Alternative Careers profiles - The Bar Association of San Francisco

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Alternative Careers
profiles
Susan Kostal
Mark Schlosberg
Mark Schlosberg, thirtyone, has big shoes to fill as
the police practices policy
director of the ACLU of
Northern California. His
predecessors are Amitai
Schwartz and John Crew.
But all his training and interests seemed to point to
the job.
As an undergraduate,
Schlosberg worked in the
student advocate office at
UC Berkeley as, in essence, a public defender for students
subject to discipline by the administration, including those
charged in student protests. He worked on a university policy committee and interned at the San Francisco public defender’s office. In his senior year, he was appointed to the
City of Berkeley’s Police Review Commission.
He went to New York University School of Law, largely for
its public interest program. With the help of a Root-TildenKern scholarship and its Soros Justice Fellowship, Schlosberg was able to graduate with no debt. While working for
sixteen months in the public defender’s office in Contra
Costa County, he was reappointed to the Berkeley Police
Review Commission and was hired by the ACLU in
January 2002.
Schlosberg spends less time lawyering and more time educating legislators and community groups on police and civil
rights issues and trying to persuade policy bodies. Most recently, he has worked to legislatively overturn Copley Press v.
Superior Court, an August 2006 California State Supreme
Court decision that blocked public access to records about
police complaints and effectively stopped police commissions from holding open hearings. SB 1019, which passed
in the state Senate by a 22–11 vote, is now stalled in the As-
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sembly Public Safety Committee, though Schlosberg is still
actively pursuing passage of the legislation.
Schlosberg, now one of the most public faces of the local
ACLU, feels no pangs about not practicing law.
“I couldn’t do what I am doing without being a lawyer.
Not everything I do needs a legal degree, but it helps
a lot.”
Schlosberg spends less time lawyering
and more time educating legislators
and community groups on police and
civil rights issues.
Shabnam Malek
Shabnam Malek, thirtyfour, graduated in 2005 in
the top 5 percent of her
class at University of San
Francisco School of Law,
magna cum laude. She
loved law school, worked
hard, had excelled in the
academic environment,
and was raising two children. In her previous
career, she developed content for a software development company and
planned arts and technology events. In other words, she
had it all together. “I felt that meant I was supposed to go
to a big firm,” she says. She summered at a law firm and
took a position with White & Case in San Francisco. She
was placed on the transactional side and developed good
friends and mentors.
But she soon became disillusioned about the practice.
“I didn’t find the area I was working in to be something I
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really loved or felt passionate about,” she says. When the
office announced in March 2006 it would fold, Malek was
in transition. “I looked at other law firm jobs, but I also
looked at the courts.” She couldn’t wait for the fall deadline for federal clerkships and found herself applying for
a clerkship at the California Supreme Court—and taking
a $70,000 cut in pay.
Malek works on the criminal side, analyzing appellate petitions and making recommendations to the court as to
whether the case should be accepted for review.
“I knew I wanted to litigate, and this would give me that
experience. It has done wonders for my ability to analyze
and frame the issues,” she says.
Despite some $140,000 in debt, Malek sees her time at
the court as an invaluable investment in her career. “I did
feel some pressure to go to big firm life. I asked myself
if I was doing the right thing, if I was taking a step backward. Ultimately, I felt I absolutely made the right decisions and realized I have developed skills that are an asset,
whether I go back to big firm life or not.”
“Seventy-thousand dollars is a lot of money,” she continues. “But I have been so happy coming to work every
morning. I go out to eat less and have to rely on credit
cards, but what I have gained in career experience and
skill development is more than worth the extra debt and
financial hardship for a year.”
She describes her young colleagues at the court as similar
to herself. “The guy who works next to me could have
done the big firm thing. He’s the smartest guy ever.” Perhaps emboldened by Malek’s choices, a friend who graduated at the top of her class also took a job at the courts.
