So Much To Say: A Legal Podcast For People

In this episode, Megan & Jennifer are joined by Jonah Perlin, associate professor of law at Georgetown University, to chat about legal education, career development, and navigating the evolving legal industry. Jonah shares insights from his extensive experience teaching and mentoring students, as well as his reflections on the changing landscape of law firms and law schools. With a career that spans both private practice and academia, Jonah discusses the challenges and opportunities faced by Gen Z in law, the impact of the pandemic on legal education, and why career paths don’t always follow a straight line. He also shares his thoughts on teaching professional identity, diversity, and the importance of self-reflection in law and life.

Jonah Perlin is a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center. He is also the host of How I Lawyer, a top 30 careers podcast for junior lawyers, where he shares stories about what it means to practice law and how to build a successful legal career. Jonah’s work spans legal practice, education, and ethics, and he is passionate about preparing the next generation of lawyers for success in a rapidly changing profession.

Learn more about our guest:
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jennifer Ramsey
Host
Megan Senese

What is So Much To Say: A Legal Podcast For People?

Welcome to So Much To Say: A Legal Podcast For People. Where we explore behind-the-scenes of work, law, life, and everything in between. We're your hosts, business development and legal marketing coaches, Jennifer Ramsey and Megan Senese, and we're here to showcase the human side of the legal world, from marketing and consulting to the very real struggles of balancing work with being human. This isn’t your typical, dry legal show. We're bringing you real stories, candid conversations, and smart insights that remind you that outside of being a lawyer or legal marketer - what makes you human? So whether you’re navigating billable hours or breaking glass ceilings in a woman-owned legal practice, this legal podcast is for you. Stay human. Stay inspired. Namaste (or whatever keeps you human). 

Jonah Perlin (00:01):
You can have big goals, and even when you miss, oftentimes that's the thing that opens the next door. And so I love what I'm doing, but I'm also confident that if one of those other pieces had gone right and I was doing something else, there's no reason I wouldn't love that also. And so it's like I think I had a very fixed mindset. This is the next goal. This is the next goal. This is the next goal. That's sort of what defined my teens and my twenties.

Megan Senese (00:24):
Welcome to So Much To Say, a legal podcast for people, where we dive into the beautiful chaos of work life and everything in between. Outside of being a lawyer or a legal marketer, we want to know what makes you human. And with that, let's get started.

Jennifer Ramsey (00:39):
We are so excited to welcome Jonah Perlin with us. Jonah is an associate professor of law and legal practice, and the senior fellow at the Center of Ethics and the Legal Profession at the Georgetown University Law Center. His prior work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington Law Review, the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, Legal Communication and Rhetoric, and the Georgetown Law Journal. Amazing. Jonah is also the host of How I Lawyer Podcast. It's a top 30 careers podcast for junior lawyers. So for all of our junior lawyers listening in on this one, if you haven't checked it out, check it out. The podcast is about sharing lawyers stories about what they do, why they do it and how they do it. Well. He is also a regular speaker and commentator on legal education and building legal careers that are both successful and sustainable. We love a little alliteration there. Previously, Jonah was a litigator at Williams and Conley and a law clerk on the district court for the District of Columbia and the court of appeals for the Second Circuit. Wow. Yeah. Do we need to have an inhale? Exhale moment here. Welcome, Jonah.

Jonah Perlin (01:58):
Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I find those bios. I do the reading right, usually the mic is now turned and I am the guest. I've done over 140 interviews at this point, and so when the mic is turned and I read it, I'm always like, and I get to talk to this person. And it's so odd to be on the other side. But I'm really grateful to both of you for inviting me on and hopefully I can add to the conversation. I really resonated with a lot of what you all were talking about at the beginning, so I'm happy to share my experience and learn from you as well.

