Mike Spivey: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. We combine them today. I'm with Rob Baker. I love how he words it—we've known each other since we were teenagers. We both went to Vanderbilt, we both were philosophy majors, Rob went on to law school, and then he went on to biglaw, mid-law, managing celebrities. So we combine this. We talk about the admissions process. We talk about the delta between Rob's law school experience and then practicing law. So where did the law school get it right, and where did they completely miss training him for when he was thrown into practicing law?
It's a natural conversation. This is completely unscripted. We forget to mention some things, because we're just talking. But we're really talking about what it was like practicing law versus learning the law in law school. We also don't mention that Rob was hired by our firm to help with this new, chaotic world of how to get a job when you're being recruited not with 1L grades, but the first day you enter law school. So reach out to us if you're interested in speaking with Rob about that, but more importantly to this episode, if you're interested in what it's like practicing law versus going to law school, this covers that.
[1:26] Hey, Rob. Good to see you. It's been what, a couple weeks?
Rob Baker: Yeah, I think you're right about that.
Mike: For our firm's annual retreat. But as a backstory, I mean, we went to Vanderbilt together in 1990 starting, right?
Rob: I love to say it, that I've known you since you were a teenager.
Mike: Yeah. Well, I was a different person. We were both philosophy majors.
Rob: That's right. I don't know how you came across philosophy, but, you know, I took a 101 course with John Locke, who I know you know, and that's really what got me into it. It was the class I liked the best.
Mike: I took it probably for similar reasons. I liked the faculty.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: I thought the faculty were cool. I mean, literally how I thought of them at 19. Did that propel you to—it propelled me to the business world, how to write.
Rob: Well, you know, I had always thought I would be a lawyer, and it was for the extremely unique reason that my dad was a lawyer.
Mike: Right.
Rob: I just thought that that would be something I'd be interested in, for no other reason. I didn't really worry about pairing the major to the career goal until later. And by serendipity or happy circumstance, you know, it didn't really matter what I majored in in undergrad to go to law school, turns out.
Mike: Right. I think it's amusing and probably intentional that, as a former decision-rendering admissions officer, you intentionally tripped up on two things I hate in admissions: the overuse of the word “unique.” Right? “Your unique international law program” doesn't ring well with admissions officers.
Rob: Right.
Mike: And qualifying the word “unique,” which was always a pet peeve of mine.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: Unique is binary. Something's either unique or not unique. It's not “very unique” or “exceptionally unique.”
Rob: I may or may not trigger you on purpose during this.
Mike: No, I think you did. But I know some people would say this is prescriptive, but every admissions person reading files has their own pet peeves. The biggest one that I had was the overuse of the word “I.” If someone had a personal statement with something like 15 to 20 “I”s, I would really de-elevate that. It might not be an auto deny, but it knocked their application down if every sentence started with the word “I.” Admissions officers are people, and people are precise with words, and using words imprecisely actually does impact your application.
Rob: It's really interesting because, I don't know how many admissions officers are out there, but it's more than five. You just have to use your best guess on, “This admissions officer would not like the word I”? It might not phase another one.
Mike: Good writing generally wins the day. I mean, I could plug our firm, right? There's a reason why we exist successfully. We know what law schools generally like and don't like, not 100% of the time.
[3:49] Think about your admissions process.
Rob: Sure.
Mike: How well do you remember it? Which might be interesting to note.
Rob: You know, it's funny, knowing that we were going to do this podcast, I kind of thought about it and put myself back into that mindset, and the truth is, I can't remember everywhere I applied to law school. I don't remember my acceptances, rejections. I know that I had them. I know that I applied to multiple.
That was back in the day, this new fancy piece of software had just come out; you stick a CD, or a floppy disc, I can't remember which, into the computer, and you can answer all the questions one time, and it would spit out printed applications for each of your schools.
And so I know I applied to multiple, because I bought that software, but Vanderbilt was on the list, Washington and Lee was on the list, I'm certain Harvard was on the list because why not? And I don't know who accepted and who rejected, other than W&L, which is where I went.