Malek and her colleague are weighing their options. Each
has an opportunity to work for the court for another year.
“Ultimately, I felt I absolutely
made the right decisions
and realized I have developed skills
that are an asset, whether I go
back to big firm life or not.”
“When you graduate at the top of your class, you can
be liberated by your law school experience or restricted
or bound by it. You are told you have a lot of choices.
But it is really easy to get myopic, that your only
choice is a big law firm. Luckily, I’m not too scared by
debt,” she says with a small laugh. “I’m glad. It’s given me
more choices.”
Evan Lee
UC Hastings College of
the Law, in San Francisco,
would love it if Evan Lee,
in the words of author
Michael Lewis, discovered the next “new new
thing.” In his new role as
associate dean for research, Lee’s job is to
help his colleagues get
published and raise their
visibility. While his focus
is the academic world, he
wouldn’t mind if one or
two of his Hastings colleagues became household names,
or at least another Joan Williams.
Lee, forty-seven, knew he wanted to teach, but his was
not exactly a linear path. He clerked for a federal judge
and went to work for a litigation firm, hoping to get four
to five years’ litigation experience that would prepare him
for his grand plan of teaching civil procedure.
As a mere first-year associate at a firm in San Francisco,
he was cornered by a senior partner with what his peers
would have considered a great opportunity. A major computer manufacturer needed a worldwide regulatory compliance program. Would he like to be the one to travel and
put it together?
“Judging from the envious stares, I think any other sane,
rational young lawyer would love to have done it,” Lee
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says. But regulatory compliance was “not anything I knew
or cared about, and had nothing to do with teaching civil
procedure.” Lee found, like other associates, that “request”
is really code for “order.”
He began his odyssey of waking for 4 A.M. calls with counsel in Bahrain or Switzerland, and found himself living on
planes. “The only thing unconventional about it was I
didn’t really want to do it,” he says. Somewhere above the
Azores, he made the decision to get out. With only eighteen
months of practice under his belt, Lee began looking for
academic jobs. He started at the University of San Diego
Law School in 1988, and wound up at Hastings in 1989,
where, as Lee’s luck would have it, there were already plenty
of civil procedure professors. So he choose criminal law
and has taught it, federal courts, and jurisprudence
ever since.
He has three times won the Outstanding Faculty Member of
the Year award from the third-year class and now hopes to
share that star power with others. “Getting published can be
a big mystery to young academics,” Lee says. “There are so
many outlets for publications, and the protocols for submission are not always clear.”
“We have some brilliant young
academics who do incredible work,
and I want to help make it easier
for them to publish.”
Lee’s role as academic literary agent and internal kibitzer
should help raise Hastings’ status. “Hastings, from all accounts, is a fabulous teaching institute. But the bottom line
is the main measure of a law school’s reputation is its scholarly output,” Lee notes. Publication is also directly tied, for
better or worse, to fundraising, Lee says.
“We have some brilliant young academics who do incredible work, and I want to help make it easier for them
to publish and help them to get information about external funding for their research.
We have folks who are very well known in their fields, but
who do not have broader recognition,” Lee says. “That is
the disconnect I am trying to change.”
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Julie Brush
For Julie Brush, forty, it all
started with tennis. She
played tennis at UCLA, and
for a time before college
was on the professional
tour. She first dipped into
the corporate world with a
job at Levi Strauss, working
closely on the firm’s reorganization with Anderson
Consulting. “My lifelong
dream wasn’t to be in the
retail business. I wanted to
own a sports management
and marketing company that focused on women’s athletics,”
she says.
But how to get there? She met with lawyer turned sports
agent Leigh Steinberg, and he suggested law school. “I
didn’t want to go to law school, so that was a problem. But
he was very persuasive,” she says.