Megan Senese (02:31):
We're so, so excited and I've been one of those lurkers on LinkedIn looking at you then and more of active and then commenting. And then almost every episode of our podcast now was like we met on LinkedIn Love, and so love sharing that. And during the prep too, we were talking about people's past crossing and different perceptions and how you've been able to write about a lot of that content. And then I'm sure that's what led to the launch of your podcast as well. And I thought it would be nice place start. So I am also approaching my 40th birthday, but I have just a couple more months. I'm holding on strong congrat, but you publicly congratulations. Thank you. You publicly announced that you just had a 40th birthday and you walked through all the things that changed over the last 10 years, and I'm sure you could probably even go back to 20 years if you wanted to. You became a full-time professor. You have all these different things going on, surviving the global pandemic mean. So I'd love just to talk to you about how you've seen the legal industry changing and also what you're seeing in the classroom. How has it changed? We talked a little bit about the prep during the prep and the conversation was so good. We probably should have recorded it

Jonah Perlin (03:43):
Probably. Yeah,

Megan Senese (03:46):
You learn. Yeah. Yeah. And so we'd love to just get some insights on what that looks like, not just for the junior lawyers, but the people who are hoping to how to navigate what feels like Some of the feedback we're getting is these almost alien workers. They're like, I don't even know how to connect with them. They don't know what they're saying. They're confused by the types of things that they're, how they're approaching certain things. That seems so standard for more of the traditional professional. So there's a lot of questions in there.

Jonah Perlin (04:18):
Yeah, I'm happy to take 'em in order and go wherever you all want to go with the conversation. I mean, I'll just start by saying I did turn 40 last week and I was sort of reflecting whenever you hit a birthday and certainly hit a decade birthday. I think reflection is really important. It's something I try to remind my students and sort of practice publicly. I think we're getting better at it, frankly. It's sort of making public reflection a part of it, but I think there's so much power in just sharing your story and what you're thinking about because chances are other people are too. And getting a change in perspective or an additional perspective I think is incredibly powerful. And so I was sort of thinking back to where I was when I turned 30, which was I was living in New York for a short period of time.

(05:02):
It was sort of the only period of my life that I lived in New York City. I had my first kid or we had our first child on the way I was clerking. So I was sort of at the beginning of my legal career and I sort of felt like from a perspective of the pie eating contest where the winner gets more pie, the sort of treadmill that I had been on for most of my life, that felt like success or that's what it was supposed to feel like. It was sort of the pinnacle. It was the next gold star, if you will. But in that moment, I also remember being like, okay, so now my career is legit starting. What am I going to do? What is it going to be like to be a father and a lawyer? Where am I going to put down my roots?

(05:43):
What is my community going to look like? And so there was a lot of outside perspective accomplishment at 30, a lot of uncertainty about how I live the days, weeks, and months of life. And that's what I tried to figure out in the last decade. And I am pretty happy where I ended up. It was sort of a winding path, and we can talk about that and my thoughts on winding paths if you want, but that was sort of what I was thinking about. And I think it's important to have that perspective when you're in a management position. Just for perspective, I started teaching full-time basically the first year that Gen Z was eligible to come to law school, was old enough to go to law school. And so when I came in, my first conference as a professor was, the whole conference was sort of dedicated to Gen Z goes to law school.

(06:33):
Most of the people in the room were like, oh my goodness, we just learned how to teach millennials and they're totally different. The keynote speaker was the woman who wrote the book about Gen Z going to college four years earlier to give us that perspective. Now not only is Gen Z in law school, but Gen Z is in law firms and that's a big change. The other big change that I think people don't talk about quite so much that's really important is that millennials are now leading law firms. So it's a change not just in the associate class or the first year class, but it's also a change in the leadership class. So inevitably, as you both talked about, there's going to be some tension, but there's also going to be some opportunities. And so yes, have I seen my classes change over the last seven years?

(07:14):
Absolutely. At their core, the students are amazing and want to do great things and want to be great people. They have a different set of skills in some cases, some skills stronger, some skills not quite so strong, and a different set of conventions and ways of living in life. And I'll end my answer here and you can take me wherever you, the thing that I think about as a professor is what are the pieces that I want to learn from them and meet them where they're at and what are the pieces where as a professor of legal practice, which is my title, I need to bring them to where I am at. And the answer can't be a hundred percent of the time what they want goes, or a hundred percent of the time I have to train them to be the lawyer that I was trained to be in my thirties and my twenties. And it's finding that balance and deciding what's really important that I think is the real challenge, but also the real exciting part of my job.

