You swoop into the courtroom, dressed to kill, and argue passionately for
one dramatic hour. The verdict is in your favor, so you quickly pack your
briefcase and speed off in your shiny car. Then, you wake up to reality....
"I would try not to be too influenced by the glamour that you seem to see
on TV," says law professor Peter Letsou. "I think for most people, it is not
the glamorous career that the media might portray. There's certainly a lot
of interesting work, but there's a lot of mundane work. You're part of a big
organization and there are some rigorous time demands."
In fact, corporate lawyers avoid courtroom drama at all costs. It is their
job to keep corporations away from the face of the jury.
"Litigators deal with the mess when things go wrong -- corporate lawyers
try to help people at the front end to avoid any messes later on. The more
you can sort out at the beginning, the more specific you can be about what's
going to happen as certain things occur in the future. Really, I think what
most corporate lawyers do is try to draft contracts up front so that people
are protected down the road, so that you don't have a lot of fighting down
the road," says Letsou.
While going to law school, Letsou knew the courtroom scenario wasn't his
style. Like most law students, says Letsou, he started school with only a
foggy idea of what he'd do with it in the end. He remembers why corporate
law made the most sense:
"Public speaking wasn't the thing that I really loved, so the idea of standing
up in a courtroom and making great arguments to the jury isn't something that
really moved me that much....In taking courses in school, I came to the conclusion
that business transactions were something that interested me."
As it turns out, practicing in a firm didn't hit a chord for Letsou. As
a corporate lawyer in a firm of close to 300 lawyers, Letsou felt like a tiny
piece in a huge puzzle. He worked on transactions he was told to work on and
did what his partners told him to do. Several years later, a career change
brought Letsou the freedom he desired.
"In teaching, obviously, you get a lot more freedom. You're very much autonomous.
You can kind of think about what you want to think about. You're not constrained
in the positions you take by clients. If you're in practice, you have to take
the position that advances your client's interest, whether you personally
agree with it or not. In teaching, you have a lot more freedom to think about
what you want to do, and decide for yourself what you'd like to do," he says.
In teaching, Letsou also enjoys a much lighter load. "The phone's not ringing
off the hook from clients calling every day. You can kind of focus on one
thing for a long period of time rather than having maybe 15 to 20 things going
on at a time. You have a little of this and then you go on to the other thing,"
he says.
A law degree, says Letsou, opens doors of all kinds. In other words, law
school graduates don't always become lawyers. "The degree itself is a flexible
one because you come out and, yes, you can go and be a courtroom lawyer if
you want. Or you can be a corporate lawyer if you want. Or there are people
who choose not to practice law at all.
"It's just considered a training that's sufficiently rigorous -- if you
can get through it, I think most people consider that you're a reasonably
smart person. And there are other things you can do as well. Some people will
go up into business and never practice law, but a lot of the stuff that they'll
have picked up at law school is considered useful. So I think it's both flexible
at the front end and the back end," says Letsou. "There are a lot of things
that you can do afterwards."
When she completed her general law degree, Wendy Reid didn't know corporate
law was her calling. Now, she is a corporate commercial lawyer.
For Reid, working as a lawyer in a smaller city has worked out. "I enjoy
it," she says. "Corporate law is such a broad area of practice. In some of
the larger offices, they would break corporate law down into six or eight
different subspecialties -- and there would be practice groups such as mergers
and acquisitions, financing, leasing. There's a whole bunch of different things.
Because I'm in a smaller office, I'm more of a generalist in corporate law
than perhaps found in a larger city."
In particular, Reid likes to help people come up with solutions. "You're
assisting your client. You're trying to find solutions for their problems.
I mean, that's what all law is, but in corporate law you're trying to do that
outside of the courtroom. It's not just corporate lawyers -- all lawyers try
to find solutions for their clients," she says.
Writing contracts between individuals and companies means having to deal
with a lot of paperwork as a corporate lawyer, says Reid. However, it is human
interaction that stands out as the highlight of the job. "I enjoy meeting
the businesspeople and trying to work out solutions for their problems and
seeing how their business can grow."