Mike: Yeah. It's so fascinating. I bet you a week after, if you got denied at Harvard, I bet you for a week it stung, or maybe a day. And it's very, to me, elucidative that 20-something years later, you don't even know if you applied.
Rob: Couldn't tell you with any certainty, and it has affected my life zero percent.
Mike: Exactly, same. I'm sure I was denied in the undergraduate process. I know Princeton denied me.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: I honestly can't remember if it hurt or not. Probably not; I don't think I expected to get into freaking Princeton University.
Rob: It was also a different time. You know, undergrad, I applied two places that I remember, and Vanderbilt was the one I really wanted to go to.
[5:18] Mike: Yep. You went to W&L Law. How was that? I'm going to venture to guess, 95% of people who listen to this haven't gotten to law—or maybe 90%. So what was it like? Did you have imposter syndrome in week one, day one?
Rob: Yeah. You know, it's like starting anything else. You know, it's a bunch of people from a bunch of different situations thrown together, and you get to know each other real fast. W&L didn't have large classes. That part wasn't hard, and they did a good job of creating some intentional social meetups to facilitate that. But yeah, it was a little bit of—there's a bunch of different people trying to do sort of the same thing.
The one thing I did take away was, more people in that environment were focused on school. Where, undergrad, you know, you could be there for a lot of different reasons. And some people were there for athletics, some people were there to go to graduate school, some to work right away. But at law school, everyone wanted to get that law degree, and so the level of study, dedication to school was noticeably higher.
Mike: Yeah. I only applied to two business schools. I didn't go to law school; I went to business school, and then I went to get my doctoral degree. But what's interesting is, I applied to the #2 business school, Texas at the time—#2 in marketing, which is what I wanted to do—and then I applied to Alabama because both my parents went to Alabama undergrad. And I thought Alabama wasn't going to happen. I was certain I was going to get into Texas. And my GPA wasn't that great. I don't even know if my GMAT was great. Again, I can't remember.
What I will say about this, going to business school was so much more like being in high school than going to undergrad. The cliqueiness, the people trying to be cool. Now, there was a lot of focus on studying, including from me, which there wasn't in undergrad. I'd crushed it in the library as a business school student. I was in that library many, many endless nights, and I didn't do that as an undergrad. But within that context of studying, there was this high school dynamic that was off the charts.
Rob: There definitely were cliques, but they weren't aggressive. There were a group of students that were married, so they had similar interests, and they would spend more time together. There were former athletes, couple of groups like that. But no one was hyper exclusionary. My experience was maybe a little bit different; it wasn't as hyper-cliquey in the same way that it was in high school, although it was cliquey.
Mike: What you're saying is actually rare. For 26 years, I've heard people talk about it, but I also observed it at three different law schools. You hear a lot of law school students—particularly the 1L year; everyone settles down a little bit 2L year—but during 1L year, you hear a lot of people saying, "I can't believe how much this is like high school."
Rob: It's really interesting. And at the time, W&L touted themselves as anti-competitive from a grading perspective, and so, whether it was true or placebo effect, it didn't feel as cutthroat around exam time. People would share notes, people were much more collaborative than the stories we'd heard other places. I don't know what it was like anywhere else.
[8:04] Mike: Was there a lot of partying? I was always surprised from my vantage point, particularly when I went to WashU and I was a dean of career services, I had much more interaction with students than being in admissions. I had made the mistake of giving every student my cell phone number, and the amount of drunk texts I would get, astronomical.
Rob: It was remarkable to me how much drinking there was. I didn't realize. And call it state-sanctioned drinking too, because, you know, a lot of schools have Blackacre.
Mike: Right. Vanderbilt.
Rob: Vanderbilt had that. I can't remember what we called it at W&L, but on Fridays, you come out the front door and there's a keg on the lawn. And you know, W&L is in Lexington, Virginia, small town, few thousand people, two schools. When those aren't in session, half the town goes away. So there's not a lot to do there. I did love that town, but, you know, drinking was high on the list, and I just didn't realize it would be like that.