Jennifer Ramsey (08:15):
Have you been able to find that balance, find those answers to what those pieces are for what they need and then what you need and how you all meet together?

Jonah Perlin (08:26):
Yeah. I don't know that I found good answers, but I've started to answer the question a little bit. And I do think Covid threw a wrench into things. I don't know, it's hard. I don't spend a whole lot of time figuring out where I feel like the disconnect happened. Did it happen when they were trained in elementary school or was it a covid problem? Spending a lot of time trying to find the genesis of the problem. I have found not to be a particularly helpful exercise. Instead just sort of looking at, well, what is the problem and is it in fact a problem? So on my podcast I had a couple months ago, my friend Rachel Bosch on, and we were talking about this topic, and one of the things that Rachel said was that one of the sort of defining characteristics of Gen Z is that they ask why.

(09:11):
So I've been playing with this idea of Gen Z is really Gen Y, right? They're the ones asking all these questions. And after Rachel said that, to me, that sort of has stuck in my head and I see it in my classroom a lot, and they don't accept, and again, I'm grossly generalizing, but compared to millennials and certainly compared to the generations before the answer, because is only the start of an answer and not the end of an answer. I try to meet my students where they're at and explain the why, where it exists, the hard part and what I've, again, I echo sort of Rachel's thoughts on this because it's really changed my thinking on it. I also have to train them to actually listen to the answer. I think they are so used to, and again, gross generalization, but they are so used to not accepting the answer, even if someone gives it to them in sort of good faith that we have to sort of create that environment where you may not totally love what comes after the word because, but it's there and it might have meaning. And we need to have our conversation from that point as opposed to, well, that's the way we've always done it. Frankly, that wasn't a good enough answer in my twenties and thirties and it shouldn't be a good enough answer to them in their thirties, in their twenties and thirties.

Megan Senese (10:28):
So an example of this, I think what you and I had that preliminary conversation was we just talked about professional work attire. And so one of the examples that you and I chatted about was somebody asking me that's in their twenties. Well, I'm getting on a Zoom interview. Why do I have to wear a suit? I'm like, well, first I was like, well, because that's what you do. You wear a suit to an interview or at least a blazer. And they kept pushing. I'm like, well, that's the business attire. That's your uniform. That's what you have to wear. And this became this a little bit of a tension. Well, I don't really think that I need to wear professional clothes to be professional. I will show up and look professional because I am a professional. And so this was, I'm a millennial, you do what you're told, and this person was younger and they're in their twenties, so I guess that's the Gen Z. And yeah, I'm not going to do that. I think. So would that be kind of an example that you are kind of talking about?

Jonah Perlin (11:25):
Yeah, I think that is an example, but I also think it's, again, that's one of those examples that we have to go back to the sort of what are we actually talking about? And for me, and this is I think as a professor of writing, I think about this a lot. It's all about purpose and audience. Everything comes back to purpose and audience. And so ultimately, if your purpose is to get a job and your audience is somebody who expects you to wear a costume, what it is, let's not sugarcoat it and make it makes you feel more. It's a costume, but if that's what your audience expects and they have a reason for it, which is this is the professional attire that we have, that needs to be a good enough reason. And if it's not, then maybe that's not a good fit. I mean, the cool part now is if you want to be a lawyer and wear a hoodie, that's great. Go do that. But it doesn't mean that every job is going to be available to you.

(12:24):
I think clothing is an example. I think the need to be on call for certain hours is a big change. Weekend work, night work, responsiveness. And again, we're not saying you have to do this, but we are saying this is what is expected of this particular job. And I love saying that lawyers can do anything, which is what's exciting about having a jd, but it doesn't mean they have the right to do everything. And so it's sort of playing that balance. And look, if we're being honest, millennials also, we pushed the clothing boundaries as well. I mean, I remember growing up, my mom's a rabbi, and when I was growing up, I remember she always wore heels when she was at the synagogue, partially because that's what people expected a woman to wear. By the time I was in practice at a law firm where I wore a suit and tie many days, not everyone was wearing heels. So there were more subtle pushes, but this idea of I don't care what they want me to wear, counterculture, great, that's fine, but just make sure that you're in an environment where that's

Jennifer Ramsey (13:34):
Appropriate. Well, as the resident Gen Xer here on

Jonah Perlin (13:39):
The

Jennifer Ramsey (13:39):
Podcast, love it. Okay. It's super interesting to hear you talk about Gen Z or Gen Y.

