In this episode, Roy talks with litigator Doha Mekki: history teacher, bioethicist, trial attorney, and Acting Assistant Attorney General. She has seen every corner of the law. And her testimony is that almost nothing about being a litigator looks the way you think.

Exhibit A: the courtroom is the last resort, not the main event. The real work is years of investigation, millions of documents, hundreds of depositions, and memos that account for every single sentence with a hyperlinked source. Exhibit B: every trial is a morality play. Exhibit C: the most important thing a litigator does is listen. Let the witness go somewhere unexpected. Then follow.

She'll also testify to the inner life of the job: the immigrant’s weight of an unstated pressure to succeed, the junk food of praise, why you have to build your own internal governor, and what it felt like when a company walked in with a binder full of documents proving she'd been right all along.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Preview

00:09:21 – Becoming a lawyer in the first place

00:27:56 – Getting ideas (choosing what to work on)

00:55:48 – Making the work (the craft of litigation)

01:38:22 – Selling the work

02:04:16 – Progressing in your career

02:34:29 – Understanding and improving “The System”

03:03:11 – What should someone considering entering the occupation do?

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