Mike: Yeah, me neither when I was a dean-level employee. And what I'm trying to do, obviously, is preview for people, what are some of the surprising things? The high school-like feel for most, not all. The partying is a little surprising, I think, to a lot of people.
What are a couple highlights from your law school experience that you think listeners would be interested in?
Rob: The friendships. I still have some friends, to this day, from law school. I didn't know how that would be. It's kind of luck of the draw, but I graduated from law school in '99, and I was just back a couple of weekends ago to visit with a professor who's retiring, who was my favorite professor while I was there. He also lost one of my exams, which is a whole other story.
Mike: Yeah. During law school, not now obviously.
Rob: That's right. The friendships, that was one of my favorite parts of law school, or the connections I made. And going back to Nashville, which is where I practiced out of law school, not a lot of people went to W&L. I picked that school because it was in the top 25, and I thought I would practice a certain type of law that would require a flexible degree. so I would need top 25 if I wanted to be on either coast. But turns out, at the end of the day, I went back to Nashville, and that part of it at least was less impactful. In fact, I had to find other W&L graduates to help in the recruiting process.
[10:00] Mike: Can you name what W&L is in the rankings now?
Rob: I couldn't tell you.
Mike: Nor could a single hiring partner, if I asked.
Rob: I can tell you what I think their highest ranking was, while I was there, because it mattered to me then.
Mike: Right.
Rob: And I'm probably wrong about that.
Mike: And you've been a hiring committee member for a while.
Rob: That's right.
Mike: People who listen to our podcast have heard me say this before. I've yet to hear a single hiring partner—and I used to be, again, a dean of career services. I didn't just do admissions, and I used to ask every hiring partner I met with—so now we're talking about hundreds—can you name the top 10 law schools? Not a single one has, to date, gotten it right.
Rob: I could give you an educated guess.
Mike: You came up with top 25, and now a lot of people like to say top 14.
Rob: Sure.
Mike: But hiring authorities, hiring entities tend to think of schools as “highly prestigious”—and they have their own cutoff. It's not T14, or if it is T14, they're completely getting wrong what the actual rankings are. So I do think people overemphasize the rankings. I did want to mention that. I'm still more curious about your law school experience.
Rob: And I can also tell you from being on both sides of that, that even when the law firms use the rankings, they're often wrong about them. Even when they're intentional. You know, I've seen a nepotism clause that was designed to get students around bias built in, so they use a top, then it would've been a top 25, if I remember it correctly, and it was just wrong. It just wasn't reflective of the actual top 25.
Mike: Great advice for others to hear from a former hiring committee member. What else about law school stands out? Not that you picked it for being top 25. If you were a client of mine now, I would say, "Refine your list a little bit better than maybe Harvard, maybe W&L because they're top 25." But what else?
Rob: So what else surprised me about law school? What you learned. You know, I thought you would come out of law school knowing how to practice law, and you just don't. They're pretty upfront about that, at least they were at Washington and Lee. And they said, "You know, we're not really going to teach you how to practice law. We're going to teach you how to think, and the problem is you're never going to be able to undo that." That stuck with me.
Mike: I can attest that you haven't undone that.
Rob: You know, I think about that often. I don't obsess about it, but I do think about it, and every now and then I will surprise myself and think a little bit outside the box, a little bit outside of what my legal training taught me, and I get excited.
[12:16] Mike: Before we get to what they didn't teach you how to do that you learned on your feet as a practicing lawyer in multiple different roles, what did they get right? Was legal writing relevant to how you would write as a lawyer? What did they prepare you well for?
Rob: Sure. There were several things. And right off the bat, I remember my contracts professor, which was my small group—and law schools do it different ways, but at W&L, each semester first year, you would have a particular small group—so I had contracts first, and then I think it was crim law was second semester. But out of the gate, the professor threw us into writing a contract, and getting not much instruction at all and just, "Hey, here's a situation. Put this in writing. It needs to be a page or two." It wasn't a long contract. And just the mistakes we made were the best teachers there, because we were able to break it down person by person, “This is why this is here,” “This is why you should have said this.” And so writing, that was a big help.
