Episode 105: Amy Impellizzeri
Former BigLaw Litigator; now an Award-winning Author
01:00:25
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Show Notes
Lawyer-turned-author Amy Impellizzeri shares how her sabbatical leave from law practice motivated her to embrace her passion for writing. Amy explains how her fellow lawyers can also unleash their creative side, how she keeps a deep love for the law while being a writer, as well as what she does to keep her creative mind in constant growth.
Relevant episode links:
Amy Impellizzeri, Lawyer Interrupted, Lemongrass Hope, How to Leave the Law, Life After Law, In Her Defense, Ms-JD.org
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About Amy Impellizzeri:
Amy Impellizzeri
Amy Impellizzeri is a reformed corporate litigator, former start-up executive, award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, and host of the Speak Studio original podcast, I KNOW HOW THIS (BOOK) ENDS. Amy’s novels have earned awards and recognition including INDIEFAB Book of the Year awards, the inaugural Francis Ford Coppola Books & Bottles Pick, National Indie Excellence Awards and more. New York Times Bestselling Author, Kristy Woodson Harvey calls her "a standout in the fiction world." Kirkus Reviews (in a Starred Review) compared Amy's latest novel, IN HER DEFENSE to Big Little Lies and called it "crackling courtroom drama." Amy is also the author of LAWYER INTERRUPTED (published by the American Bar Association) and co-author of the newly available HOW TO LEAVE THE LAW, featured in Bloomberg Law, Boston Business Journal and more. New York Times Bestselling Author, Marie Benedict calls HOW TO LEAVE THE LAW "a wise and invaluable guide to lawyers." Amy is a Tall Poppy Writer, a past President of the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association, a 2018 Writer-In-Residence at Ms-JD.org, recipient of Ms. JD’s Road Less Traveled Award, faculty member in Drexel University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, and a frequently invited speaker at legal conferences and writing workshops. Connect with Amy at www.amyimpellizzeri.com.
Transcript
In this episode, I'm very pleased to have a former attorney and a prolific writer both in nonfiction and fiction.
Amy Impellizzeri, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm excited about what you're doing and I'm thrilled to be part of it.
Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I appreciate you being a part of it. One of the initial impetus of the show was to encourage women lawyers to apply to become judges. That is especially because I noticed that there were not as many women appellate judges, being an appellate lawyer, as I would've hoped across the country. That was the initial idea, but it has moved out far beyond that so that.
You and I are talking as well in terms of, “If I were in law school or if I were a newer lawyer, I would want to know what all the opportunities that I could do with my law degree are,” practicing law or not practicing law. We are also demonstrating how there's a lot of fluidity in your career. Once you decide to do one thing, you're not stuck in that forever if it turns out you're evolving and there's something else you'd like to do with your life. You fall in that category.
That is something that I didn’t understand at all when I was starting out in my career. It is a message I want to get out there.
Law school is that way. It says, “You have to do this thing and only this thing. You have to be a lawyer. You have to be in court. You have to get a clerkship, and then you have to do all these various things. If you don't do those things, you're going to fall off a cliff.” In real life, there are many avenues to success. Your definition of what success is may not be this cookie-cutter thing.
The third thing is that could change your definition of what you want to do and where the meaning is, and what success looks like for you, and could evolve over your life as you evolve as a human being. All of those things are generally, from my experience in law school, what we're lacking. We're trying to fill in the gap there. They've gotten a little bit better at being a little more open, but still, people get to the first point and think, “This is now what I'm going to keep doing.” Before we get into all of that, I wanted to ask first what brought you to law school, to begin with, and what made you think you wanted to be a lawyer.
I had a one-dimensional view of what being a lawyer meant. I wanted to make an impact. I wanted to change the world. I wanted to be part of a movement toward justice. I was very much influenced by media portrayals of lawyers. Armed with all of that misinformation, I started college with one professional path or one professional goal, which was to be a lawyer.
I did then enhance my perspective by interning. Even in college, I interned with a local lawyer. I had a fabulous experience because he was a part-time district attorney for several days a week and then on other days of the week, he owned his own real estate law firm. I would spend 1 or 2 days a week in his real estate office doing title searches and then I would go with him to court 1 or 2 days a week and listen to murder trials. I had a varied perspective on the law and options. I did transactional work and litigation work. I became enamored with litigation early on. I eventually continued on my path to law school.
While I was in law school, I started exploring the option of a federal clerkship, which I ultimately did a federal clerkship for the Court of Federal Claims. The vaccine court that's placed within the Court of Federal Claims is a very niche court and a niche topic, which I wrote about while I was in law school. I sent my paper to the chief special master at the vaccine court.
It was there during my two-year clerkship that I traveled the country with the chief special master who was the architect of the vaccine court. I decided I wanted to be a litigator. We were doing some exciting work at the time because the vaccine court was relatively new. This was in the mid-‘90s. The vaccine court had developed as a result of the Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of ‘86.
