Legal Journalist More Optimistic About BigLaw than Big Newspapers

Legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin advises unhappy lawyers looking for a new career to follow their hearts—although his own career change was not motivated by dissatisfaction.

“My only advice is to try to do what you love,” Toobin says in an interview with the blog Bitter Lawyer. “And be lucky. I drifted from law into legal journalism just before a boom in that field, but I never could have predicted what would happen. Enthusiasm is more important than just about anything.”

Toobin views law as a promising field for lawyers who want to remain, but he’s not as optimistic about his own profession.

“I’m more confident about the future of BigLaw than I am of big (or biggish) journalism, especially newspapers,” he tells the blog. “Lawyers can always, more or less, create demand for their services, but we can’t force people to read, watch or buy that which they don’t want to read, watch or buy.”

Toobin tells Bitter Lawyer he first began dabbling in journalism as a student at Harvard Law School when he started writing freelance legal stories for the New Republic. He was an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn when a friend at the New Yorker suggested he submit samples of his writing.

“Forty-eight hours later, my legal career was over,” he says. “It was more a lark than an escape.”