Now, I wasn't a litigator. I will caveat what I said about law schools not teaching you how to practice with—if you were at W&L, we had the Black lung Clinic, right? So as a law student, you could go and actually work on cases of people that were suffering from that horrible disease. And so you really did, in that case, get a sense of what it was like to try a case.
Mike: Yeah. When I worked at Vanderbilt, they had a number of clinics, and similarly, students could actually work on cases at those clinics.
Rob: Yeah. But for me, you know, to try and teach a transactional lawyer how to be a transactional lawyer, there's so many different components that go into it. The best one, I think, looking back, I entered the negotiation competition. We would take manufactured fact patterns and argue the two different sides of that and try to reach agreement. That was a lot of fun and very practical. I used a lot of those skills after law school.
Mike: Looking back, could you finger-point what made people in your class good lawyers? Because I'm going to give you a quote from a mentor of mine, but did you have instincts, "Oh, I'm going to be a good lawyer. Oh, this person, Sarah's going to be a good lawyer."
Rob: There's so many things packed into that question, because there are so many different types of lawyers, right? There's so many different things that make you a good lawyer. Sales, right? Can you land clients?
Mike: I know.
Rob: Can you do the work? They say when you get out, there's finders, minders, and grinders, right? People find the work, people take care of the client, and then people in the back room just do the work. So at a minimum, those three classifications are three very different people. And so there are some folks that you meet, whatever this person does, they're going to be successful.
Mike: What percent is that? Because we had those at Vanderbilt undergrad, too.
Rob: 5%. It's not a huge number. But they just have a combination of factors, it just equates to success in whatever they're going to do. But not all of us have that. And so I would just say that it is difficult to predict. I'll get this wrong, but one of my friends was one of the worst performers in school, and probably one of the most successful attorneys that I know. Built his own firm, and it's been wildly successful. Took a lot of risks to do that, but it worked.
[15:15] Mike: The highest-paid lawyers are the salespeople, and by sales, it's actually the opposite of what one would think. They're not cold-calling and being cheesy like an insurance salesperson might be.
Rob: They're convincing people to trust them with what, at the time, is probably the most important thing going on in their lives, or one of them.
Mike: They're exceptional, listening and networking. If you listen to the podcast—we'll link it—with me and Gibson Dunn's M&A global chair, Jeff Chapman, now, he's doing $200 billion deals or whatever.
Rob: Sure.
Mike: And he's not selling himself. He's listening to other people. I've gone out to dinner with him a number of times; I can never get a question in about his life, because he’s always asking me about my life. That's sales, believe it or not.
Rob: It really is. And if you've ever been a client, you can understand that even more how important it is to have someone that just gives you a sense of calm when you're handing off whatever the issue is.
Mike: So they got some things right. They got some litigation experience right. They got contracts, which everyone says. You learn contracts, you learn contracts. I could actually hire a 2L for our firm to write our firm's contract if I wanted to. I'm certain of that. Contracts just make sense.
This is what I'm most interested in. What did you do in your career that you were never prepared for?
Rob: I want to be clear that I don't think that law schools are necessarily getting it wrong; it's just that, you can only be thrown into the fire by being thrown into the fire, right? You can't simulate game pressure. And so they will tell you, the law schools, upfront, that they're teaching you how to think, not how to practice law, and then when you get to the law firm, which is what I did, they said the other side of that, which is, "You don't know anything about practicing law. And we know you don't know anything about practicing law. Everybody here knows more about it than you do, including the people who are here to help you.” And so the best thing you can do is learn, and learn from everybody. And so I took that to heart, because they were right.
I guess I would go back to, teaching you how to think is actually more important than you may realize at the time. It really does factor into how to figure out how to be a lawyer. Now, I went into a transactional practice that started in corporate M&A, a little bit of public reporting work. I transitioned that into an intellectual property practice with the ultimate goal of being an entertainment lawyer.
Mike: Which you were.
Rob: Which I was.
Mike: Having been at Vanderbilt Law School, just to let the listeners know, a lot of people came to Vanderbilt Law School to be "entertainment lawyers." And that's a hard first job to land. You got to build towards that.