Jonah Perlin (13:48):
Yeah, right.

Jennifer Ramsey (13:48):
To be honest with you, I'm not really exposed

(13:52):
To that generation right now. And I love that they are asking why and not necessarily just stopping at the, because I said so, because that's very much my, when I entered the workforce, right? 25 years, 25 years, 25 years ago, I just did what I was told. Part of that is just me, right? My inherent makeup and how I was raised. But it's just interesting to hear that that is now, some of those barriers are being torn down where no, we can pave more of our own path in our professional career than just do what we were told. I mean, I remember I had to wear full on business suits and sit in a cubicle for 12 hours. What sense does that make? And I'm not even kidding. Right,

Jonah Perlin (14:40):
Right.

Jennifer Ramsey (14:40):
So Jonah, you said something earlier. You've been teaching now for seven years. What has been the most unexpected or surprising evolution, if you will, in the students who you teach who are lucky? I'm going to say lucky to have you as a professor, because you take a moment and ask for reflection, ask for perspective. That's so cool. I don't remember any of my teachers ever asking me for that, by the way. I just That's very cool. I wrote that down. I appreciate it. What has been your biggest, like, oh wow, that is something new that I learned or that I picked up or unexpected for you?

Jonah Perlin (15:21):
Sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for that. And I should say that I learned this from the people that taught me one of the cool parts about going your alma mater to teach or going back to a law firm or a business that you were at as a junior person and then get to be in a more senior role is you really get to sort of see in a very unique and powerful way, I think a trajectory and change within an organization. So I should give shout outs to my professors who I stand on their shoulders and now I get to call them colleagues. I would say there's two changes that I would highlight over these seven years. One is purely a product of what has happened over the last seven years. So I started teaching in a moment, I think in some ways of transition, 20 18, 20 17, 20 18 was the first Trump administration, which certainly had a change feeling among my students.

(16:15):
I live here in Washington, I teach here in Washington. There was definitely a change here in Washington after having been sort of eight years of the Obama administration. That was a big change. And then the pandemic hit. And so my first couple semesters teaching was in person. My second couple semesters teaching was entirely online. And now we live in this world that is sometimes fully in person, sometimes fully online, sometimes hybrid. We live in all these different modalities all at once. And I think we all were affected differently by that. And so we don't have the same shared experiences, and the students really don't have the same shared experiences because they're of varying ages and they had varying experiences for three years that were truly foundational to them. So I have students who are my age or even older who have families. Their experience was really different than people.

(17:10):
I have students now who were essentially seniors in high school and didn't get to go to their senior prom and didn't get to have those experiences or were in college or were doing their first job if they did a job between. So we don't have the same shared experience. And as a result, I think expectations about social interaction and what is expected of people is just odd and we're still figuring it out. And I think the tale of this is going to be tail, both in terms of the story and of the animal tale. The tale of this is going to be super long, decades long in my view. And when the hit, I had a 2-year-old and 4-year-old. So my experience is really different than somebody who was living in their parents' basement and doing law school. Totally different experience. So that's one change is a lack of shared experience in the classroom.

(18:03):
The second has absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic and has a lot to do with the legal profession and legal education as sort of the driver of the legal profession. And that is, again, teaching where I went to school, the students that I have in my class do not match the students who were in class with me when I was a student. We have far more variety of backgrounds, geographies, socioeconomic status, where people went to college, what people plan to do when they're done. It was a lot more, I wouldn't say it was monolithic my class, but by comparison, I mean the easiest sort of metric for this for me without going too far astray is I think I had four or five students in my section that I went to college with so that I knew beforehand that was like 5% of my section.

(18:56):
And now even my first and second year teaching, I think we had maybe one double, and then the other 55 went to 55 different colleges. So that I think is really exciting for the legal profession because people bring different lived experience and they bring that to the business side, they bring that to the actual practice of law. And now we're seeing yet another change as schools need to sort of react with the legal and professional changes and expectations around the importance of a variety of experiences and diversity in the classroom. So that has been a real change. And who you have in your classroom. I don't think I had quite appreciation for this until I started teaching, but who's sitting in the room with you, digital or otherwise, can really change the whole experience even if you're teaching the exact same content.