The Chief Special Master that I worked for, Gary Golkiewicz, was the architect of the court. It was an exciting time to be working on that court. It has gained some more comeback into the national spotlight and events because of COVID. I tell people this a lot. The COVID vaccine that everyone thinks was thrown out to market quickly is 30 years in the making because of the vaccine court. The vaccine court allowed vaccine manufacturers the ability to resume product research and development that had been completely stifled in the 1980s because of tort litigation. It's been an interesting full-circle moment to see the vaccine court become important nationally again.
I was working on the vaccine court. It was a very important time. The idea of litigation then became a passion of mine. I wanted to be a litigator. That was my journey. After I left my clerkship, I did start my legal career as a corporate litigator. I worked for a boutique defense firm that only hired law clerks. We showed up, got our files, and were in court right away. It was a robust litigation practice.
We were the national council for Amtrak. I did a lot of Amtrak work and a lot of FELA work, which is the federal worker's comp statute for the railways. I did a lot of insurance defense work. I was in court all the time and I loved it. Since I was doing all of this litigation and I was making a lot of connections, I started getting courted by Skadden, Arps to join not their litigation department, but their mass torts department. It was a department that works on all litigation, which was not class actions, but when a client had a nationwide tort issue. That wasn't necessarily certified as a class action. We managed their nationwide litigation.
I got courted and I went to work for Skadden. When I went in to tell the partner I was working for at the time at the boutique firm that I was going to work at Skadden, he said, “You will hate it there. You are a litigator, and you will never litigate the same way again.” I said, “That sounds crazy because how could anybody hate working for Skadden, Arps?” He was right and wrong. I managed to carve out litigation practice there. I did work on a lot of interesting high-profile litigation, but he was right. I never litigated quite the same way again. I never had quite the same autonomy over my caseload or my life.
I would think that a firm like Skadden would be interested in the fact that you did have some tangible experience in court. That would be something that they would value.
I came in as a lateral. I had clerked for 2 years and was practicing for 3 years. I can remember that I had to schedule my interviews at Skadden around, “I'm closing next week on Thursday. I have to depose this witness on Tuesday.” They were shocked that a junior associate was closing or deposing a key witness. I was interviewing senior associates who did not have the same trial experience I did. Ultimately, there were even partners. I worked for a partner who tried a lot of cases, but there were partners at Skadden who had never tried a case. It was exciting to join Skadden with that level of experience.
You moved at a time that's consistent when most lateral associate moves are. It is between 4 and 6 years with a certain level of training and experience. The gap in the experience that you noted between even more senior associates or senior council of maybe not having significant depositions or having trial experience continues in some large firms.
It is shocking to me.
It's so important to do what you did, too, in terms of getting experience early. My experience getting experience early in a trial was instrumental in my becoming an appellate lawyer. I knew that it wasn't me. It wasn't a good fit, but if I hadn't done it, I'd still be out there 8 or 9 years later waiting for my first trial trying to find out whether I like doing that or not. It's so important to do things not only to get the skills but to find out in reality as opposed to in theory, “Is this something I like doing?”
The model of the law firm that I went to work for was so brilliant. They only hired law clerks. I worked on the trial and appellate levels. I would do the appeals of my own trial cases and would work on those appeals. In some of these cases, you would work from beginning to end. You did depositions, but you were ready. There was no real learning curve because you had been in court on the other side for several years. I thought that was brilliant. It allowed a real breadth of experience for the junior associates. They had a great mentorship program in place, too. You were paired up with a senior associate right from the beginning who was incredibly experienced.
You moved to Skadden and it was different. It was from Skadden that you decided to go into other career work as a writer. How did that evolve? Did you always have an interest in being a writer?
Here's the thing. I had always loved writing. I had always been a creative writer, but because I was so focused on going to law school, in college, I put that side of myself away. I did put away creative writing thinking that the two could not mix. I ended up being at Skadden for ten years. I went there, and the partner at my old firm used to call me every couple of months to tell me about a disposition of a case I had worked on. He'd say, “Are you ready to come back yet?” I would say, “Yes, but I can't. I'm going to make the most of this.
When I went there, I did negotiate. I was like, “I don't want to do document reviews. I don't want to be locked in a conference room with documents.” It was so arrogant to say that, but I didn't know what I didn't know at the time. I was able to negotiate this position in litigation. I was working on some fun cases, but I figured out within the first few years that was not going to be the place I’d die unless they killed me or the job killed me. I wasn't going to die sad.
I figured out that I was going to gain as much experience as I could. I was going to work on cases that were as interesting and exciting as I could. I was going to do a lot of pro bono work, which I did. That was a place where I could cultivate my love of litigation and my litigation skills. I did all of that. I would say I loved practicing law until I didn't. After a decade there, I was like, “I feel burned out. I don't think I'm qualified to do anything else but practice law,” because by then, I’d been practicing law for fifteen years counting my clerkship. I did not have this idea that, “My legal training and legal background has somehow given me some breadth of experience.”
