Feature Articles
3L: It's a Wrap
Neal Fisher
As he was completing his second-year summer associate position at a prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm, Neal Fisher (L’09) learned something about the reality of the profession that he didn’t exactly expect. He began hearing rumors that one of the key players in the firm’s labor and employment group was planning to leave, taking his clients with him.
This meant that Fisher had to do some interviewing, fast. Though he liked that firm and could have easily foreseen a future there, Fisher suddenly found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when that partner and several others in the labor and employment group did indeed depart for other opportunities.
“The section in which I wanted to work was all but defunct,” he asserts, noting that he couldn’t very well pretend, all of a sudden, that he liked a different type of law. “It really opened my eyes to the reality of law firm life, the instability of it all.”
Another third-year law student unaccustomed to sudden changes of fortune might have been thrown for a loop, but Fisher — who’d grown up poor on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and won a full scholarship to Georgetown University before entering law school — saw it as merely another opportunity. Fortunately, he had no shortage of interviews elsewhere, which is why, sitting at the Courtside Café on a Wednesday morning in his third year of law school, he found himself with a schedule resembling that of an airline pilot’s: off to Las Vegas, Nevada, the next day; New York the following Monday; Delaware the following Friday and California the week after that. All in all, first- and second-round interviews with maybe a dozen or more firms.
“With a Georgetown degree and the skills I’ve learned, both analytical and writing, especially, I do feel I have something to offer the job market, and I can be a bit more selective in what I want,” he says. “I don’t feel pressured into accepting any job offer.”
And in the end, it all worked out. In November, he accepted a position with Fisher & Phillips, a labor and employment firm that he’d been seriously eyeing in September. He’ll join their Irvine, California, office in the fall.
“I used to think that I wanted to be a very big firm associate, but I don’t think that’s what I want anymore, just because I don’t think I’d get the quality of life that I’m looking for,” he says, noting that one of the advantages of his chosen firm — a mid-size firm with over 200 lawyers — is that it’s family oriented. “I don’t know that you lose out on much training at a mid-sized firm on the more important assignments, contrasted with some of the more mundane assignments you do at a big firm, like document review and stuff like that.”
He’s looking forward to doing labor and employment work — maybe under the larger umbrella of litigation — with an eye toward eventually working in the field of sports and entertainment law. In the fall, he took a sports law class from Adjunct Professor Andrew Brandt (L’85), who spent eight years with the Green Bay Packers, first as director of player finance and later, vice president and general counsel.
General counsel to a sports team, perhaps? “Sure,” Fisher says, grinning. “The hardest decision for me [would be] what city I want to be in.”
More Efficient
While Fisher is eager to begin the journey, he counts himself fortunate that he’s still got some time left at Georgetown.
“I don’t know why anyone would want to stop being a student,” he says. “It’s the best job you could possibly have — you read, you write, if you don’t feel like going, you don’t. If you want to stay up late and watch a movie, you can … you have much more control over your life and how you choose to live each day.”
Which is rather misleading, coming from someone who still gets up at six in the morning in his third year of law school to hit the books — and is studying constitutional law II with his laptop on a day when he doesn’t even have class.
“Work before play, same sort of thing I’ve always done my entire life,” he says, adding that he’s learning to be even more productive when it comes to work, if that’s possible — taking his books on the Metro, to dentist appointments, that kind of thing. Not surprisingly, that’s something else that he learned from the law firm life. “There was a lawyer [I worked with over the summer] who was probably the most efficient person I’ve ever met in my life; he could be talking to you while editing your work, writing a memo, answering a phone and e-mail, so, learning from him, I try to be more efficient.”
Still, not everything is so left-brained. Besides sports law, employment discrimination, evidence and constitutional law II, he’s taking Professor Rick Roe and Professor John Hirsch’s Literacy and the Law Seminar, where he gets to continue honing the teaching skills he learned last year in Georgetown’s Street Law Clinic. In Street Law, he got to teach high school students about the law; in Literacy and the Law, he gets to read to elementary students once a week while studying the impact of the law and society on literacy.
“It’s surprisingly more complex than it sounds,” he says, explaining that he has to break things down into segments in a way that children can easily digest. “Some of them will come in having a number of hours of reading; other students come in not having had this privilege, so some students you will have to teach how to read, and other students you’re going to guide them along.”
Right Direction
What Georgetown Law has given him in the past three years, he says, is confidence. “I didn’t know that I was lacking that before, but I think that I was a little uncertain about my abilities. When I first came here, professors would call on me and I would simply say that I didn’t know the answer because I often doubted what I knew and preferred to listen in class rather than talk. Now, I’m much more sure of myself and feel as if I am headed in the right direction toward being a successful attorney.”
And he’s come a long way. This past summer, he went back to Virginia’s Eastern Shore to attend a family reunion, and was touched by his family’s obvious pride in him. “They let me know there was something much larger than myself,” he says. “You can search the depths of my family, you will not find a doctor and you won’t find a lawyer [yet!]. … They are all manual laborers.”
But his grandmother, who died at the age of 100, just before Fisher entered law school, had always wanted a doctor or lawyer in the family. “She always said, you’re going to grow up to be a lawyer.” While Fisher still needs to graduate and pass the bar, the end is now in sight, and he feels safe in saying that his grandmother’s prediction may actually come true. “Finally someone in the family becomes a professional,” he says. “And not just any law school, but Georgetown Law.”
