The Philadelphia Inquirer reports…
When he was nearly finished with law school, right at the point when Led Zeppelin-loving Paul Green was about to shed his Telecaster and T-shirts for wing tips and Windsor knots, he decided on a change of venue.
At 48 and despite a plum internship at one of Philadelphia’s most distinguished law firms, the School of Rock founder took a fresh look at the legal profession with its 60-hour workweeks and its buttoned-down culture, and said: no thanks.
“At the beginning of my fourth year of law school, I decided I needed to get serious,” Green said recently. “So I started going on interviews and reading about what life in a firm is like. That’s when I realized that if I got my dream law job, I might have to give up everything I like in life.”
Green — whose story was the basis of the successful 2003 movie — will finish his last four classes next month and start cramming for a July bar exam. But his future won’t include a job at Ballard Spahr, where he’s been interning the last year, or at any other firm. Instead, the new lawyer will commence his latest riff, creating another music-related business, one he hopes will benefit from his legal knowledge.
“I’m a punk-rocker,” Green said, laughing, “and what’s more punk rock then getting a law degree and then not using it?”
A lawyer unmoored from the legal profession, Green will also be an example of a relatively recent trend: pursuing a legal education not as an end in itself but to supplement a prior degree or a career in another business. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, there are lawyers who also are CEOs, CPAs and physicians.
“It’s a trend that’s increasing,” said Greg Seltzer, Green’s mentor at Ballard and the leader of that firm’s Emerging Companies and Venture Capital Group. “Almost half the people we hire out of law school have some sort of job between undergraduate and law school. I think law is intriguing to people in a lot of respects.”