I took a sabbatical, but for no other reason than to catch my breath. I did recognize the opportunity. It was part of a program that Skadden instituted shortly after the Lehman Brothers collapsed. In 2009, they offered a sabbatical program called Sidebar Plus. It was a subsidized sabbatical. The hope was that some people would self-select out that they could avoid layoffs, and they did. Maybe transactional lawyers who were slow would self-select out and things would reshuffle. Instead, all the litigators applied for the sabbatical because we were all swamped. Litigation is completely impervious to economic decline.
At first, when I applied for the sabbatical, the head of my department was like, “The litigators can't do this.” I was like, “Please, I need just a year.” I advocated for myself and was able to get it that year. I realized what an opportunity I had. I was like, “I have to be intentional about this year and decide by the end whether there is something else that I could do.”
I was doing freelance writing, advocacy work, and pro bono work. I was writing about Sidebar Plus and exploring the versatility of my training. I wasn't sure what the end goal was going to look like, but I kept making the next deliberate step and exploring, “Is there transactional work that's interesting to me? Is academia interesting to me?” I was trying to explore these different things. While doing so, I started writing again. I rediscovered my voice, and I did rediscover my first love, which was writing and creative writing. I had this crazy idea that, “This is so unusual. Here I am, a lawyer and now, I'm becoming a creative writer.” Isn't that odd? That's so odd. Those two things are completely opposed.
When I worked at Skadden, we were in the Vogue offices. We were in the Condé Nast building. We shared the building with the Vogue offices. I can remember walking into the building and watching the seas part. You could see the lawyers going in one direction and the beautiful people going in the other direction. To me, they were two different groups of people. It wasn't until I stepped away from the law a little bit that I started to realize there were so many former lawyers doing creative things. I was meeting lawyers turned artists, entrepreneurs, and writers. Many lawyers turned writers. I started to realize there wasn't anything special about me exercising this creativity.
It is good that it gives you a little humility there. You're like, “Others have done this.”
All these lawyers turned to these creative pursuits. I started to realize, “The law attracts creative people.” To answer your first question, I was very much drawn to the law out of the idea that it would be an outlet for creativity. You'd come up with all these creative solutions and avenues to justice and creative solutions to problems. You'd negotiate and mediate all kinds of creative solutions for people, corporations, and businesses.
The reality is that in the practice of law, especially the way I practiced it in big law for so long, the culture stifles that creativity. I started recognizing that when I got out in the world. I saw so many lawyers looking for creative pursuits alongside their practice of law or even leaving the law altogether for those creative pursuits.
That has become a big passion project of mine to advocate for lawyers to tap into that creative energy while they're still practicing if that makes sense to them. It is to not leave prematurely because you're stifled in some way. It is to harness that creative energy alongside your practice or to recognize that there are other avenues available to you. In fact, your law degree and legal training can be the differentiator in pursuing that post-practice of law.
When you were saying that you would think there was more creativity involved in the practice of law itself, I was thinking that your time on the vaccine court showed creativity because you're talking about carving out a whole new court and area of the law. That's super exciting, but there are not that many opportunities to do that.
The judge I worked for, at that time, was Chief Special Master Gary Golkiewicz. I am still in touch with him. He is a brilliant judge and lawyer. He ruined me because I left that clerkship thinking, “This is how it's going to be. This is what's going to happen. We're going to have incredibly robust, creative, and intellectual conversations. We're going to be making policy and changing people's lives with the law.” That's not what happened after the vaccine court.
There are rare opportunities to do that. I feel like in appellate law, there are opportunities to do that because we can make a difference with one case. We're helping to develop the law, and that's what attracts me to it. I never thought of that before as being a creative outlet, but it is.
You've tapped into something special there. That's great.
You said a lot of lawyers end up in creative endeavors, but it may not be perceived as being related. Also, originally, my goal was to be a writer when I was quite young. I particularly wanted to be a poet. I had this image in my mind of starving in a garret as a result of being a poet. I thought I should choose something else. As it turns out, I'm still a writer. I am paid to write, but to persuade. At one point, I thought, “I'm going to go back and I'm going to take this seriously. I'm going to take creative writing classes and I'm going to see if this is something I should also be doing.”
I remember having to convince all of the writing instructors in that that what I did in my main life was equally creative to the writing that they were doing. Everyone has their little bubble of writing. They see it their way. They have impressions of other writing as not being as creative. I remember I had to make the case. I had to bring in some of my appellate briefs and others’ briefs. I would say, “This is a story. We are writing a story. It's a different format, but we're storytelling. Some of the techniques that you're telling me about are exactly what we use.”
I did convince a few of the instructors that, in fact, we weren't all about legalese and we could tell stories, and there were some similarities. Everybody has their perspective based on what they know. They were like, “You're here despite the legalese.” I was like, “It’s all from a piece. It's all different things.” What ended up happening was that I used all of those techniques and all of that training in short story writing or essay writing in my legal writing. It goes back and forth. That sabbatical was a gift in being able to explore different things, and you treated it like that.
I was very much aware. I often refer to that. It was an impactful time in my life. I often call it the year of me because I was like, “I'm not going to finish books that I don't love. I'm not going to finish meals I don't love. I've got only this small window of time. It has to be so meaningful.” Even though I didn't know what it was going to look like at the end of that year, I knew I was going to have to make every next step deliberately and intentionally, and I did.
