Feature Articles
3L: It's a Wrap
Ron Cluett
At the end of his 2L summer, Ron Cluett (L’09) went out to lunch at the D.C. Coast restaurant with Chris Groboske (L’09) and Cono Namorato, the hiring partner of the Washington, D.C., tax firm Caplin and Drysdale. Cluett and Groboske had spent the past 12 weeks working as summer associates — an experience that Cluett describes as outstanding. At the firm, he found challenging work and a congenial group of lawyers that welcomed this former classics professor into the fold. Even better, the summer served as further confirmation that Cluett’s midlife career change was a good move.
So when Namorato handed each student an envelope containing an offer to work at the firm full time after graduation, Cluett was elated.
“You could be taken out to a nice lunch, and they say, order what you want, this is the last thing you’re getting from us,” joked Cluett (who enjoyed, by the way, the restaurant’s soft-shell crab BLT). “I had a good feeling about it, but I was still really delighted to get the offer.”
A cautious person by nature, Cluett says he treated the summer like a 12-week job interview, a strategy that paid off in the end. Though the attorneys he worked for gave him a good review in the middle of the summer — and he believed that everything had gone well — he says he never operates on the assumption that something, especially a job offer, is a done deal.
“The work that I did at Caplin was real. It involved real assignments, real clients, parts of larger projects … it was a feeling that I only did a little bit of this, but I can see where my contribution was part of this larger effort, and that was really great,” he says. “We’re pretty inexperienced as 2Ls, and the learning curve is unbelievable for summer associates. From that first day when you walk in until 12 weeks later when you leave, you really get responsibility, and that was terrific.”
See You Monday
Now that he’s in his third and final year of law school, Cluett — at the age of 47 — is ready to be a lawyer. “Frankly, on my last day [of his summer associate position] if someone said, ‘By the way, the ABA has decided that you only need two years of law school, do you want to come back full-time?’ I would have,” he says. “Not that I’m eager to get out of Georgetown, but I would have said, ‘Fine, see you Monday morning.’”Though he declined to discuss any of the particular projects he worked on — cautious future attorney that he is — Cluett says he worked in almost all of the firm’s major practice areas, which include ERISA, employee benefits, international tax and tax-exempt organizations.
“What surprised me was how quickly and easily I felt like I was part of the firm, with very little growing pains or adjustment in that way,” he says, noting that law firm work is more collaborative than academic work. “You have to spend a lot of time doing legal research on your own, but other people are critiquing it all the time [and] you’re doing one small part of a very large project. I’d never done any of that stuff before, but I learned how much adjusting of my own mindset that would require. Almost none, I found.”
Caplin and Drysdale has remained intentionally lean in the mega-firm era, with approximately 75 attorneys, which Cluett found to be an ideal size. “It is small enough that you can actually know people as people — even in 12 weeks, you start to develop a sense of personalities — but at the same time, you don’t feel like everyone is in everyone’s pocket all the time,” he says. As Cluett has insisted all along, there’s a certain kind of mindset that goes along with tax lawyering — i.e., people who like esoteric knowledge and enjoy trying to solve complex technical puzzles. So while he wasn’t surprised to find several other former professors at the firm, teachers of English and communications in addition to law, he admits that the Ph.D. doesn’t go very far in the tax law world.
“When you’re working on a project, the issue is, let’s work on this project and get it done,” he says — and that philosophy is fine with him. “I really liked that; I felt like from the beginning the real criteria were, how well are you doing this thing we asked you to do? All the other stuff, it makes you an interesting person, but it doesn’t dominate.” And having passed the test with flying colors, he has much more confidence in his lawyering abilities. “One thing about the summer that was great was that I know I can do this,” he says. “I obviously still need the feedback and guidance from other people, but I know where I stand on it now; I have the confidence to follow my own judgment and pursue issues that interest me.”
Privileged Status
Though he’s eager to get on with this new life, the summer has given him a heightened appreciation for school as well. Like most 3Ls, Cluett realizes that in a few short months, he’s not going to be able to pick and choose his own work schedule, as he’s essentially done for the past three years.
“You would think that as a former professor I would know this, but [being a student] is really a very privileged status in a lot of ways,” he notes. “You have a lot of demands on your time, but you have an enormous amount of control over how you do the work and when you do the work … law firm life isn’t like that.”
Last year, Cluett’s strategy towards school was three-pronged: get a strong foundation in tax law, obtain a well-rounded general legal education and take a “fun course” each semester. Sticking to that goal, he took accounting for lawyers, professional responsibility and a negotiations seminar in the fall — along with a seminar on foreign affairs and the Constitution. The latter is a subject he recognizes he can only learn in law school — and at a place like Georgetown — if he’s going to be a lawyer. And he’s been doing some publishing, too. His article “Sound and Fury, Signifying What? The U.S. Foreign Earned Income Exclusion Debate” was published in the September 15, 2008, issue of Tax Notes International.
“I chose Georgetown for a couple of reasons. One was the strength of the tax program, because I had a sense coming in here that that was probably what I wanted to do,” Cluett says. “The other thing was, I was a professor before … so I was actually not interested in law schools whose culture was all academics. I wanted a place where the quality of training was incredibly high but the focus was more pragmatic and professional-practice oriented … I thought that Georgetown would be an ideal place to get solidly grounded in the theoretical aspects of law, with always one eye on how do you apply this in the firm — and that’s how I feel about the education I’ve gotten here.”
Relationships
And as he moves from law student to Georgetown Law alumnus, Cluett appreciates those Law Center connections, too. “The thing that has been the most gratifying about Georgetown that I couldn’t have predicted coming in is the quality of the relationships that I’ve made here. I just think they’re amazing,” he says, adding that it’s not only his classmates’ intelligence that’s extraordinary; it’s the wide range of things that they are interested in — and how decent they remain as people. “Given the size of Georgetown and its place here in Washington, you do have this feeling that in 10 years, when you have a technical question you can [call them up and] say, ‘Hi, I sat next to you in torts. Can you give me five minutes of your time?’”
