I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up

Posted on by Luis Villa

The recurring question lawyers ask first year law students when they meet them is something like ‘so what do you want to specialize in?’ The answer I really want to give is something like ‘open source law generalist’, but sadly that isn’t really something that people hire, and probably isn’t something you’d really want to be anyway unless you were an academic- law is a highly specialized profession where ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ is quite true. So at some point in the near future I’m going to have to figure out what or how to specialize, I think… and I have no idea what it is going to be. I’m definitely interested in patents, copyrights, trademarks, antitrust, and a few other things. But none of them yet jump out as something I’d like to pursue single-mindedly for several consecutive years. Definitely something I hope folks around here can help me figure out this summer.

Published by Luis Villa

10 thoughts on “I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up”

  1. Just follow your gut feeling. I think that it is not about what job title do you want, it is about to do what you do, just try to do what you like and give your best in it, and also, talk about what you like with others.

    Exiting opportunities will just come as you make efforts to be good on what you like. Seriously, you won’t have any problems on working what you like other than choosing where do you want to work on what you like, because being as good as you are, and having so such rare skills of developer, free software evangelist and lawyer, you will be always an interesting person to hire in any high tech company.

    Keep on rocking dude.

  2. personnaly, i dont want to specialize
    i’m a phd student, which is probably the top in specialization you get get to. but however i managed to stay general. in my phd, on communication systems, i deal with propagation, modulation, emergent behavior with agent systems, interference management… just about every aspect. and still i do believe i’ll find work out there, because their is a need for people having a broader view of the whole complex system. i’m sure that’s also true with law, is it not?
    sure i’ll never be a master in one restricted aspect. but i’ll make things work together.
    at university and doing various studies (psychology, and electrical engineering) i figure a lot of high profile teachers are so into their little restricted research area, they’re not even synchronized with reality and miss so many other points that actually interact with what they are studying, because they focus too much on one specialized aspect.
    sheers, best luck with your studies and life after that (is there a life after a phd? OMG i’m finishing my phd in a few month i have to wright a these and find something to do afterwards! lol)

  6. I’ve never studied at law school but I always thought that one could specialize as an ‘Intellectual Property’ or maybe ‘Digital [Age?] Intellectual Property’ lawyer and that would cover the patent, copyright, and maybe trademark bases.

    If you are forced to narrow it down even further, well I personally would choose copyright myself. Surely once you start studying the Case Law that relates to the computer field you’ll find the stuff that interests you. In the one class that I had (non-law school) that introduced these kind of things, just studying the case law dealing with the DMCA got my blood boiling…

    After that, the first thing you’ll wish was free and open source or had an open source counter-part is the LexisNexis Case Law search…

    Good Luck :)

  7. I’ve never studied at law school but I always thought that one could specialize as an ‘Intellectual Property’ or maybe ‘Digital [Age?] Intellectual Property’ lawyer and that would cover the patent, copyright, and maybe trademark bases.
    People speak of being IP lawyers, but (as far as I can see) the reality is that they always specialize into one of the three fields.
    After that, the first thing you’ll wish was free and open source or had an open source counter-part is the LexisNexis Case Law search…
    Working on that problem. ;)

  9. Nate: I would love to talk to Eric; I didn’t know he was CS before he went into law but I’ve been reading his blog a bit of late- some very good thinking there.

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