Two Career Tracks, One Lens: Why My Background Points Both Ways
The second semester of 1L is almost behind me, and if the first year of law school does one thing, it forces you to be honest about where you're going. For me, that question keeps circling back to corporate law and white-collar criminal defense.
On the surface, they don't look like natural neighbors. Corporate law is about building and structuring transactions, drafting agreements, and closing deals that hold up long after the parties have moved on. White-collar criminal defense is about examining. You are stepping into a completed transaction and asking, under the pressure of a government investigation or a courtroom, what it actually meant and who is responsible for what went wrong.
But the more I study both, the more I believe they're powered by the same underlying engine. Both require you to read a business situation the way a skeptic would. Both require you to understand how deals are actually structured, not just how they look on paper. Both reward the attorney who can hold the details of a complex financial transaction in mind while also seeing the larger picture of risk and intent.
Before I came to law school, I spent time in private equity and private credit. They were two different vantage points on the same question: how are deals built, and where do they break?
In private equity, I analyzed energy transition investments and reviewed operating agreements. The job was to understand how a transaction allocated risk and control before anyone committed capital. That's the foundation of corporate practice. In private credit, I was underwriting loans and reviewing covenants — evaluating whether borrowers were accurately representing themselves. White-collar defense is fundamentally about what a representation meant when someone later disputes it.
I came to Brooklyn Law School with both of those experiences already in hand. What I'm doing now is learning the legal vocabulary to apply them in practice. Both tracks are still very much on the table, but I’m now finishing 1L with more clarity than I had when I started.