With the end of the year approaching, I always find this to be a good time to take an objective review of your year from a professional standpoint. Don’t beat yourself up, but be honest: Did you achieve any or all of your career objectives? Did you get any closer? Whether it’s starting your own solo practice, lateraling to another firm, going in-house, working for the government, joining a startup or leaving the law to pursue an alternative career, what held you back?
This is in response to a recent important article by Kate Battle about how predictive coding software is threatening to replace the document reviewers. There is no doubt in my mind, the document reviewers will be replaced. The only question is how many years away are we from that? If it’s 10 years away, then presumably all of my fellow document reviewers are not going to scramble to plan their next career move. But if the trend starts happening in the next year or two, this could cause major upheaval. So what should you do?
B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E! If there is one piece of advice that has helped in my alternative career transition from lawyer to comedian it’s to always be aggressive. A cool thing happened to me recently because I followed my own advice.
Greta Van Susteren is a former criminal defense and civil trial lawyer, and the host of On the Record on Fox News. Last week, she took a few minutes to chat with Matt Ritter about her career path.
I just got off a nightmare of a document review. As a former big firm associate, I know first hand what it feels like to be lashed out at by someone for no other reason than they have seniority over you. However, in my new alternative career as a part-time document reviewer and full time comedian and writer, I assumed I would never again have to take abuse as part of this relatively simple job. Unfortunately I was wrong.
Recently, I was subjected to the worst assignment I have ever had to do because of two people that were hungry for power. Here are some tips for document reviewers facing this situation and some for Napoleonic project managers who might want to avoid being hated by everyone in the document review community. Somehow I doubt they will heed my advice.
Here’s more of Matt Ritter’s useful advice from the document review trenches. The following are useful things I have picked up from my few short months on various document review projects.
When you’re looking to make the jump to an alternative career, there’s never going to be a moment where a wise old man says “it’s your time.” In the real world, you have to make decisions and follow through on them. If you’re thinking of leaving Big Law because there’s something else you think you should be doing, my best advice would be to start planning now. There’s not much of a blue print for people trying to leave the law and do something else, so I’m trying based to pass on some lessons (a few painful) that I had to learn.
This is a question lawyers often face if they do things the Matt Ritter way: freelancing, chasing their alternative careers, supplementing their main practice, etc. I am writing this post because I am on the verge of potentially getting a modest windfall for freelance legal work I did over the past two years to help launch a start-up. I referred to it as a windfall because after two years, I had pretty much considered it a sunk cost and now the start-up is actually attempting to cash out.
We continue our interview with entertainment lawyer, Jeffrey Fuhrman:
You obviously ran a tight ship. So let’s fast forward a little, now you’re at E!, how did that happen?
After two seasons of Millionaire, I was hired into business and legal affairs at the Walt Disney Company (the owner of the production company producing Millionaire) and spent 3 more years working directly with the boss who had hired me from Millionaire.
So now you’ve added “business” to the title. How did that happen and what does that mean? Many lawyers I have talked to want to make the transition from BigLaw to in-house, but their lack of “business” background makes them especially scared to take on a job that has that word in the title.
Keep Reading ⇒
Is an in-house job as an entertainment lawyer the “dream job?” I recently sat down with a good friend who went from BigLaw to Business and Legal Affairs at NBCUniversal to find out the answer.
Name, law school, year and first job?
Jeffrey Fuhrman, Penn Law, class of 2001. Associate, Skadden Arps, 2001-2004, banking and institutional investing department.
Current title?
Executive Director, Business and Legal Affairs, NBCUniversal Inc. More specifically, working with the networks: E! Entertainment, G4 and Style and a production studio called Comcast Entertainment Studios.
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