Ultimately, at the end of that year, I found my way to work for a startup company. I was doing freelance work for them and then I negotiated a full-time position for myself. At the end of the year, I asked Skadden if I could take a leave of absence. We negotiated a three-year leave of absence. The one-year sabbatical turned into four years. It has been over a decade. I would say I'm still on my one-year sabbatical, but I have admitted that I will never go back to practicing law, at least not that way again. As we lawyers like to do, I did it as risk-averse as I could possibly do at the beginning.
That's good. Sometimes, people do think it's black or white. They’re like, “I have to jump off and do something.”
I counsel people not to do that. I do a lot of CLE conferences about lawyers transitioning from the law. They always ask me inevitably to do a piece or a section about writing a book. I always have all these lawyers come to me afterward and say, “I want to quit my day job and write a book.” I'm like, “Don't ever do that. Here's what you can do. You can proceed on the side. You can cultivate your knowledge about the industry. Do that. Be a lawyer about it.”
Don’t quit your full-time job just because you want to write a book. You can do it on the side and cultivate your knowledge at the same time.
The other thing in the thread in your story is that you're a very good negotiator. You negotiated certain things going into Skadden. You negotiated the sabbatical into this three-year leave. You negotiated with that other company to come in and do work with them. There are some pretty good negotiation skills you have, too.
I always say I didn't leave the law behind. I brought it with me. My first real full-time gig coming out of the law was working for a startup company. I was not their lawyer. They were venture capital-funded. They had their own legal team. One of the things I started to realize that they needed was a translator because the creative team and the legal team were always butting heads. They wanted someone to be the liaison between the two. That's how I got my foot in the door. I started realizing that what they really needed was somebody to negotiate with outside vendors. The company was called Hybrid Her. They don't exist anymore, but they were, at the time, a print magazine moving to an eCommerce site that would market and promote women entrepreneurs and women inventors.
I can remember the general counsel when I was negotiating for my full-time job. I knew I was never going to replace my Skadden salary, but I had this idea of what salary I needed to pay the bills at the time. He was like, “We're a startup company. We can't pay you that.” I remember saying to him, “You want me to negotiate the best possible contracts with your outside vendors, but you want to hire me after I cannot negotiate the best possible contract for myself.” He was like, “Well played.” I got the contract I wanted and then I negotiated for their outside vendors. I was like, “I'm still a lawyer.”
That is great. In all of that is a strong sense of self. You're moving into different positions, but you have a strong sense of your worth. You're standing up for that in the negotiations, but not in a rude, super forceful, or aggressive way. That sounds pretty persuasive to me if you want me to be negotiating things. We got to do this.
I talk to transitioning lawyers about this a lot. There are two big hurdles when you are transitioning from the practice of law. 1) Financial and 2) Identity. They're both equally troublesome. They can both hold you back. Not everybody needs this. I talked to lawyers and other transitioning professionals. I said, “You have to figure this out for yourself. You have to own your decision.”
What was important to me from the beginning of transitioning from a practicing lawyer was to still own my lawyer identity, say I was a lawyer, call myself a lawyer, and introduce myself as a lawyer. It's a shorthand, especially when I'm talking to vendors. I wasn't acting as the company's lawyer or legal team. When I can introduce myself as a lawyer and own that background, for me, it gave me the confidence I needed to proceed. It has become easier for me to distance myself from that time of my life, but it's still very much part of my identity. That has allowed me to move forward in new chapters with confidence.
That is a theme that's coming across to me. You're being confident. It is not necessarily about exactly where the road is going to end because you're taking one step at a time, but being confident as you take each step and valuing yourself in that process. The identity piece is important for lawyers. The financial thing is important, but the identity is much bigger than you think. There's a lot wrapped up in saying that you're a lawyer.
It is a shorthand. People respect lawyers. In our community of lawyers, we respect the profession so greatly. We want to still be respected by our peers. In fact, for a lot of transitioning lawyers, myself included, some of the biggest resistance and criticism that they’ll face when leaving the law is from other lawyers. I’ve seen it displayed. I've seen it caused by two different emotions. One is jealousy where it is like, “You're figuring a way out,” but then also, confusion. Others who are not interested in leaving the law are completely confused. They’re like, “Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to give up anything?”
The biggest resistance and criticisms when lawyers leave their profession are jealousy and confusion.
It has taken me over ten years away from the law to be able to say, “I didn't give up anything. I took it all with me.” That has been easier to say that I have a second chapter to point to, but in the beginning stages of that, I was susceptible. I was vulnerable to that criticism and resistance. I had to grow some thick skin because I had to face that.
I can remember being at my very first book signing for my debut novel. It was in 2014. It was only about four years after I left the law, but that still seemed like a lifetime. Somebody raised their hand and asked me at that event a question that stumped me. It was, “Are you a lawyer who now writes, or are you a writer who used to be a lawyer?” I was paralyzed by that question. I gave it some lawyerly non-answer. I would think about it for years. It wasn't many years later that I was able to say, “It doesn't matter. I am still a lawyer and a writer.”