Megan Senese (19:43):
Yeah. Okay. There's a couple of things that I wanted to pick up on. So we talked a lot about how there's diversity in the classroom, not just for gender and race, but also just geographic location. And so one of the things that, I'm kind of jumping just a smidt here, but one of the things that we've seen a lot, because by the time we get to the lawyers, they're more on the senior side. For the most part, our business really handles more on the, we help the associates, but for the most part, people who are on partner track and or just made partner is more of the majority of our exposure.

(20:19):
And for the most part, when we were still working in big law, that's where most of our time went was to these more senior partners. But so once you get into the law firms, a lot of the conversation, there's a couple of threads that happened. One, it's like we've got to find some good summers, we've got to find good summers. Where are they? That's kind of the one thing. And then the second thread, which we could put aside for a second, but say it anyway, and I'm sure you hear this and you see it on LinkedIn all the time, is law school doesn't teach you how to be a lawyer or law school doesn't teach you how to do business development. Or law school doesn't teach you fill in the blank, right? Nobody's teaching you the business of law. You're only learning like this. And so this other kind of the books part. And so one of the things that has been people have, the firms have accelerated their search for summers, and that acceleration seems to impact one particular kind of group in a negative way. Are you seeing mostly first generation lawyers, maybe lawyers of color women, people who don't know what the process is or don't have the experience in their family? Are you seeing that in the classroom or are you feeling it or the kids feeling it?

Jonah Perlin (21:34):
Before I dive into answering that, I do have thoughts on that. I actually think your two, you presented them as sort of unrelated threads are actually quite related in many ways. Because look, practicing lawyers love saying how terrible law school is in one breath, and in their next breath they say they go to the law schools and they say, who are the people who did the best in your torts class? That to me is a quote, great summer. So in some ways, in one breath they're saying, we do not value what law schools do anymore. And in the next breath they are saying, but we are still going to use those traditional metrics of success to decide who we hire and don't hire. And my response is, I'm happy to have the conversation on either side of it. I agree. I agree that law school could do more.

(22:31):
I agree that firms could do more, but you can't really speak out of both sides of your mouth there because your part of the problem and not part of the solution at that point. So they're not unrelated. And I think this actually gets to the second point that you made, which is really important, which is this rapid acceleration of hiring. And I think that we have to ask why are firms doing this? We have to think that firms are in theory, rational, economically rational actors, and they think this is to their benefit. And I think part of it is this feeling that they were missing out on someone or something and that they didn't want to play the game because they're the greatest firm. And as long as they get in front of people early, they're doing them a favor. That's not really how it works.

(23:21):
There are three players in this ecosystem. There's the schools, the firms, and then the students. And the firms actually have the most market power of all three. And so they will tell you the schools are pushing them. I think the schools, there are certain schools absolutely that are pushing this. Again, I don't really know that it matters so much, but they have a lot of market power that does matter. Your other question was like, well, what effect does this have? What practical effect does this have? And the answer is, I don't think it's as simple an answer as people who come from families with lawyers are getting better jobs. I don't think it's a one-to-one correlation like that. What I do think is it is making students spend time during their first year of law school, their first semester of law school, even focused on learning about how to get a job at a firm instead of actually learning law and figuring out what it is that maybe they want to do or be good at.

(24:21):
And so what we are losing, I sort of talked about the triangle. There are three players. What the schools are losing is we are losing our students' attention at the very moment that we were sort of traditionally created to thrive. And I can't give my students that experience if they don't even have enough time to just focus on one L because I'm telling you, my students are going to be interviewing for second year jobs before they have second semester grades. So at the end of the day when you say you're getting students that haven't learned enough in law school, it's like, well, I'm sorry that they haven't, but that's because we are dividing their attention in an attention starved economy and in an attention starved moment. And so we're doing our best, and I'm sure we can do better, but that's the negative effect that I'm seeing is that students, students sort of have, they come in, they have to, from day one, start figuring out what they want to do, and we haven't even had a chance to get to know them and for them to get to know us.

