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The Buddy Check and the Legal Record

One of the first things you learn as a scuba diver is the buddy check. Before you go under, you and your dive partner verify each other's equipment — not because you assume something is wrong, but because the environment you're entering is one where a problem that seems small on the surface becomes serious quickly once you're underwater. I've been thinking about that practice a lot in the context of legal risk management.

Corporate attorneys do something that functions very similarly. Before a deal closes, the parties conduct diligence — reviewing the other side's representations, verifying that what's been disclosed is accurate, checking that the conditions for closing have actually been met. It's a systematic process, and like the buddy check, its value isn't visible when everything goes right. It's visible when something could have gone wrong but didn't, because someone ran the process correctly.

White-collar criminal defense begins where that process ends — or where it failed. An investigation, an enforcement proceeding, or a criminal case involving financial conduct starts with a question: what did the record actually show? The attorney works backward through the documentation, looking for what was done and what wasn't, trying to determine whether the gaps that exist were innocent or intentional.

The connection between the two practices is clearest when you think about what good corporate work actually prevents. A transaction that's been properly structured, documented, and disclosed leaves very little room for a white-collar case to take hold. The pre-dive checklist, run correctly, makes the post-incident review a much shorter conversation.

I want to practice in both directions. Scuba diving is just a hobby that keeps the framework in mind.

#law #scubadiving

What Scuba Diving Taught Me About Legal Risk Management

I'm a certified scuba diver. And if there's one thing diving teaches you — quickly, and with some urgency — it's that the checklist is not optional.

Before every dive, you work through the same sequence. Air supply, gear function, buddy check, and conditions assessment. You don't improvise on any of those, and you don't skip them because you've done them a hundred times before. The checklist exists because underwater environments don't offer good options for fixing mistakes after the fact.

Corporate law is a pre-dive checklist.

The job of a corporate attorney — structuring transactions, drafting representations, documenting the parties' intent — is fundamentally preventive. You are trying to make the deal airtight before anyone goes in. The thoroughness of that work determines whether the transaction survives scrutiny later, whether it holds up when someone disputes it, and whether the record is clear enough that the parties' intent is never seriously in question.

White-collar criminal defense is the post-incident review. When a government investigation begins, or an enforcement action is filed, the checklist has already been run — or it hasn't. The white-collar attorney's job is to reconstruct what the pre-dive setup actually looked like, what was done correctly, what was skipped, and whether the skipped steps actually matter in the context of what's being alleged. You're working backward through a completed process, looking for the explanation that holds up.

The best corporate attorneys I've read about think like white-collar defense attorneys. Before they close a deal, they ask: if this transaction were reviewed tomorrow, what would the record show? That's the pre-dive question.

Dan Selby, 1L at Brooklyn Law, scuba certified, still thinking about checklists.

#law #nyu #scubadiving

Intent Is the Word That Separates Corporate Law from Criminal Defense

Spend enough time studying both corporate law and white-collar criminal defense, and one word keeps appearing at the center of the difference between them: intent.

Corporate attorneys create intent. They draft documents that define what the parties agreed, what they were trying to accomplish, and what they understood the transaction to mean. Good corporate practice makes intent explicit — clear enough that even a skeptical reader, years later, can understand what the parties meant and why.

White-collar defense attorneys interpret intent. By the time they enter a case, the documents already exist. The transaction already happened. Someone — usually the government — has decided that the intent behind that transaction was improper, and the attorney's job is to reconstruct the record and show that the intent was, in fact, legitimate, or that the government's reading of the documents doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

I worked through this distinction while researching criminal justice reform at New York University. The criminal justice system constantly addresses questions of intent— was this act deliberate, reckless, or accidental? — but white-collar cases push those questions into territory that requires deep business literacy to navigate. You can't argue about whether a complex financial transaction was fraudulent without understanding how that kind of transaction is supposed to work.

That's where my background comes in. Private equity and private credit showed me how transactions are built and where the representations that matter tend to live. Brooklyn Law is giving me the legal framework to read them the way a prosecutor would — or, on the defense side, to push back on a reading that doesn't hold up.