I was self-conscious about that in those early years. I was like, “How am I going to hold onto my identity? Is it okay to want to hold onto my lawyer identity? How am I going to reconcile the two?” Frankly, I didn't write legal fiction. I didn't write legal drama until 2021. The book I released in 2021 was a couple of years in the making. It took me a decade away from the law to be able to say, “I can even write legal fiction now. Now, I can reconcile all these parts of myself and they can all work together.”
There are two things. The first thing is that there's the outer shell of the identity and how people perceive that. There's also the interior, which is what I call the stacking of all of the skills. You're a writer with certain skills because you have lawyer skills. You don't have to leave those skills behind because you bring them with you. You're the same person. Everybody gets focused on the outer shell part. That’s us included. Tell me about the process of starting to write and going towards publishing your first book. You said you didn't start with legal thrillers. You started with different genres.
I had no interest in writing legal fiction. What I started writing right away during that sabbatical and then continued for the next couple of years is the story on the side about a woman who was at a crossroads in her life and was re-evaluating choices made. It was a second-chance book. Ultimately, I worked on that for four years. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I started to realize, “I have something.” I started to go to writing conferences. I started to workshop it. I started to realize that I might have something that was a potentially commercial book.
While I was still working on that, I was writing for ABA journals. I was writing about Sidebar Plus. I was sitting in a coffee shop working on my novel and working on some other writing when I got a call from an agent who worked for the American Bar Association publishing arm. He said, “I've been reading some of the things you've written. We want to greenlight a project called Lawyer Interrupted, but we need somebody to write it. Will you help me work on the proposal for this book and potentially think about writing it?” I said, “I’m working on this novel. I'm starting to think about shopping this novel, but that's the book I should be writing.”
It wasn't supposed to be a memoir, and it wasn't a memoir. I did work on the proposal. It was green-lighted very quickly. I wrote that book. My first book contract was a non-fiction book contract for Lawyer Interrupted. What we pitched it as and what it was was a synthesis of interviews and research about lawyers who had transitioned from the practice of law to different fields, creative and otherwise.
When I got that book contract, I used that to help shop for the novel contract. I sold my first novel without an agent. The startup company that I was working for had been a print magazine moving to eCommerce. The editor of the magazine became a friend and a mentor. She made introductions for me. I started saying out loud that I was working on this book, which I advocate to everyone who is working on something that they're not sure about, “Say it out loud in all different audiences. You never know where you'll find mentors and champions.” That's what happened to me.
The New York City editor made introductions for me. I met the head of this smaller publishing house. I was a boutique publishing house much like I started my career for a boutique law firm. I loved it. I met Nancy Cleary, Head of Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing. You'll love this story, too, because this was another example of me negotiating for myself. She read the beginning of my book and said, “You have a real book here. I do two things. I take on, every year, a roster of authors that are traditionally published. I also have a self-publishing consulting arm, so I help some authors self-publish. I usually don't do fiction. I usually don't do debut authors on my traditional roster. I would consider helping you self-publish.”
She had only read the beginning of the book. I said, “I would like you to consider taking me on and putting me on the roster of traditionally published authors next year.” She said, “I like your gumption.” I said, “Would you read the whole book before you make a decision?” She said, “I like your gumption. I'll read the whole book for you.” I said, “That's what I want to do.” She said, “Send it to me and I'll read it over the weekend. I'll get back to you next week.” I was like, “Okay.” I remember waking up and being like, “I'm going to hear from her.”
I remember I was at my son's hockey game. I'm sitting next to the ice and I get this email. “I read the whole thing.” She attached a contract to that email. She offered me a spot on her roster. With that book, she did a great job. My debut novel is called Lemongrass Hope. She was an advocate and a champion for that book. It got some modest press.
Jacquelyn Mitchard blurbed it. She is Oprah's very first book club author. We hustled. We got the book to Jacquelyn Mitchard, which was no small task. Since Jacquelyn Mitchard blurbed the book, Library Journal noticed the book and featured it. It did well. After all of that, I was able to get an agent. I got my agent after the first book. I am on my second agent, but then, I've been an agent or author since my second book. I used to always say I have a non-traditional path to publishing, but what I've learned is that it's not like the law. There is no, “Take the LSAT. Go to law school. Pass the bar.” It's not like that in publishing. It's the Wild Wild West for the most part.
That's what I've learned, too. It's much more Wild West-y than the law. It's interesting that you leveraged the ABA contract for the non-lawyer. Even then, you're leveraging your skills, knowledge, and value in the legal space, which was partially because of your non-legal interest. You flipped that into the next. You’re like a maverick dealmaker. I don't think you're just an author. There's a lot going on here.
This is a story I hear from lawyers all the time when I talk to lawyers who have transitioned to other fields, especially creative fields. It is a differentiator. I've talked to artists who've said their ability to negotiate their deals on quick turnarounds and their own contracts is a differentiator in the art space and in a lot of spaces. It was a differentiator for me and continues to be because I have been able to look at my own contracts and advocate for myself.