(25:25):
The example I sometimes give is when you announce that you're getting married or you get engaged, I remember when we got engaged for us it was like, well, when's the wedding? Where's the wedding going to be? And I'm like, I don't know. We didn't talk about it yet because we just got engaged. And I sort of feel like there's that dynamic where it's like, you got into law school, great. What are you going to do for your first job? And that's really troubling to me, and I don't have an answer. I think frankly, I think the answer to the schools and the students might like is to push it back a little bit so we have more time. But as I said, I don't think that we necessarily have the market power to do that. And so we need to come up with more creative solutions, and I want to be part of those solutions. But that's the challenge from my perspective.

Jennifer Ramsey (26:08):
I do not know what percentage of law school grads go actually into private practice, but all I've known is being a legal marketer, business developer in a law firm. And I've always thought, I live close to the University of San Diego School of Law, and I always thought, I wonder if it would be helpful for the students, the law students, if they had some sort of class built into their curriculum that did talk about, I don't want to say marketing and business development, but it is as at Williams and Conley. I mean, it's part of the unspoken expectation when law students go into law firms that if you want to be partner, you got to bring, you got to,

(27:00):
But they're not really taught or equipped or really even think about that. I don't think, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jonah, I don't know if there are some law schools out there that maybe are starting to think about how do we build some other classes in to the curriculum where, and look, this is going to be useful for students no matter if they go into private practice or not. It's the value of building relationships. It's the value of your network and your connections, whether they're your undergrad alumni networks, your law school networks, and how to just be human and be social, which is what we talk about on this podcast. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on whether, I don't know if that exists, that type of class, but it dovetails with what you're talking about. It's like giving the students a breath, a beat, a pause to, there's other aspects to law school than just torts and constitutional law.

Jonah Perlin (28:01):
Yeah, I mean, look, I think the answer is I'll do the professor thing like yes and no. The yes to your answer, it depends the yes to your answer. And the thing that I'm completely on board with is this idea that we need, we need to develop students beyond their ability to read case law and respond to comments. There's no question that is the case. I will say, and again, despite all its faults, the American Bar Association has now requires and is integrate what you are required as an accredited law school now to build in what they call professional identity formation into your curriculum in law school. This is relatively new, 3 0 3 B, and schools are now figuring out what that means. And so that can mean things that they do outside of the classroom. That could mean things that they do inside of the classroom that could go towards mental health, that could go towards networking and business development that could go to a lot of places.

(28:59):
So I think the desire to build this in is there, and I think that's a good thing. Where I will push back a little bit is that there is nothing harder to break into than the one L curriculum that was before. We only had them really for one semester before they started paying attention to jobs. And so everything is a zero sum game, but with credits and grades, it does feel a little bit like a zero sum game. So for example, as a legal practice professor, my job is to teach legal communication and I have two credits in the fall and two credits in the spring, and that should be enough to, okay, train lawyers how to communicate. There's no possible way that I could accomplish that goal. I tell my students all the time, I get them for 40 hours of class a year.

(29:49):
So one traditional American workweek spread across over the course of nine months. That's what I get, and these are all the things that I need to introduce them to. And then people often come in, especially the folks who teach podium classes, come in and say, well, we need to do all these other things. Let's ask the practice-based professors to do it. Many of them have practiced, they're more suited for it, which is accurate, but what are you going to tell me I'm not supposed to teach? What's the trade? And if you ask transactional lawyers, they'll tell you, we need contract drafting. If you ask government lawyers, they're going to tell you we need to understand how to represent clients. People tend to think that every lawyer acts like them, which is one of the reasons I have this podcast to sort of open up and pull back the curtain of what lawyers do to remind them that we need to be teaching sort of meta skills at the highest level of abstraction.

(30:38):
And that's what we do in at least how I think about teaching legal writing. And again, this is not my creation, this has been passed down to us, is I am teaching students not just how to write a brief so they can go write a brief. I'm teaching them how to write a brief so they can learn how to write any document that is presented to them. And I think we need to do the same thing in every class is what is the meta skill that I can convey at the same time that I'm teaching them the sort of core doctrinal skills. So it is both exciting. It's an exciting time in legal education, but it's also a stressful one because this is sort of the million dollar question that no one really knows how to solve, and that's not to mention who's going to teach it and how are we going to get them and how are we going to pay for it? Those are all the real logistical challenges. But I'm just talking about from a ideal world, we could do all of this. How would we do it?