#law #nyu

The Question at the Center of White-Collar Defense

One of the projects I'm most proud of from my time at New York University was a long-form research paper on criminal justice reform — work that became the foundation for my senior capstone. The subject pulled me in because of the human scale of what's at stake in the criminal justice system: who gets charged, who gets resources, how intent gets interpreted under conditions that aren't always fair.

What I didn't anticipate was how much that research would clarify my interest in white-collar criminal defense specifically.

Here's the distinction that emerged for me: white-collar criminal cases are defined by questions of intent in a way that most criminal cases are not. In the bulk of criminal practice, the question of what happened tends to be the primary one. In white-collar practice, what happened is usually established — there was a transaction, there were documents, and money moved between parties. The central question is what it meant: did the person structuring that transaction intend to deceive, or were they acting on a good-faith interpretation of a complex situation that went wrong?

That's a deeply interesting legal question. It requires attorneys who can read a business record not just for what it says, but for what it was intended to communicate and how a reasonable person in that position would have understood it.

My research on criminal justice gave me the foundation. My finance background gave me the business fluency. My corporate law coursework at Brooklyn Law is giving me the front-end view — the documents that white-collar cases are eventually built from. I know where I want to practice. The research just confirmed it.

The Question at the Center of White-Collar Defense

What I didn't anticipate was how much that research would clarify my interest in white-collar criminal defense specifically.

The Handicap Can Wait. The Process Cannot.

Anyone who plays golf knows the frustration of a round that comes apart not because of a single catastrophic mistake, but because of a series of small ones — a rushed swing here, a skipped step there, a decision to trust instinct over method at exactly the wrong moment. I think about that a lot in the context of corporate and white-collar practice.

Corporate attorneys work in a world that seems, on good days, like it should be straightforward. The parties agree to the terms. The documents reflect the agreement. Everyone closes and moves on. But the work that distinguishes excellent corporate practice from adequate corporate practice is exactly the process discipline that's hardest to maintain when things seem to be going smoothly — the thorough review of representations, the careful drafting of conditions, the insistence that the documentation is explicit rather than assumed.

When that discipline slips, it creates the cases that white-collar defense attorneys inherit. A representation that should have been verified. A disclosure that was technically present but effectively hidden. A board decision that wasn't properly documented. Those aren't dramatic failures — they're process failures. And they have consequences that show up years later, in the middle of a government investigation, when everyone who was in the room has a different recollection of what was agreed.

I've been carrying around a 10 handicap for longer than I'd like to admit. Working on it. The parallels to legal practice are not lost on me.

Dan Selby, Brooklyn Law, still taking both the golf and the law seriously.

#law #nyu

What Golf Teaches You About Legal Practice

I've been playing golf since I was a kid, and I'm still working on my handicap — currently hovering around 10, which is either "respectable for a first-year law student" or "needs significant work," depending on who you ask.

What I've come to appreciate about golf, especially this semester, is how unforgiving it is about process. The game has no shortcuts. You can't rush your pre-shot routine, skip the setup, or decide the wind probably doesn't matter and expect it to end well. Every step in the sequence exists for a reason, and the rounds that fall apart are almost always the ones where you convinced yourself you could skip something.

Corporate law works the same way. Every transaction has a checklist — representations, conditions, covenants, and closing deliverables. The attorneys who do that work well treat every step as non-optional.

The documentation that seems like an administrative detail at closing is often the very documentation that matters when someone disputes the deal three years later. Missing a step in due diligence or leaving ambiguity in a key representation creates the white-collar problem of someone else being called to fix it.

White-collar defense is equally unforgiving, but at a different stage. When a criminal or civil enforcement matter arises, the record that exists — whatever corporate attorneys built or failed to build — is what you have to work with. The post-incident review, reconstructing what was done and what was skipped and what it means, demands the same discipline as the pre-shot routine: methodical, sequential, unwilling to assume that anything is too obvious to document.

Two practices. One intolerance for cutting corners. Golf has been a useful reminder of both.

#law

Economics, Ethics, and Pizza: The Education Behind the Law Degree

There's a version of the NYU story that's easy to tell: economics degree, Dean's List, Global Leadership Program, now at Brooklyn Law School. That version is true. But it leaves out the parts that actually shaped how I think.