I also think that I have a perspective on the publishing industry, which so many writers get beaten down by and jaded by. I have a certain perspective having been in a very cut-throat, competitive profession for so long that I'm not immune to the jaded days. I do have a more bird's eye view of the process because of having been in a profession that was so gruesome for so long.
Let's put it in a nice way of saying. You can understand the business side of it and why certain decisions are made. You may not think that's the right thing to do in the larger sense, and it may not be fair to authors, but from the publisher's perspective, certain things might make sense.
I understand all that. I agree. That's a diplomatic way of saying it. Thank you.
This is so interesting. There may not be one particular route in publishing, but there are still a lot of caches. There are certain things where you have to get the imprint of approval from different places in order to move forwards, publish with different kinds of houses, and things like that. All of those things you mentioned were important in establishing your credibility in publishing.
I have been on the receiving end of so much generosity and I have tried to pay it forward whenever I can. My network in the writing world has become large and organically supportive. I did find a group pretty early on in my publishing journey. It was right after my second book was published that I found this group called the Tall Poppy Writers. It's a marketing co-op founded by Ann Garvin who's a USA Today bestselling author and an incredible writing mentor. She's a good friend to me, but she was an incredible mentor first in the business.
She assembled this group of women who were in a variety of different genres and different publishing houses who could help cross-promote each other. It was to also lift the veil of secrecy off the publishing industry. That's how it started. At any given time, there are 40 to 50 of us. I've been involved with the group since 2015.
I always say, “If there were Tall Poppy Lawyers, I might still be a lawyer.” It’s reflective of what you're doing with this show of women trying to raise each other up, trying to share knowledge, trying to share awareness, and trying to be supportive in the industry. That has also been a big game-changer for me with that group of women, and then, in turn, the other friendships and relationships that have formed through the industry.
Writing is pretty solitary generally. Being able to have that is helpful to prop you up in writing and a bunch of other things, too. That's what I noticed when I went back to my early midlife crisis of wondering whether I should have been another kind of writer. I ultimately concluded that I was doing the right thing for myself because I didn't like being alone that much. I'm alone as an appellate poet lawyer, but I'm not alone all the time.
It felt like there was a lot of ruminating involved, especially if you're doing creative nonfiction. When something bad happens, I move on. I don't relive it over and over. I felt like, “I would not be a good writer about this. You have to relive it.” As a result, I was much crankier. I was like, “I'm lonely and I'm cranky. I don't like who I am, so I'm out.”
I get it. For me, I found the opposite to be true. I was cranky, but I also sought out. I do understand that it's such a solitary, lonely profession if you're not seeking out connection.
That was my roundabout way of saying that that group is awesome for that purpose as well.
After I got those two book contracts, I was like, “This is going to be my full-time job.” I made a writing office in my house. I was like, “I'm going to write full-time. That's what I'm going to do.” That's when I realized, “This is a lonely thing.” That is a hard thing if you're just going to sit in your corner of the house and write all the time.
I started writing in coffee shops. I'm on the faculty of Drexel. I do nonprofit work and volunteer work, and then I write alongside those things which feed the writing and my need for connection alongside the writing. I'm like you. I had to figure out a way not to make me lonely and cranky, but I also have to write or I will be cranky.
Writers can avoid being lonely and cranky by doing nonprofit or volunteer work.
You have to balance all of those things. Either too much of this is cranky or too much of that is cranky. It was dramatic to discover that. I thought, “I write alone all the time. How could this be any different?” There's something about it. Legal writing is outward-facing. You're going to produce pretty quickly to somebody and you're going to get a reaction in terms of whether you've persuaded the court or not. There's always something about action that immediately comes from the writing where you don't get that. You just put stuff out. Sometimes, you get feedback, but sometimes, you never know whether you've had an impact on anyone with your other kinds of writing. That can be a little frustrating.
It is a vulnerable thing, writing in your own voice as opposed to writing in your client's voice. That's a thing that a lot of lawyers are like, “I already write, so this will translate directly over to writing fiction or writing poetry.” As you've learned, that idea where you have to hone your voice, find your own voice, and be comfortable exposing yourself and your soul in a certain way, is not always comfortable, especially after you've been writing as a lawyer for a long time. That was a big adjustment for me and a big part of the process of transitioning from lawyer to writer for sure.
There's a part of you that's going into that in a different way than it is when you're writing advocacy.
It is very personal. Even my nonfiction isn't autobiographical. Parts of my story are woven through it, but my writing is personal. It's not autobiographical.
That's how you get authenticity and genuineness into it even if it isn't exactly recounting what happened. You've got to have certain things that make it real. It sounds like you've gone back to the topic of your first book in a different way. Tell me about your newest book.
In 2022, I released two books. One is called How to Leave the Law. I co-authored that book with Liz Brown. It's a follow-up to both of our respective earlier non-fiction books. Liz Brown wrote Life After Law. I wrote Lawyer Interrupted. How to Leave the Law is the follow-up to those books. It is a synthesis of research and interviews with people who have transitioned away from the law. How to Leave the Law also looks heavily at the coaching space, which has evolved in the last couple of years as a whole industry of lawyers turned coaches.