Jennifer Ramsey (31:33):
The million dollar question, how do you teach the meta skill?

Jonah Perlin (31:36):
Yeah,

Jennifer Ramsey (31:37):
Okay. What is the most unexpected lesson you have learned from your career path that has changed the way that you approach legal? Because you've got this really interesting, I mean, you clerked, you were at a law firm and now you're a professor, so you've got a fairly holistic view.

Jonah Perlin (31:57):
Yeah, I mean, I love the question and it's a version of a question that I try to ask my guests, so I appreciate it.

Megan Senese (32:04):
We're so smart. Look how smart we are asking.

Jonah Perlin (32:06):
No, truly, I really do appreciate it, and it's something that I say a lot on my podcast as well, is that careers only make sense looking backwards. They don't make sense looking forwards. I think, and I talk about this a lot, if you're listening to this and you've heard me say it, it's because I really truly do believe it and I want everyone to hear it. We started the podcast at something like LinkedIn where you can build connections, and I love that. And that is something that is uniquely 2025. It's sort of how we communicate, how we professionally network. And I think it's fantastic and it has huge benefits. The challenge of it is those sort of identification of resumes make it look like you start at the beginning of the career and with no breaks, one job follows after the other. Job follows after the other job, and it looks as if you're reading it.

(32:59):
It was planned from the beginning. And anybody who's been in the world long enough knows it is basically never that way. It only makes sense that the job that is sort of higher up or more recent only makes sense when you sort of look backwards at it. But there could have been a whole other sort of sliding door moment where you end up in a different spot. And the reason I think it's so important to say that, especially for junior folks, is I think it should take a little bit of the pressure off. It is good to see. What I love about LinkedIn and the ability, even just to read lawyers bios on firm websites is you can see the realm of the possible in a way that was really hidden before. Now you could sort of see, oh, this person made this path and this person made this path.

(33:48):
And then you can start thinking, how can I relate that to my experience? But you don't have to plan it in advance. So I'll tell you the thing that on my resume you would not see, but is exactly essential to me finding a job that I love and I get to do every day, which is frankly, I got told no to two big jobs at what I felt like was a really pivotal critical moment in my career. So I was a couple years into practice, my second round at Williams and Connolly, I thought I was decent at it, but I wasn't going to be the greatest litigator of all time. I sort of liked it, but I had some challenges also. So it wasn't like these terrible horror stories was just sort of like, I don't know that I want to do this forever. I'm fine doing it for now.

(34:34):
And I thought, okay, I am going to go to old this nonprofit that I used to work for, and I'm going to create this program that I'm going to sort of say I'm going to be the founder of the program and we're going to create it from scratch. And I could sort of scratch that entrepreneurial itch, go back to doing policy work, which is how I got into law in the first place. And I got pretty far in that discussion. And then I started getting ghosted a little bit, and the emails started not being responded to quite as quickly. And I sort of saw the writing on the wall that it wasn't going to happen. And within, I don't know, mere months of that happening, the Georgetown job came available. And so I would've been in the wrong place at the right time, at the wrong time if it didn't work.

(35:24):
The other real moment that changed my career forever was I was coming off of my clerkships, and I applied for one last clerkship at the Supreme Court, and I was pretty excited about it, and I thought, it's probably not going to happen, but there's a chance. And I got pretty far in the process, and it turned out that my best friend from law school, who's one of my best friends to this day, ended up getting the job that I had applied for. So for the same job. And the justices have billions of incredible applications, not billions, but many, many, many incredible applications. They were not going to hire two Georgetown students. It was not happening. And that particular sort of not getting the call for the interview and seeing my dear, dear friend, get the job. He was adjunct teaching a writing class at Georgetown.

