FROM CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST TO WALL STREET LAWYER

When approaching his tenth year out of college, John Nelson began wondering if he might change to a career in law, a career he had generally thought he might enter back in his teens.

In college, he had been an English major with a special interest in medieval literature and creative writing. And on nearing graduation, he had headed toward what had then seemed the more glamorous field of journalism and communications rather than law. 

For his first job out of college, he hadjoined a smaller firm editing its employee publications.

But an attractive opportunity had arisen several months later when a leading electronics corporation had offered him a job as a communications specialist on the basis ofan application he had made in his graduating job hunt.

John had accepted and, over the next nine years, had gone on to positions with the corporation in upstate New York, the San Francisco Bay area in California, and a special assignment in which he toured throughout the country. He found much of his work interesting and satisfying especially when he handled press information and relations largely on his own initiative and was often being interviewed himself for newspaper stories and on TV broadcasts.

Higher level but less satisfying assignments at headquarters offices followed. In them he began realistically thinking howfar he might advance in the corporation. He saw that, while substantial advancement was almost certain, he had very slight chances ofmoving up to very high position and income.

That winter he took the law school admission test with an eye toward checking out his chances of acceptance by a leading school. Getting very high scores, he took the next step ofapplying to several schools. He was admitted by and he enrolled at the school at Cornell University.

In law studies, he found that skills developed in his prior career in communications helped him readily identify and absorb keyfacts in the very heavy reading of cases required. Both for experience valuable in getting into his second career and for earnings to help meet heavy law school expenses, he held jobs while in law school. During the academic year he worked part time in a small town law practice in Ithaca, N.Y. (where Cornell is located). In summer vacations, he held fulltime jobs with a New York City law firm.

On graduation he found and accepted a position preparing him to take over as general counsel for the U.S. division of a major European bank in New York City. When advancement possibilities narrowed there, he shifted to a small New York City law firm with an excellent reputation that specialized in insolvencies (bankruptcy matters). He soon became a partner.

Within a few years, thatfirm was absorbed by merger into one of the very large and prestigious lawfirms with headquarters in the Wall Street financial district in New York City. John became a partner in the large firm.

Today, he feels extremely satisfied with his second career. At the same time, he finds his corporate communications experience has had a number qf benefitsfor his work as an attorney. It developed writing skills basic to drafting briefs and other legal documents. Speaking in interviews and on TV had helped him acquire poise when representing clients in court. And knowing at first hand how corporations operate internally has proven invaluable in working with corporate clients and corporate adversaries.