I've noticed that on LinkedIn. That is where I see the community of so many lawyers turned coaches. They’re not just coaching lawyers, but it is in many different ways.
That's been a wonderful development in the space. That was one of the things that prompted us to want to write a follow-up. It's very full circle this 2022 because I did release my first legal drama. It's the first in the series. In Her Defense released in the spring of 2022. It's the first in the Riversedge Law Club Series. The second book is called Barr None. It's coming out in the spring of 2023.
I never thought I was going to write legal drama. I thought I was going to separate that past chapter out. It wasn't until during COVID when I was examining what my next book was going to be that I started thinking, “I’m ready to write legal drama. I'm ready to write legal fiction.” The Riversedge Law Club Series is not set entirely in a courtroom. It's the grounding factor of the series. The Riversedge Law Club, which is a fictional plate or a fictional club in a fictional town, is where a lot of backdoor politics happens. It is where a lot of cases are tried outside of the courtroom.
It's the embodiment of a lot of stuff that I saw over the course of my career but sensationalized and fictionalized for fun. Some of it's not. It's not an exaggeration, but I won’t tell you which parts. It's been fun to go back to my roots in a way and to bring the writing and the law together. 2022 is a fun year for me to have the legal drama series. Fiction is my passion. I love it. Alongside that, my passion is counseling and mentoring would-be transitioning lawyers to help them explore their own creativity.
Do you do that outside the books or just through the books?
Through the books. I do a lot of CLE conferences, speaking at legal conferences, and writing conferences. Since I'm on the faculty at Drexel, which has a law school, we do a lot of talking with law students. We're working on a lot of projects that would help cross-promote opportunities between the law students and the creative writing students and bring those creative writing opportunities to law students. It's a big passion of mine. I didn't understand all of the things that were available to me when I was in law school. I'm hoping this generation of law students will have a little more information on their hands.
It is expanding a little bit, but in case it isn't, that is what I hope the show can help with as well. At Drexel, you teach in the creative writing department. Is that right?
Yeah, the MFA program.
Did you decide that you wanted to get an MFA yourself along the way or not?
No, I did not. I did not. Nomi Eve is the director of that program. She is a Tall Poppy writer. She has created this amazing program that has a real social justice and community activism component to it, which is so interesting to me. It's a practical program. It's a program that helps the students interface with agents, editors, and published writers.
That’s good. I know there are not that many but some limited residency programs that allow people where they don't have to be in one place for 2 or 3 years.
That’s Drexel’s program. I'm here in Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, but a lot of the students are not.
That is a great invention because it's good to have options. If you can't go somewhere and move to Iowa for two years or whatever, then doing the limited residency is something that might be doable when the other isn't great.
It's something you can do alongside something else, like practicing law.
It fits exactly with the formula that you've been talking about. If you only had a few minutes, what would be your top two tips for a lawyer who might be considering doing something else more creative?
I would say try to do it on the side. First of all, a lot of practicing lawyers don't even know what their hobbies or interests are anymore.
I was going to say you have to reconnect with that.
That means taking a Saturday morning off every now and then. It means joining boards, doing volunteer work, and expanding beyond your world. We all know that when we're practicing law, our world shrinks. You have to be deliberate and intentional to try to step outside of that small circle. Cultivate your interests and your hobbies, and then do it on the side. That's what I tell people all the time. That means you can trial and error. You can try different things out.
I remember interviewing Jill Donovan. She owns this incredible jewelry company called Rustic Cuff. She was a lawyer in Oklahoma for many years. She tells the story about how she decided that every year, she was going to take up a new hobby but immerse herself in it. In one year, she took up Russian and then went to Russia. In one year, she took up tap dance and then did a recital alongside the young students. In one year, she learned how to play poker and entered a poker tournament. In one year, she took up jewelry design. Ultimately, that took off. It became a lucrative side profession for her and her full-time profession.
She has an incredible, profitable jewelry business. It all started by exploring new unique ventures, creative ventures, and other ventures once a year. She said, “I had this idea that over the next twenty years, I would have cultivated twenty new hobbies. That's what I set out to do alongside practicing law.” Ultimately, one of them took off and became commercially successful, which became a passion project for her. She ultimately left the law. That's a good model for people.
I love that idea. I like the total immersion idea.
Give yourself one year to master something.
That's an interesting model. I like that. It is taking it to the utmost, which is what a lot of lawyers tend to do. My parents are always like, “I thought that was supposed to be for fun. Instead, you're creating a business or doing this and that.” I'm like, “That's fun. I don't understand what you're telling me.”
You should always do it until it's not fun anymore. When it's fun, you're willing to throw yourself into something that's feeding your soul that way.
Some of it is going with whatever the current feels like. If it's taking you a certain way, you go with it even if you know what each step is but have no idea where it's going to end up. Clearly, something is calling to be created in the world and you're shepherding it along. That's how I look at it.