(36:18):
When he got that job, he couldn't keep teaching as an adjunct because he was working at the Supreme Court. And he called me up and said, would you be willing to fill in for that class? If I don't fill in for that class, I don't get the visitor gig at Georgetown, which I only got because I didn't get the other job I wanted. And it all goes from there. And you don't see any of that on LinkedIn. And I tell this story publicly, I think it's important to hear that you can have big goals. And even when you miss, oftentimes that's the thing that opens the next door. And so I love what I'm doing, but I'm also confident that if one of those other pieces had gone right and I was doing something else, there's no reason I wouldn't love that also, right? And so it's like this, I think I had a very fixed mindset.

(37:04):
This is the next goal, this is the next goal, this is the next goal. That's sort of what defined my teens and my twenties. And now it's like there can be multiple truths, and the one you have is the one you got to live. And so I've been really lucky that it led me here. And as I tell people, I'm going to do this, I think as long as they'll let me do it. But then again, who knows what changes, right? I have no idea. I mean, we are in a moment in the city in which I live where everything professionally feels like it's changing. So who knows what the next decade holds, but I know for right now, I'm in the right place where I can do the right thing.

Jennifer Ramsey (37:41):
Okay? Chills. Chills, little tears welling up, be still my inspir. I love that type of shit. Megan knows what you just said was so beautiful. Thank you. And inspirational. And I just hope everyone listening really takes what you're saying to heart because it's so true. Multiple truths can be true at the same time. Multiple things can be true at the same time. And it's kind of the grace that we use as we go through life, right? Give ourselves a little bit more grace and grit at the same time. And I feel like that's a mic drop moment, Megan.

Jonah Perlin (38:29):
Yeah, I love it. I love it.

Jennifer Ramsey (38:30):
I

Megan Senese (38:31):
Agree. So if people want to connect with, obviously they can follow you on LinkedIn. We want everyone to listen and to subscribe to your podcast. I put this in, if people want to sponsor your podcast, they know where to come and get you

Jonah Perlin (38:47):
A hundred percent. They know where to find me. They know where to

Megan Senese (38:49):
Find you.

Jonah Perlin (38:49):
See, this is the problem. I left the law firm before I ever to sell myself. So my podcast is what I call my lush, my largely unpaid side hustle. And so anytime that anyone reminds people that there are options, please, I'm pretty easy to find.

Jennifer Ramsey (39:05):
Did you make that up? Did you make that acronym up? I

Jonah Perlin (39:08):
Don't know. I think I might have.

Jennifer Ramsey (39:09):
It's so good for trademark.

Jonah Perlin (39:14):
Everybody should have one.

Megan Senese (39:15):
Sure. Percent. And then I promise we'll wrap it up, but I also saw you posted that you might be trying to put together a program for junior law students or associates over the

Jonah Perlin (39:27):
Summer. Yeah, so I guess this is the first time we're talking about it. I mean, I have this problem where I largely, I have a lush and I look for others, and I've been playing with the idea of how can I help? How can I connect more people? How can I be connected to more people? I don't have a lot of answers to that question. And so I've done some speaking at law firms in various events, and I love doing that. I was just down in Florida doing the campus to career day down at Stetson, but I am sort of playing with other ideas of creating community or finding other ways to connect. So if you have ideas or anything, I'm always up for chatting about it.

Megan Senese (40:04):
Well, we, stage, would love to talk about that more, but we also encourage our listeners to go follow the link. It's a paid program. So we want to ensure that all of our guests get the money that they deserve. This is our job. We are business developers. We are here to help you develop

Jonah Perlin (40:19):
Your, see, I need to learn from you, and I'll get y'all on how I lawyer so you can tell junior people what they need to know because we would

Megan Senese (40:26):
Love that.

Jonah Perlin (40:26):
As Jen, you pointed out, we don't always teach that early on and early and often is important.

Megan Senese (40:32):
We can be your course curriculum. Love it. Thank you for joining us on so much to say. Jen, take us out.

Jennifer Ramsey (40:38):
Yes. So teaching Yoga is my lush Jonah.

Jonah Perlin (40:42):
Love it.

Jennifer Ramsey (40:43):
We always close out every podcast with Stay human, stay inspired, and nama stay.

Megan Senese (40:49):
That's it for today. Join us next time on So Much To Say, a legal podcast for people. Can't get enough of us? Visit us at www.stage.guide.