Rob: It is very difficult. You know, it's a little bit analogous to being an entertainer. You know, in Nashville we used to say, a hundred people get off the bus every day, and there may be one job available. There may be one spot if you want to be a singer. The same thing's true for entertainment attorneys. You know, there's just way more people that want to do it than jobs are available. And so just the attrition alone kind of weeds out who's going to make it. That was true for me.
Mike: Well, that's also true going to biglaw.
Rob: Yeah. Attrition is a much bigger force than people realize, because you can be frustrated that things aren't working or that they're not moving forward, but just the ability to stick with something gives you an advantage, because other people won't stick with it.
Mike: Including on the waitlist.
Rob: That’s right.
Mike: People lose their ebullience and enthusiasm, and if you can maintain that while you're on the waitlist, you might be the person that gets the August admit simply because you hung around with resilience.
Rob: That's right.
Mike: I mean, Scott Galloway talks about this all the time. The #1 predictor of success is willingness to fail publicly. Put yourself out there.
Rob: Yeah, that's an uncomfortable truth. Only uncomfortable while it's happening. When you get to the other side, it becomes clear.
Mike: You know, you said one other thing I want to click on, which is, Washington and Lee did their best, but they couldn't prepare you for something that you had never done before, practiced before. I mean everything in life—ask anyone who's brought a baby home.
Rob: Yeah. No.
Mike: Are you comfortable leaving that hospital? Of course not. You're on your cell phone Googling how many ounces, how many ounces, how many ounces?
I public speak a ton. Was I comfortable the first time I public spoke? No, it was abject failure.
[19:07] Rob: Yeah, I don't want to make it sound like W&L's unique or that they didn't prepare me. They absolutely did. If I could do this whole thing again, I'd go right back there and get my education all over again.
Law school is a lot of fun. That's another thing I wasn't really prepared for. I didn't think it would be fun. I just thought everyone would stick their nose in a book and get to work, but it was a lot of fun at the same time.
Mike: Yeah. I think it's a lot of fun for 80% of people.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: I actually think anything with meaning, there's a part of that meaning that's derived from hard work. So I was an athlete, you were an athlete. All those long hours to me now are meaningful. And they probably were meaningful at the time. All my long hours in business school, ridiculous long hours in doctoral statistics classes, I mean, those brought some meaning.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: Alright, so what else when you were practicing—and then you became a manager for celebrities, probably you're under an NDA, we can't name all the celebrities. Anything else, Rob, that, either when you were at biglaw, mid-law, or managing celebrities, totally not on your radar or you were not prepared for as a law student?
Rob: Yeah, so, this is more of a statement about, kind of the whole overarching going to law school, law schools, and then practicing. That might not be what you think it is going in. You know, we put a lot of emphasis on T14. We put a lot of emphasis on where you go equating with what the rest of your career is going to be like. And at least for me, what I realized on the other side was, that wasn't really the driving factor. Now, yeah, if you want to go and practice exclusively biglaw in a major market, then T14 is going to be your friend. But you might want to practice in a particular geographic area. You might want to practice in a particular specialty, and it might not be “T14” that is the right answer for you.
You know, my first job out of law school was at the biggest firm in Nashville, and in my class, there were Vanderbilt graduates, there were UT—Tennessee—graduates, right? The real UT. There were, you know, I was the only W&L graduate. We had a Pepperdine graduate. We had an Alabama graduate. All of us had the same job, and we all had the same salary, and we all paid different amounts for our student loans. Now, I don't know that anyone would trade their law school experience. We all ended up where we wanted to be. But were I reverse engineering it, the advice I give now is, to the extent you can know what you want to do on the other side, that can inform your choice of law school as much as any ranking can.
[21:31] Mike: Yeah. Let's end on two notes. So you covered some differences. One would be, what makes a good lawyer? And let me take a stab at this.
Rob: Sure.