New York University sits inside a city that operates like a graduate seminar in applied ambition. The people around you in class are simultaneously launching startups, running policy initiatives, managing investment portfolios, and arguing about ideas with an intensity that makes most classroom discussions feel tame by comparison. You absorb habits of thinking from that environment, whether you intend to or not.

The economics concentration gave me something specific: a framework for analyzing behavior under constraints. Who has what incentives? How do they respond to rules? Where does the gap between intended outcomes and actual outcomes tend to open? Those are economics questions — and they're also the central questions in corporate law and white-collar criminal defense, just translated into legal vocabulary.

The NYU Global Leadership Program pushed me toward a different kind of thinking — cross-cultural, contextual, focused on the gap between how institutions describe themselves and how they actually operate. Useful in a lot of places. And the NYU Pizza Club — which I founded and was genuinely just about finding the best slice in New York — was a reminder that not everything has to be strategic. Sometimes it's just pizza.

Daniel Selby, 1L at Brooklyn Law, Dean's List at New York University, still maintaining standards about pizza.

#law #NYU

What New York University Actually Gave Me

I graduated from New York University in 2024 with a BA in social sciences — economics concentration — and a few things I hadn't expected to take away.

The credential is real. Dean's List across my time there. Selected for the NYU Global Leadership Program, one of twelve students chosen for a program focused on international and cross-cultural leadership experience. Those accomplishments matter, and I'm proud of them. But when I think about what New York University actually gave me — what I carry into law school and into the work I want to do — it's something less easily captured on a resume.

NYU is in the middle of New York City, and New York City is a relentless editor. The pace of conversation around you, the quality of the people you encounter in class and outside of it, the sheer density of people building real things — companies, funds, policy shops, research — it all forces a kind of intellectual sharpness that's hard to develop in a slower environment. You either keep up or you fall behind. That friction was valuable.

My economics training gave me the analytical foundation — how to read data, how to evaluate arguments, how to model the relationship between incentives and outcomes. That foundation shows up constantly in law school, where the underlying structure of most legal questions is some version of an economic question dressed in legal language.

And if I'm being honest: the NYU Pizza Club I founded, which was exactly what it sounds like, taught me something about community-building that no curriculum could. Brooklyn Law has that same pace. Nearly a year in, I'm grateful for both.

#law #nyu

Three Backgrounds, Two Legal Tracks, One Area of Law

People sometimes ask whether working in Washington on energy policy has much to do with practicing law. The honest answer is: more than I expected.

Energy is one of the areas where policy, finance, and law are so deeply intertwined that understanding any one of them in isolation leaves you with an incomplete picture. The legislation that defines what qualifies for a tax credit affects how deals get structured, which affects the financial representations companies make to investors, which — when those representations are challenged — creates the cases that white-collar attorneys work on.

I spent time at the Energy Futures Initiatives Foundation and the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions. I wrote about clean energy financing, renewable investment, and the policy frameworks that determine where capital flows. I watched how the distance between a policy intention and a market outcome often lives in the details of the legal and financial structures in between.

At Brooklyn Law School, I've started to map that experience onto the specific practices that interest me most. On the corporate side: tax equity transactions, project finance, the transactional work behind clean energy deals. On the white-collar side: ESG enforcement, greenwashing claims, SEC climate disclosure investigations — all of which are growing areas as institutional capital follows the policy push into clean energy.

My background in Washington and in finance points toward both. The question isn't which track applies to energy law — both do. The question is which angle I'll approach it from first.

Dan Selby, finishing 1L, still thinking through it.

#law #daniel selby

From Washington to the Courtroom: How Energy Policy Connects to Two Legal Tracks

Before I went to Brooklyn Law School, I spent time in Washington working on energy policy. First at the Energy Futures Initiatives Foundation, then at the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions. I was writing op-eds, tracking legislation, and learning how the financing behind clean energy projects actually determines what gets built and what doesn't.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was getting a front-row education in two distinct legal practices.

The first is on the corporate side. Clean energy finance has become one of the most active deal-making spaces in the market. The legal work behind those transactions — tax equity structures, project finance agreements, power purchase contracts, regulatory compliance — is complex and technical, requiring attorneys who understand both the deal mechanics and the policy environment. My time in Washington gave me a ground-level view of how those policies are made and what they're intended to accomplish. That context matters when you're structuring the deals that bring them to life.