While working full time at Levi’s, she started in the night
program at Golden Gate University’s School of Law. After
graduation, Brush began methodically building her sports
résumé. She knew she needed experience with contracts, so
she took a job with a small San Francisco entertainment law
boutique. “But the bulk of that practice ended up being litigation, which I didn’t like and was not a helpful skill set for
what I was trying to develop.”
To get the transactional experience, she hired on as a real estate associate with Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. She continued to interview for jobs she thought would get her
closer to her goal. “What I found, though, was that since I
stopped playing tennis in the late 1980s, all of my contacts
had retired. I hadn’t even thought about this possibility. It
really threw me for a loop. This was going to be a major uphill battle.”
Brush was faced with the “now what are you going to do
with yourself ” quandary. “I made a list of all the skills I
thought I had strengths and weaknesses in, and the qualities
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and values I wanted in a job. A friend suggested legal recruiting. She came away from an interview with Major
Hagen & Africa (now Major Lindsey & Africa) and realized “there is everything about this business that is checking all these boxes for me.”
She started with the firm in 1997 and liked the idea of working solely on commission. “You controlled your own destiny.
You could make as little or as much money as you wanted
based on how hard you wanted to work. Given my drive and
work ethic, I knew I would succeed in the business.”
In 2000, she and partner Jon Esher formed their own legal
search firm, Solutus Legal Search, where, not ironically, she
gets to counsel other lawyers on their own career moves.
“Breaking off and starting our own company was the best
decision we ever made. We’re both very, very happy. We
think we have a great thing going.”
“I don’t see myself as straying back into law. I don’t feel
like I gave anything up.”
Paul Henderson
Paul Henderson, thirtynine, comanager of the
misdemeanor trial team of
the San Francisco district
attorney’s office, is a news
junkie and consummate
multitasker. That’s helped
him follow in the footsteps
of fellow former prosecutors Jim Hammer and
Kimberly Guilfoyle as a
television commentator on
legal affairs.
Henderson, a 1993 graduate of Tulane University School of Law who has been with
the district attorney’s office for twelve years, would get calls
from local media outlets when they needed a legal term explained. His TV career took off eighteen months ago when
Guilfoyle put him in the permanent rotation of her show,
The Lineup, on Fox. Since then, he’s been on Nancy Grace’s
show on CNN, as well as a number of TV stations in
Northern and Southern California.
“I’m not on all the time. I’m not omnipresent,” says the
very talkative Henderson. “Let’s say I’m on often enough
that my family doesn’t watch anymore.” He does seem to
know exactly what reporters, especially TV reporters, need
by the way of a sound bite, all the while being aware of the
bright line between interesting commentary and his duties
as a prosecutor and officer of the court.
Henderson is in court daily and so always is camera-ready
in a suit and tie. He tapes most programs in the evenings
and on weekends, but occasionally a network will send a
camera crew to his office at 850 Bryant Street. The very
concise Henderson can rattle off a comment and be done
in ten minutes, he says. His files include Anna Nicole
Smith’s will and the dog-fighting case against Atlanta
Falcons quarterback Michael Vick.
“I want more experts to look
and sound like me,” he says.
“Hopefully my presence is
making a difference.”
“I was once given thirteen seconds to comment on race
and the criminal justice system” on Nancy Grace’s show,
he says. Without missing a beat, he explained that in charging situations, it comes down to conduct, not the race of
the victim, alleged perpetrator, or witnesses.
He says he’s proud to be a young African American voice
in the legal affairs world. “I want more experts
to look and sound like me,” he says. “Hopefully my presence is making a difference.”
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Monica Schreiber
Monica Schreiber is on her
third career. And yet they
all relate.
She studied journalism in
college and worked for
local newspapers in the Bay
Area, including the Peninsula Times Tribune and Palo
Alto Weekly. After six years
of loving her jobs
but hating her paycheck,
she started thinking about
law school.