I agree with that. I love that.
Somebody's got to pick it up. You’re like, “I noticed it. I should probably be the one. I’ll squirt that little idea out there and see what happens.” With regard to moving to a new career or a new profession, how have your books and recommendations been received by lawyers? Are they a little resistant? Have you felt like you're personally responsible for helping certain people move to a new part of their lives?
One of the other things I often tell people is to say it out loud and when you've got these little ideas in the back of your head, try to cultivate them. Hopefully, saying it out loud will help you find your supporters and opportunities that you wouldn't have known about otherwise. I thought it was unique to leave the law and pursue creative ventures.
When you are visible in that space, people start understanding, “I could do other things. I could write. I could explore this creative side of myself.” I've been excited about how lawyers in particular have become wonderful ambassadors of my mission and avid readers. They have also then used the conversations that we've had as inspiration and jumping-off points for their own creative ventures. It has been great.
When people leave the law to pursue creative ventures, they inspire others to explore their creative side as well.
You said you interviewed a lot of different people for the books also in terms of leaving the law and finding something else. How did you find the people to interview? How did you go through that process?
It is in all different ways. I've become a student of transitioning lawyers ever since I started working on the book proposal for Lawyer Interrupted in 2015. I've cultivated a database of transitioning lawyers. You'd be surprised to learn that there are so many more than you thought there were. Transitioning lawyers are incredibly generous people. Once lawyers transition, they're so excited to talk about it with other lawyers. They're so excited to write about it and talk about it in other forums. It has become a much more visible field of people than it was many years ago.
They're excited to tell their story or their evolution.
They're not in hiding. They're yelling about it. Would-be transitioning lawyers are still in hiding. They're still a quieter group of people or a quieter demographic. Transitioning lawyers, we're loud. You can find us.
That's so interesting. What’s the range of other things that lawyers have done after practice?
That's what's so fascinating.
Is it everything?
It's endless. I used to think there are entrepreneurial fields. We tend to think that it is mostly academia, government work, or in-house work. Those sorts of law-adjacent fields are certainly available to people, but there are entrepreneurial fields, artists, and real estate. There is no limit to what fields you can go into. The most important message is that you're not limited. Instead, the versatility of the JD degree means that it's going to be a differentiator in your next path. You need to think about where your passion and interests lie and how to use the legal training to propel you to that next step because it's certainly not going to limit you.
Even on the show, I can think about other folks that we've had on, like executive directors of museums. We think about legal nonprofits, but that's an executive level at another one. There's a lot to do. There are writers. There are people in venture capital. There are entrepreneurs often in the legal tech space, but also in other areas. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I enjoyed the discussion and your insights. Normally, I end with a couple of lightning-round questions. Do you have a moment for those?
Absolutely.
The first question is what talent would you like to have, but don't?
I wish I had visual art talent. I'm so mesmerized by artists. Writing is my art, but I'm so mesmerized by artists in any other medium. I would love that, but I don't have one single artistic bone in my body.
I always say that there are art makers and art appreciators. There's always a role, so that's good. You are a writer, so this might be a tough one. Who are your favorite writers?
That is impossible.
This might get you in trouble, so you may not be able to answer it.
I never say that out loud because I have so many writer friends in a variety of different genres. I will say this. I am a huge fan of the Tall Poppy Writers who represent across genres. I don't read any one genre. I don't read just nonfiction and I don't read in one genre of fiction. I read a lot. I'm a voracious reader. I'm always reading multiple books at the same time. I have too many writer friends to pick one.
I figured that would get you in trouble. I had to ask it though. I was like, “I have to ask and see what the answer is,” but I suspected that was going to be it. For what in life do you feel most grateful?
My children. They’re my greatest story. That's my legacy. For a long time when I was practicing law, I didn't know if I was going to have the time or energy to be able to have a family. I was so grateful to start my family while still practicing law. I've been grateful that I didn't miss that boat.
Whom would you invite as a guest to a dinner party?
I would love to be having a dinner party with Harry Styles. For one, I would get major bonus points with my daughter. Number two, I'm completely mesmerized by his creativity and his journey from boy band member to ardent feminist. He would be so fascinating to sit across from at dinner.
That's the first time I've gotten that answer. There's something about your creativity. You're in a different zone. The last question is what is your motto if you have one?
I do have one. It's, “Be the buffalo.” I discovered that fairly new. I read an article about cows versus buffalos in storms. When there's a storm, cows apparently try to outrun the storm. They run in the same direction as the storm and try to outrun it, which never works. For buffalos, when there's a storm coming, they turn and face the storm and run right through it. Ever since I read that, I was like, “That's the energy I want to harness. I want to be the buffalo. If there's a storm coming, I don't want to try to outrun it. I don’t want to try to avoid it. I want to turn, face it head-on, and get through it.”
I love that. Thank you so much. That's awesome. That's a great way to conclude. That is a powerful image to end with.
I agree. When I discovered that, I felt the same way. I'm glad it resonated with you.
Thank you so much again for joining the show. It was so much fun.
Thank you so much.