I have an MBA in Business Law, what career should I do?

Which legal specialty lends itself better to business opportunities and/or intellectual rewards: startup law or corporate restructuring law?

• Corporate restructuring law --> GC for distressed investing fund --> start own hedge fund/investment advisory group  (common route) Startup Law --> Work in-house at emerging company --> IPO exit (other business-related options for startup lawyers?) I love reading about science and technology, but come from an economics background in undergrad.  I enjoy persuasive writing, negotiating, and maintaing some degree of autonomy/independence over my schedule, but I am by no means afraid of hard work.  I feel like I'd enjoy advising companies that help form the lifeblood of our economy, however, I know that bankruptcy lawyers are often sought after for potentially lucrative distressed investing positions and may allow me to gain a greater degree of independence/autonomy down the road in my career. However, looking at balance sheets all day and engaging in fundamental investment research is a bit boring to me, especially when the companies do not have a technology focus.  I've even thought of getting a second bachelors in chemical engineering (almost minored in chemistry), but the time/cost would be tough to justify.  I'll be starting at a t-10 JD/MBA program soon, and would love to hear any advice.  Thanks.

• Answer:

  I worked in restructuring at a top firm for a few years and have a number of friends who work in "startup law" (which as far as I can tell is really just corporate, with a small-client focus, a narrower field of players, and more defined mileposts). Your question contains an assumption that I think is worth teasing out--if you're at a T-10 school with all the options in the world, why wouldn't you just get an entry-level job with a distressed fund or a startup? To my mind, you won't gain any benefit from spending time being a lawyer for startups or distressed debt investors rather than working there, and in fact, this will set you back toward your ultimate goal. Let me explain. A ton of being either a junior lawyer or an entry-level financial analyst is "paying your dues."  That means, effectively, that you're not trusted with the plum, "interesting" work until you've done a lot of dull work and figured out (often for yourself, with no guidance) how that work figures into the overall whole.  Put otherwise, this means that you'll be exposed to tactics--the day to day mechanics and drudgery of, say, representing a debtor in bankruptcy--without necessarily learning the strategy--namely, the reason why you're doing what you're doing, who's talking with whom behind the scenes, and how that fits in with what the seven other people on the case are doing.  But here's the difference: the learning curve is MUCH flatter for lawyers than for distressed funds.  You can see this in a decided mismatch in the ages of the clients and the lawyers providing services--for instance, a buddy of mine in his late twenties who worked at a distressed fund would often call up a senior partner at my firm (effectively, my boss's boss's boss) to make requests.  There's no reason why you should waste seven years of your life working your ass off in a restructuring practice (oh yeah, you should be aware that as a specialty is famously hardworking and unpredictable, even by the standards of ), struggling to make partner, then trying to sell yourself as a useful hire to a client, when you could be actually learning how to invest in distressed debt.  I have friends who've taken both routes--trust me, those who work on the client side have more in the bank account, spend more time at home, have more exit options, and are far, far happier. I have no idea if this is true for startup law too, but I expect similar considerations apply. More generally, you're going to have to pay some dues no matter where you go, so those dues might as well go directly toward a goal you want, rather than toward a parallel, but fundamentally different field. Don't become a bankruptcy lawyer and hope that somehow having taken Contracts five years before will help you sneak in the back door to a distressed fund; in all likelihood, you're going to get beat out for that job by a punk straight out of business school, and if you're really lucky, spend your life taking orders from him. Let me know if you have any questions--happy to discuss in the comments.