultimately took the one in Pittsburgh. I worked for a law firm that is now called K&L Gates. It was Kirkpatrick & Lockhart at the time. It’s one of the oldest–it might even be the oldest–big law firm in the city. I am not from Pittsburgh originally, but I had been here a few times for different things, and I liked the city. So I started practicing there right after law school. I had taken the Bar [Exam] in the summer right after I had graduated, and I passed the Pennsylvania Bar, and so I started working there.

What type of law did you specialize in, and what drew you towards it?

I worked about four years there [at K&L Gates] as a complex commercial litigation associate. There are two sorts of branches of law, if you’re in the corporate world. There’s transactional law and there’s litigation. So transactional would be doing deals like buying and selling companies or stock deals or agreements [and] drafting contracts. I was on the litigation side, which is where you basically argue about the contracts and things that happened. So if you hear about people suing each other, that’s litigation. I was primarily on the defense side, so I represented large companies. I was an associate, so most of the cases that I worked on had a partner who was managing the case and one or two associates who would work the case. These are cases that dragged on for a really long time. There were cases that were still going on when I left that I had been working on the entire time.

I did some environmental litigation, some antitrust litigation, some general breach of contract and broad stuff, so it was a variety of things.

I actually left that firm and went to a different firm for a year and a half. [It was] similar, but I did more appellate work there, so it was more research and writing. When you appeal a case, then you’re doing a lot more arguing based just on the law and precedent and so forth, and not so much the facts of the case. It’s more drafting legal pleadings and things like that.

What made you decide to move to teaching?

I left practicing law for a couple reasons. I had one child, and I wanted to have more children. My husband was an attorney, and it was just really difficult to try to manage family and home and everything else and also work. I was probably working 60+ hours a week at the firm, so, you know, it was high pressure. At the time, it was the 90’s, so there weren’t a lot of women. There were some, but it was still a majority of men I would say. I think things have changed somewhat since then, but it was pretty tough as a woman to try to balance all of that. And so I went to Pitt and got a Masters of Arts and Teaching. After that, I got hired [at NASH], and I’ve been here ever since.

Were you ever interested in clerking?

Actually, it’s interesting! When I was trying to think about a career switch, I interviewed and was actually offered a clerkship for a district court judge in Pittsburgh. That was a big choice for me. I could see myself clerking because I did like the research and writing piece, but when you clerk, that’s basically all you do. There’s not a lot of human interaction. You work with other clerks, you work with your judge, obviously, and you watch arguments and cases, but it really isn’t interpersonally very interactive. It’s just a lot of solitary research and drafting and meeting with your judge. And I liked this gentleman a lot–his name was Brooks–but I just thought I would like to do something where I worked with people more. So now I have a lot of people that I work with!

What advice would you give future law students on how to balance school, work, and life?

I think for me, it was not as hard as for some people because I had always worked and gone to school. I was on work study during undergrad. I probably worked like 25-30 hours a week when I was in undergrad. In law school, I worked for a professor doing research, I waitressed at the faculty restaurant, so for me, I’ve always done better when I was incredibly busy and engaged. This was a time before cell phones and TikTok and lots of things that could distract you, so I would get up and go to class and then I would study, usually right after class, and then I would go to work and kind of rinse and repeat. And then I would go out on weekends, and yeah! Not a lot of sleep, and not a lot of down time, but I thrived on that kind of schedule.

It’s important to know yourself, I think. Be prepared for that kind of pace. I don’t know if it would be like that at every law school, and also, I really needed to work to make money, and not everyone does. I would say that if you have money and you don’t need to work, it’s clearly easier, but also, the more time you have, the more time you have to waste. To me, there was never any time to waste, so I was always doing something I either wanted to do for fun or something for school or something to make money. There was no time that I wasn’t doing one of those things.

How do you recommend networking? 

This is just my experience, which is kind of gated. I did not do a lot of networking, per se. The way it works in law school in terms of jobs is that they would come to your campus and conduct interviews on campus, and you would sign up for the ones you wanted. And if they liked you, then you would do a fly back. They would fly you to the city wherever the firm was. I think it’s more important–[rather] than try to make connections with a lot of people–is to work and be better at connecting with people one-on-one. Honestly, the job offers I got were not because of my GPA. I think it was because I was a woman that could talk about a lot of different things. The firm that I ended up working for, the interview we did, we ended up going to the pool hall and shooting pool and talking about the Pittsburgh Pirates. I literally think that’s how I got the job. I think that being able to speak to other people, being able to be a good listener and communicate, and having a wider range of interests and topics that you talk about is going to help you in interviews. They can get the top person from every law school and say, “We’ll pay you this much money,” but I do think your personality and your social skills are really important in law to get that opportunity.