The second is on the white-collar side. As capital has flowed into ESG investing and clean energy broadly, regulatory scrutiny has followed. Greenwashing enforcement, SEC investigations into climate disclosure practices, fraud allegations related to ESG misrepresentation — these are active and growing areas of white-collar practice. The legal questions look different, but the underlying analytical demand is the same: what did this company represent, to whom, and did the representations hold up?

Washington gave me the policy background. Finance gave me the deal background. Law school is giving me the tools to apply both. Energy law — whether on the transactional or enforcement side — feels like a natural destination.

#law

Why the Best Corporate Lawyers Think Like Prosecutors

There's a piece of advice I keep encountering in white-collar practice literature that I think explains the relationship between corporate law and criminal defense better than any textbook definition:

Draft every document as if a prosecutor will read it someday.

That's not paranoia. It's the highest standard of corporate practice. And it's also the best explanation I've found for why the two areas of law are less separate than they appear.

White-collar criminal defense — the kind of practice I'm drawn to — is built on the examination of exactly the documents that corporate attorneys produce. Operating agreements. Board minutes. Financial statements. Emails about deal structure. The question in almost every white-collar case is some version of: what did the people who created these documents know, when did they know it, and what did they intend?

Corporate attorneys who ask that question prospectively are practicing white-collar defense before anyone has been accused of anything. They're building the record that exonerates their client before the investigation begins. That's a compelling way to practice corporate law, and it's also exactly why a white-collar background deepens corporate work: you understand how documents get picked apart, so you draft them to survive scrutiny.

Brooklyn Law School has pushed me to think about this connection. The 1L curriculum surfaces it everywhere — in criminal law, in contracts, in civil procedure. The same underlying question about intent and documentation keeps appearing in different legal contexts. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Daniel Selby, still a few weeks from finishing 1L, still thinking about this every day.

#corporate law #law #criminal defense

Architects and Historians: The Real Difference Between Corporate and White-Collar Practice

The question I get most often when I tell people I'm interested in both corporate law and white-collar criminal defense is: "Aren't those just two departments at a big firm?” Yes — but the mindset is fundamentally different, and I think it matters more than people realize.

Corporate attorneys are architects. Their work is prospective. They're building something — a transaction, a company structure, a set of agreements that will govern the relationship between parties for years. The job is to define intent clearly enough, on the front end, that there's no ambiguity later. A well-drafted operating agreement, a carefully structured M&A deal, a securities offering with thorough disclosure — these are the artifacts of good corporate practice. They exist to prevent disputes from arising.

White-collar defense attorneys are historians. Their work is retrospective. Something happened — a government investigation, a criminal indictment, an SEC enforcement action — and now the question is what that something actually meant. They're working backward through documents, financial records, communications, and the statements to reconstruct the intent of people who may or may not be able to articulate it themselves.

Here's what connects them: both require you to read a transaction the way a skeptic would. The corporate attorney asks, could this be misread by someone who wanted to? The white-collar defense attorney asks, was it misread, by the government, and does that misreading hold up?

My background in private equity and private credit — understanding how deals are actually built and where the representations that matter tend to reside — prepared me for both questions. I want to use it in both directions.

#law

What Baseball Stadiums Have to Do With Firm Culture

Here's a question I've thought about more than I probably should: why does walking into a baseball stadium feel like walking into a law firm?

The answer, I think, is that both are institutions with accumulated identities. You can read about them all you want, but you don't actually understand the culture until you're standing inside it, watching how people behave in the space, noticing what's preserved, what's been updated, and what everyone seems to take for granted.

I started visiting MLB stadiums with my dad. What began as a shared father-son project turned into something I've continued on my own — partly for the baseball, partly for the study in how organizations present themselves. Twenty stadiums down, ten to go, and the list of things I've noticed along the way is longer than any ranking could capture.

Some stadiums feel like they're performing a tradition. Some feel like they're performing modernity. The best ones — and I'd include Citi Field in that category — feel like they've figured out who they are and built the environment accordingly. They're not trying to be anything they're not.

That's what I'm looking for in a firm, too. The corporate and white-collar practices I'm drawn to are serious, technical disciplines. The firms that do them well tend to know who they are. You can usually tell within an hour of being inside.

