Professor Menesh Patel joined UC Davis Law faculty in 2018. His primary research interests are in the areas of antitrust, securities, and corporate law. Before joining UC Davis, he was a research scholar at the Program in the Law and Capital Markets, jointly operated by Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School. Prior to that, he was a law and economics fellow at Stanford Law School, and also practiced law at Sidley Austin LLP. Professor Patel received a J.D. at Stanford University, a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a bachelor’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Iowa.

Could you please share your legal journey, explaining what led you to pursue law, what motivated your transition from academia to the legal profession, and how you became a post-doctoral research scholar?

I went to graduate school in economics because I loved economics as an undergraduate student and wanted to keep learning. About halfway through my PhD program, I had an urge to do something that was more applied and engage with more concrete issues. My dissertation was in industrial organization, which is an area of economics that has applicability to a variety of practical applications including antitrust and a part of my dissertation was on issues in antitrust.

I also enjoyed problem solving. A career in the law, and especially one focused on antitrust, seemed like a wonderful place for me to solve interesting and important problems for clients in part using my economics background. So, I finished my Ph.D. and started law school. I began practicing right after graduation and really enjoyed it. After some years, I started missing the ability to really focus on the ideas, which isn’t something that you do as a practicing lawyer but is one of the features of a career in legal academics.

To become a law professor you need to have prepared research papers. Some law schools have fellowship programs whose purpose is to give future law professors a few years where they focus on research.  There was a fellowship position at Columbia Law School that seemed suited for my research. So, I left my practice at Sidley Austin, went to Columbia for two years, wrote the necessary research papers, and then started at King Hall in 2018.

Can you describe to us a “typical day” at Sidley Austin?

This is going to seem like a standard answer, but there was no typical day, and I think that’s not unique to my practice. What a lawyer does on one day can be very different than what they did the previous day, and that’s true even as you get very senior. I think that’s part of what makes a career in the law really rewarding and really challenging, but in a good way.

When I started as a junior lawyer, I did primarily antitrust litigation. At that stage of your career at a large firm, you’re often assisting more senior lawyers handle the substantive aspects of a case.  For instance, if there’s an important deposition to be taken in a litigation at a large law firm, the deposition usually will not be conducted by a junior lawyer but instead will be conducted by a more senior lawyer. The junior lawyers are involved, but their involvement usually will be to prepare the senior lawyer for the deposition, for instance by reviewing and learning the exhibits and preparing outlines. But as you get more senior, then you’re the one who handles the substantive tasks, such as taking or defending depositions.

Also, at the early years as a litigation lawyer at a large firm, you do a lot of legal research and writing. What differed from the legal research and writing process from law school was that almost always the research wasn’t included in a formal memo. In law school you’re taught to write formal research memos and I did write some of those research memos. But often the findings were contained in an e-mail that you would send the supervising lawyer, or perhaps they’d be delivered verbally in a meeting with the supervising lawyer. So that was an important part of the practice as a junior lawyer. And then you may write sections of briefs. As a junior lawyer at a large firm, you ordinarily aren’t the lawyer who is writing the entire brief. However, if you’re a junior lawyer at a smaller firm, then you may write the entire brief.

There also would be time spent meeting with other lawyers, which I didn’t anticipate would be a big portion of my career as a junior lawyer. But it happened with high frequency. You meet with senior lawyers in one-on-one meetings in their offices to discuss research findings or sections of briefs that you’ve written. You are involved in team meetings with your colleagues, where you would all assemble and talk through various aspects of the case, sometimes with the client in the room or on the phone. In this way, you would understand how the thing that you’re working on fit within the larger litigation, which would be extremely illuminating. And you’d also hear senior lawyers talk about litigation strategy, and be able to participate in those conversations, which also was really educational and interesting.

What attracted you to Antitrust/Competition group at Sidley Austin?

It was my fit with the firm’s culture. Something that I learned through my summer experiences in law school was that one of the most important things determining my professional fulfillment is whether my personality meshes with those that I work with. No matter the career, you end up working long hours at certain times and how that feels, at least for me, depends on who you’re working with. When my personality lines up with those I’m working with, the long hours don’t feel long and can be a lot of fun, but that’s different if there is a strong disconnect. This is something I try to advise law students as they go through the employment process – that is, try to get a sense of the people you will be working with and see if their personality aligns with yours. 

What were some law school experiences that helped prepare you for a career in Big Law?

First, your doctrinal classes are important, even ones that you may not anticipate as being important. For example, in my second year of practice, I worked on a very large litigation that ultimately was a very large contract case. A lot of the case turned on issues that I had learned in my first-year contract class. I didn’t remember many of the substantive details from my first-year contracts class, but the knowledge came back quickly because once you learn something a second time, it’s much easier than learning it the first time.

Skills classes are critical too. As a law student, I was told that legal research and writing would be among the most important classes that I would take, if not the most important. I didn’t believe that to be the case because it wasn’t a doctrinal class. Also, when I took the class, it was pass-fail, so the incentives were different than a graded class, and I placed it among the least important classes that I was taking as a first year. That was a mistake. In my summer positions, it became immediately obvious to me that legal research and writing was the most important class that I had taken. Each of the things that I did in my summer positions and many of the things I did as a junior lawyer related to things I was taught in LRW.  

How is the study of law different from the practice of law?

There are many but let me flag two noticeable differences. One key difference is that in school you learn by reading, doing practice questions, and outlining. In other words, you learn by learning. When you practice, you learn by doing. This is because the practice of law is a skills-based profession and that’s the only way you learn. One important implication is that if you want to progress as a lawyer, you have to make sure that the specific assignments you’re getting are giving you the skills you need to progress.