Mike: So our firm—I don't think people realize this, and there's no reason why they should, but our firm actually works with law firms, because law schools get sued. And there are people out there who are also invested in law schools who work with law firms to make their law schools better. So I've worked with law firms, I've worked with a number of lawyers on a number of different projects. I won't call them cases; I'll call them projects. And obviously, as someone who has been at three law schools, I just have the good graces to know a ton of lawyers. I think like 90% of my LinkedIn contacts are lawyers and something like 50% of my Facebook friends.
So to me, what makes a great lawyer versus a good lawyer? Because I know a lot of good lawyers, but I know a few great lawyers. Number one, they're adaptive. Some people will get this reference; a lot of people won't. A good football coach has a system. They run the wishbone or whatever. A great football coach works with the people around them and changes their system. So they adapt to the case, they adapt to the merger, the transactional deal, based on reading the room and the circumstances.
So I always think of—I've made up this word—”AQ,” adaptive quotient, is greater than CQ, curiosity quotient, which is greater than EQ, emotional quotient, which is greater than IQ. I mean, I'm living proof. I've been relatively successful, but I think my intelligence would be lower than a lot of people that we went to Vanderbilt with. But I'm super curious, and I think I'm pretty adaptable. So that's one. And highly responsive would be another one.
What else, from your perspective?
Rob: I think you're hitting the nail on the head. It's easy as an attorney to get into—I don't know if “rut” is the right word, but in my case, I'm doing, whether it's prosecuting a trademark application or doing a record deal or just a regular old M&A transaction. There are forms, there are blanks, and you can get into just a system where you just plug stuff in. If you're not listening to the client and what their needs are, then you're missing the boat on what they actually hired you for. Right? Every case is unique. Just about every case is unique. And so understanding your clients—which means listening more than you're talking—is, I think, crucial to being a good attorney.
Mike: Yeah. They do listen. There's cases going on right now in the world that Spivey Consulting is tangentially—people are asking us for our advice. And when I get on the phones with these lawyers, I can never get anything out of them. I'm curious about the cases, too. They never tip their hand. I'm doing all the talking; they're asking me for expert witness-like questions.
[24:04] Rob: Sure. And then not to just copy exactly what you're saying, but I think you're hitting the nail on the head. Probably the biggest complaint that any lawyer gets is, "I didn't know where we stood. I didn't hear from him or her." And so nothing is always going to be worse than something. Even if it's, "Hey, nothing happened this week," or "Hey, I didn't hear from," or "Hey, I reached out and crickets." It's always better than, well, I'm not going to bother my client telling them something didn't happen. They want to hear it. They want to know, and they want to know that you're paying attention. They're probably giving you something that's very important to them, and so they want to know that you're taking it seriously.
Mike: Right. 90% of the people listening to this are in the application process or already know where they're going. What would you say to them, if they were your son or daughter or child? Whether it's about their law school experience, their experience as a lawyer, their experience deciding to retire, who to root for in the NCAA tournament for all I care.
Rob: Sure.
Mike: Final best wisdom.
Rob: Dive in. You don't know what it's like to practice law, more than likely. And so you probably don't know the differences in the different types of law. You might find something that you love and you had no idea that you were going to love it. And so dive in. This is going to be three years out of your life, and find that thing that you want to pursue and then pursue it. That sounds like generic advice, but it's real, and it's true. Just put your whole self into it.
Mike: We have a lot of psychologists on our podcast, because it's very helpful for people with a long career ahead of them. And they're always talking about living in the present. It's so hard. All our past memories have some faultiness in them. We have no ability to predict the future at all. I went to DMV yesterday, remember? I was like, "They're going to kick me out of here and say I didn't bring the right document," and it was a five-minute pleasant experience with a likable person. I was so wrong. And all I was doing was griping to you about having to drive an hour to DMV.
The only moments that are real are the present. Right?
Rob: There's the philosophy major.
Mike: Yes!
Rob: I think that's right, Mike. And just to go a little bit further down that hole, your law school has opportunities that you don't realize that they have. If you just dive in and find them and take advantage of them, you know, you'll never have that chance again. So, you got three years. Take advantage of them. Make it the best experience that you can.
Mike: Thanks for your time. We’ll talk soon.
Rob: My pleasure.
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