A New Beginning

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This Friday will be my last day at Shearman & Sterling.  After seven and a half years, the time is right for me to move on.

When I reflect on my time at Shearman & Sterling, I realize how tremendously fortunate I have been.

I once heard that the average length of a career at a major law firm like Shearman is two and a half years.  That may be a little too short, but if the actual length of service is anywhere near that, I’ve managed to beat the average by a couple years.

That’s all you need to know how happy I’ve been with the firm.

At Shearman & Sterling, I got to work on headline-making transactions involving blue chip companies most of you have heard of with colleagues that I genuinely liked and respected, all while being well-compensated. Yes, the long hours with little sleep and even less life outside of the work often sucked, but all things considered, my life was pretty darn good.

So, you may be asking, if the firm has been so good, why leave?

The short answer is that because there is so much else I’ve always wanted to pursue.

Because a career with a major Wall Street law firm was never part of my life plans.

I went to law school because I was politically wired in college, fell particularly in love with the U.S. constitution and assumed that law school is where you go to study the Supreme Law of the Land.  It never occurred to me when I entered law school that I needed to come out with employment until I saw my classmates frantically scheduling interviews after the end of the first year. I didn’t know what Wall Street law firms did, but I didn’t want to be left behind so I jumped on the interview bandwagon.

So of all the fortunates I’ve had with Shearman & Sterling, the greatest was that I stumbled upon an amazing workplace in a world that I never knew existed.

And although I came to enjoy the work over the years–even I confess the profession suits my temperaments quite well– the part of me that never contemplated the world of corporate law never died.  As three years became five, then seven, I never reached the point that this profession, much less this field, was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

I liked Shearman enough.  I liked it a lot.  But it never consumed me.

Truth be told, if my feelings about a career at a law firm were even a bit ambivalent, I probably should have left earlier; it’s not a place for the half-hearted.  Because the firm had been so good to and for me, though, it became increasingly more difficult to leave for the unknown.

But I’ve finally been able to cut the cord.

Starting next Monday, I will be joining Amazon of Japan’s legal department that covers the cloud service, which, I’ve been told and read, is becoming the driving force of the company’s growth.

This is tremendously exciting.

It’s exciting because this was the only way I was ever going to be able to enter the cool world of IT.

It’s exciting because I will no longer have to experience those only-in-the-world-of-lawyers moments, like when I’m going through a two hundred page document only to check the location of commas because a comma’s misplacement can potentially cost millions of dollars, or when I have to suffer through letters that begin with a phrase like “Reference is hereby made to…”

It’s exciting because I get to put the analytical skills I’ve honed as an attorney to the world of business, helping the company grow along with engineers and whoever else make tech companies create the amazing things we never knew we couldn’t live without.

Most of all, it’s exciting because it will be completely new, nothing like anything I’ve done at Shearman & Sterling or that I’ve studied in college or law school.

The goal of my life is to live by the motto of my alma mater Boston College, Ever to Excel.  In the past seven and a half years, I’ve been blessed to be in an environment that challenged me to excel, day in and day out, and no doubt Amazon will continue to do the same.

But for me the motto includes a personal collorary, to make a difference. I’m hoping that working at a company like Amazon, with all the ways it has pushed the boundaries in the way people buy goods and businesses store data, I’ll be able to make contributions to the world in ways that I never could at a law firm.

The journey begins on Monday.

It’s gonna be a blast.