“When I decided to become a lawyer, it was because I had
an intellectual interest in the law. I also wanted a graduate
degree and the presumed career options that came with
that. What I didn’t give much thought to—until I found myself in a law firm—was whether my personality and temperament were really suited for life as a lawyer, especially a
litigator.” She graduated in 2000 from UC Berkeley Boalt
Hall School of Law at age thirty-one.
Schreiber, who landed a plum job as an associate in the
media group of a San Francisco firm, was quickly educated
on her first day on the job. The day-to-day confrontation of
litigation, especially in a fast-paced media practice, ran completely counter to her personality. “I started thinking pretty
quickly about other things I could do,” she says. “I was
aware of legal marketing, and started doing some research,
and figured out it was probably where I was meant to be.”
24 FALL 2007
Schreiber started at Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly as the
firm’s West Coast marketing manager. When Oppenheimer
pulled out of the California market, Dechert acquired most
of the firm’s Palo Alto attorneys, and Schreiber went with
them. She focuses primarily on the firm’s IP practice.
Five years into her new career, her background in journalism and the law seems a strong foundation. “One of the
things that struck me when I made the transition was I
found I was intrigued and interested again in the actual legal
issues I was working on with attorneys.” This, she says, is
because she was able to focus on the “macro view” as opposed to waking up at night worrying about the local rules.
And yet knowing that anxiety helps her relate to the attorneys she works with. “I knew I would be able to go in and
talk to the lawyers in their language. I understood on a deep
and personal level the challenges they faced, what it meant
to do business development work when that work is not
billable.” Schreiber, now thirty-nine, has reduced her schedule at Dechert to two days a week while she lays the groundwork for her own legal marketing consulting business.
Schreiber says she loved law school but forgot how much
she hated confrontation. “There’s something about three
years of law school, and being surrounded by the world of
cases, disputes, and other people who are going into litigation, that made me lose sight of who I really was and my
true personality. To this day, I will walk past one of the attorney’s offices in the firm where I work, hear them on the
phone with opposing counsel, and think, “Whew! I am so
glad that’s not me.”
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Rhonda Donato
When Rhonda Donato,
forty-seven, left the workforce after her third child
was born, she “stayed out
longer than I thought
I would.” How long?
Ten years.
Donato graduated from
Santa Clara University and
then went to work at McCutchen Doyle Brown &
Enersen in San Francisco
doing securities and intellectual property litigation.
While there, she worked on a death penalty appeal and
habeas petition. She had done similar work in law school
under Stanford professor Robert Weisberg. After McCutchen, she worked as a staff attorney at the First District
Court of Appeal, working on both criminal and civil cases.
“We read the briefs, and after the justice had given us an
idea of how he or she wanted the case to come out, we
would draft the opinions.”
When she wanted to reinvigorate her career earlier this year,
she knew going back would take some strategizing. She
started at Hastings College of the Law’s new Opting Back
In program, designed to help those who have put careers on
hold gear back up. “There was great support, networking,
and a sharing of information,” Donato says. She didn’t even
have time to get a job search off the ground when a friend
and fellow mother called. “I’ve been approached about this
job and don’t want to do it full time, and I immediately
thought of you.”
The job was as staff attorney with the Northern California
Innocence Project, based in Santa Clara. Though she
hadn’t sought the position, Donato realized it was a perfect
match for her skills and that her résumé was a great complement to that of her jobshare partner’s.
Donato and Katie Ross turned in their résumés jointly to
the Northern California Innocence Project, and within two
days received a call and an interview. “Katie had been a public defender and had taught at Santa Clara, and I had big
firm, court, and appellate experience. For them, combined,
we made the perfect candidate.”
The women split the job 60 percent/40 percent. Donato
hopes to add more time long term. “I can’t believe there
is a job out there that is so meaningful; the work is so
exciting and interesting, and so well suited to my abilities
and interests,” she says.
She didn’t even have time to get a
job search off the ground when a
friend and fellow mother called.
“I’ve been approached about this job
and don’t want to do it full time,
and I immediately thought of you.”
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