Dan Selby, finishing 1L, still working through the bucket list. Fenway is next. Busch Stadium after that. If anyone has strong opinions about either, I'm listening.

#baseball #law

20 Stadiums, One Lesson: Environment Shapes Everything

I've been to 20 of the 30 MLB stadiums. Ten left to go. When I tell people that, the first question is usually about rankings — which is the best, which is the worst, which one surprised me most. I have opinions on all of that (Citi Field tops the list; the Oakland Coliseum was not the highlight of my year). But the thing I think about most, when I reflect on what this project has actually been, is something a little less obvious. Every ballpark has a personality. Camden Yards feels like it was designed to remind you that baseball is historic and that Baltimore specifically has something to be proud of. Oracle Park in San Francisco feels like an architectural postcard — stunning in a way that almost distracts from the game. Wrigley Field in Chicago feels like the sport froze in time, and it likes it that way. Those personalities aren't accidental. They were built — by the design of the space, the decisions made about what to preserve and what to update, the way the organization chose to present itself to the people showing up every night. You feel a culture before anyone tells you what it is. I think about that in the context of where I want to practice law. The firms I'm interested in, the ones doing serious corporate and white-collar work, have cultures that precede you, the same way a ballpark does. You can read about them, but you can't fully understand them until you're inside and the best research isn't always in a survey or a recruiter's talking points. Sometimes it's paying attention. Ten stadiums left. Two years of law school left. Plenty of time for both

The Analytical Through-Line: From Finance to Law

People sometimes ask why someone with a finance background would be interested in criminal defense work. Isn't that a pivot? No, the confusion comes from seeing "criminal" and assuming the practice is far from the business world.

White-collar criminal defense isn't far from the business world. It is the business world — seen from the inside of a courtroom, or a grand jury room, or an SEC enforcement proceeding. The cases are built out of documents, financial records, and emails about transactions. The factual questions are almost always business questions: what did this deal mean, what did the parties know, and what was the intent?

My private credit background trained me to ask exactly those questions. Underwriting loans meant reading financial statements skeptically, identifying where the borrower's narrative didn't quite match the numbers, and determining whether the gap was innocent or something more deliberate. That analytical process — skeptical reading of a financial record — is the core skill in white-collar defense work.

On the other hand, my private equity background trained me to understand how deals are structured, where risk lives in an operating agreement, why documentation choices that seem minor at closing can become consequential years later — that's corporate practice.

At Brooklyn Law School, both of those frameworks are coming into focus. The legal vocabulary is new. The underlying analytical habit isn't. And I'm increasingly confident that the two tracks I'm pursuing aren't as different as they look from the outside. They're two applications of the same skill in different directions and at different stages of a transaction's life. That's a compelling place to practice law, and I’m excited to be here.

What Two Finance Jobs Taught Me About Two Legal Practices

Before law school, I worked in two corners of finance. I didn't fully understand, at the time, how differently those experiences would end up pointing.

In private equity, I was analyzing energy transition investments. That work is fundamentally about deal structure — how transactions allocate risk and control between parties, what the operating agreement says about decision-making authority, and where the liability lives when something doesn't go as planned. Those are corporate law questions. The attorney's job in that world is to build the structure correctly from the beginning — to anticipate every place where a deal could be disputed and ensure the documentation doesn't leave room for ambiguity.

Private credit was a different lens. Underwriting a loan means evaluating whether a borrower's representations hold up under scrutiny. Are the financial statements accurate? Do the covenants reflect what the parties agreed? Is the story the borrower is telling consistent with the data? That, it turns out, is much closer to white-collar defense work.

When a government investigation turns to a particular transaction — an SEC inquiry, a fraud allegation, a criminal case involving financial misrepresentation — the central question is exactly the same one I was asking as a credit analyst: did the representations hold up, and did the person making them know whether they did or not?

At Brooklyn Law School, I'm putting legal vocabulary to skills I built in finance. But the underlying question those two jobs trained me to ask — where is the gap between what someone said and what actually happened? — is the same question at the center of both practices. One practice tries to prevent that gap from existing. The other tries to reconstruct it after the fact. I want to be fluent in both.

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