Taking the Fight to The Courts with Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter

That actually brings up an issue that's been a little bit of a bugaboo of mine for a little while here, especially with, I think...

So look, my perception of especially the law students and young lawyers coming up right now is such that I think that a lot of them are, they recognize the stakes, they recognize what it means to actually have to go out on a limb and take a risk and to do something that matters and that that is kind of a great life path to pursue.

But you just touched on something that I think that a lot of people forget.

And I'll just say this based off personal experience also.

There are times in your career when you have to do menial things, right? You have to do things that don't have any guarantee of glory.

They don't have any, you know, someone's not going to sit there and get you a plaque at the end of the project.

Sometimes it just involves showing up and working hard and doing something.

And you recognize that, you know, if you just keep working hard and you keep showing up every single day, that maybe, just maybe, you know, other doors will open down the line or it will create different through paths to different things.

But...

This whole notion, I think, that some young people, not everybody, believe me, not everybody, but there's some young people who have this thing in their head right now that, well, everything that they do has to have a whole lot of meaning and everything has to be super interesting.

I agree that that is a great goal.

It's a great career aspiration to have that, but I don't know if enough lawyers right now are prepared to take on roles and to do things that might seem more trivial.

Might be like, why do I have to do that? Why do I have to go do this thing or assemble this bunch of paperwork? Or why do I have to do X, Y, or Z when really they should be viewing it as an opportunity? Because you never know how those skills are going to serve you later in the future or how that role or those relationships that you formed while you were doing those things is going to carry you forward into the future.

So the experiences and the relationships you build layer on top of each other.

I cannot possibly do the job that I have now if I had not already done all those prior jobs.

It doesn't have to be maybe that exact job versus another one, but jobs like that.

Some of these questions that came up every day when I was just a trial lawyer, they'll come up now.

Except now, instead of being able to run off to a supervisor to ask what the answer is, I have to make the decision myself.

What are we going to do? And I've got 30 seconds.

Plus, a lot of times people think of life as very linear, right? I did this, I did this, I did this.

And that's just not reality.

Like there's tributaries, there are sides you take, you jump off, you come back in.

And the successful person is the nimble person.

It's the person willing to take on this task and that task.

My goodness, I didn't think of that, but that's amazing.