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Daniel Rubin's avatar

To the 2L: take the job at your firm and make yourself available for writing opportunities. Firms love pumping out memos on new cases and regulations; make it known to the assigning partner that you want to help write them. That’ll give you practice with writing and build up your online resume too. (And give you a shot at paying off your loans.)

Also ask the firm if they would mind if you maintain a blog or use your LinkedIn as a place to riff on legal developments. You’d be surprised, they may see it as positive marketing for them (if you have smart things to say). E.g., there’s an associate at O’Melveny who maintains an extremely popular TikTok account with her husband, talking about the law in laymen’s terms; they haven’t told her to stop.

You can try to find a legal field that isn’t being discussed anywhere yet can be fun to think about in the right hands (Tax? Bankruptcy? Fund formation? I’m already boring myself). But anyway I don’t think the existence of Matt Levine excludes all other writers on matters of corporate and securities law. You just have to write in your own voice and deliver your own take. I’m quite capable of reading Professor Ann Lipton’s blog even after I’ve read Matt’s column. Anyways I think your area of interest, white collar investigations, makes for quite fertile ground. One Bloomberg columnist can’t cover all of it.

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Tracy Erin's avatar

For the lawyer who wants to be a journalist, I would suggest trying to get things published sooner rather than later. I went to law school with Jess Bravin, who covers the Supreme Court for the WSJ and this was always his path -- but he was a reporter before he started law school and then he did all kinds of interesting things while a student that helped him make connections (e.g he was a student Regent on the UC Board of Regents and appointed to some Berkeley Commissions).

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