I think a second important way that the study of law is different from practicing is the relative importance of the facts. From the first day of law school all the way to the last day of law school, and then through the bar exam, students focus on learning what the law is, and we think that’s what makes good lawyers – learning and being knowledgeable about the law. But when you practice, you learn quickly that the law assumes a background position to the facts of the particular matter that you’re working on. The facts dominate the law. It’s very different from law school.

How does the nature of the work change when transitioning from an attorney to a professor?

There are many differences. One is that when you’re a practicing, regardless the type of law that you practice, the law is what the law is. Your arguments, or whatever you’re trying to do, is circumscribed by the current state of the law. It is true that a lawyer may try to get the law to move in a way that is more favorable to the position that they’re arguing, but that is usually pretty incremental. In contrast, in an academic environment, one gets to freely advocate for significant changes in the law and make arguments that are more grounded in the hypothetical.

A second key difference is that in practice of law the things that you work on are given to you by your clients. What a lawyer does on a daily basis are guided by whatever the lawyer’s clients may need at that particular time and that applies to whatever organization the lawyer is working at.

When you’re in an academic environment, you no longer have clients, and so you have more choices in what it is that you may work on a given day and that can be both liberating and daunting. It can be liberating because you can focus on what you want to focus on. It can also be daunting because sometimes it’s easier to have someone guide what you do, rather than having to figure it out on your own.

What are differences between legal research for clients and for your academic projects?

First is time. I could spend all of today, all of next week, and any more time that I want researching a particular issue because there’s no time urgency. I do need to publish articles, but the publication schedule is on a pretty extended deadline. So, there effectively are no real time restrictions except the ones that I impose on myself. That’s not the case in the practice of law, of course. There, the time pressures are significant because in any given day there will be many issues to work on. They’re all time sensitive and your clients don’t have the willingness or the resources to have their lawyer spending weeks and weeks researching a particular issue. So, time is a big difference.   

Another difference is precision. Any project that a lawyer works will be perfect when it leaves their desk because precision is something that characterizes a good lawyer. In academic work, our research papers start out as works in progress that we send around for comment and review. In other words, while our final work product will have the same level of precision as work product that a lawyer produces, the early drafts that we send out for review and comment will be works in progress and, by their very nature, incomplete. This is important part of the academic process because we want our work to be vetted and improved by the review of others, which can only happen if others engage with our work at an early, inchoate stage.   

What are the key aspects you focus on when teaching students and preparing them to be lawyers?

Three pieces of advice come to mind. The first is for students to try to learn as much as they can in law school about what different lawyers do. I think that is important because law students have to make choices about what areas they want to practice and they type of place they want to practice. To some extent, this information is provided in law school, but not to the extent that is needed to make an really informed decision. So, if students want to make informed decisions about their career trajectory, they should take steps early in their legal career to determine what different lawyers actually do. I encourage students to reach out to me and other faculty and our alums for assistance with that process.

I’ll give you an example of my practice history. I wanted to go to law school to practice antitrust. While in law school, I knew that there were many non-litigation roles in the law, but with respect to my future practice area of antitrust I thought—wrongly and somewhat embarrassingly—there were only antitrust litigators, and so that’s what I ended up doing. Some years after I started practicing, I learned about the deal side of antitrust that involves assisting companies navigate the merger review process and engaging with the antitrust agencies in case a deal raises a competition issue.  I started working on those types of matters, and I fell in love with that part of antitrust. Had I learned that earlier in my career, I would have more quickly steered myself to working on those sorts of matters

The second piece of advice is to think about legal problems through the eyes of others. In your summer positions, you are going to look at the problem that you’re working on through your own eyes, which is the natural scope. But if you instead ask yourself, how is that problem being viewed through the lens of my supervising lawyer or the client, you get a different perspective of the particular project and that will help you do a better job.

The third piece of advice is to be strategic in your career. I think that’s important to mention because many of us did not have careers before we went to law school or have family members or others in our communities who may have had careers. We and those around us may have had jobs, but not careers. To be successful in one’s career requires being strategic in the sense that you’re thoughtful and purposeful about what you’re doing at any given point and what you want to be doing at later step. It’s easy to put your head down and do great job. But if you’re not strategic or holistic about it, then in five years you may be somewhere that you don’t want to be, even though you’ve done a great job for those five years up until that point.

What advice would you give to students who are interested in being a law professor like you, and how should they best prepare themselves during their early legal careers?

I think the thing to do is to take a look and see the trajectories of other professors that are in that particular area that you’re interested in and try to emulate their backgrounds. That’s easy to do because all law professors have their profiles and CVs online. With that information, a student can get clear a snapshot of the steps that others took to enter the legal academy and can ascertain whether those steps are ones that they can and want to undertake. 

Can you tell us how technology and the pandemic may have brought about significant changes in corporate law since you started your career?

The pandemic brought around many changes in the practice of law, both in and outside of corporate law. A notable influence of technology and the pandemic is the pivot to remote work. Many organizations—including law firms, governmental entities, and public interest organizations—have some degree of remote work, where lawyers aren’t in their physical spaces for five days a week like they used to do. And that also applies to junior lawyers as well.

I think that offers significant advantages in terms of work-life balance and flexibility, but I also think there is a great value for junior lawyers if they can be in the physical workspace because there is a great deal of mentorship that happens when they’re in personal interactions that just can’t be replicated by remote interactions. The value of those mentorship experiences is at its highest when one is a junior lawyer. The other advantage is that by being in an in-person setting, it’s easier to form stronger relationships with those that are in the organization which one is working. Stronger relationships sometimes translate into better work experiences and facilitate advancement.