I’m excited to present a lawyer (defender of the Constitution) and fashion blogger (defender of good taste) in the next installment of the “Real Jane at Work” series.
Kat Griffin, 33, is an attorney at the Media Law Resource Center, a non-profit information clearinghouse which provides information on First Amendment and media law developments. She’s also the blogger behind Corporette, a go-to for professional women looking for fashion advice.
I was so happy that Kat agreed to be interviewed because I’ve been a fan of Corporette for some time now. She really is a fashion authority for lawyers and Wall Street-types, and her hundreds of commenters fill in the details for every other career you could imagine.
I wanted to hear more about Kat’s career path and how she juggles her full-time job and successful blog. Read on for the interview!
Now you’re a lawyer at a media law nonprofit, but you’ve said on Corporette that you worked in fashion journalism for “half a second.” Can you describe your career trajectory and how it got you to where you are today?
In college, I was a journalism major, and was really interested in fashion journalism based on my love of fashion and style. In 1997 I decided to intern in New York, and sent my resume to everyone, eventually choosing to work for a trade fashion magazine, Sportswear International. That summer, I worked primarily on a stand-alone publication called “The Encyclopedia of Denim,” and it was all denim, all the time – from brand profiles to the environmental impact of the washes and treatments and beyond. (They always say you should know something about everything, and everything about something – for a long time after that summer I thought I had the latter covered.) Anyway, it was interesting, but I decided it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the long term – I was more interested in profiles of people and things like that. So I focused on jobs where they would let me actually write – that was how I chose Family Circle for my summer 1998 internship, and when I graduated in 1999 there happened to be a job opening there with my favorite editor, so I took it.
Before I left college, I had done a project for a class on new copyright legislation that had just passed – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I thought it would make a great freelance piece, so I was reading everything I could – and eventually decided that if I was so fascinated by it I should try to work IN the field instead of COVERING the field. So I went to law school at Georgetown (chosen primarily for its proximity to the Copyright Office and things like that).
Anyway, from there I rediscovered my love of the First Amendment, and through networking heard about my current employer, MLRC [a First Amendment and media law clearinghouse]. I interned there in Summer 2001, and got to talk to a ton of media lawyers – many of whom had come from Cahill Gordon, which was why I chose to work at that firm after law school. I was lucky to work with some great people and on some truly interesting cases, but I knew pretty early on that I didn’t want to be a partner – and I kept waiting for litigation to become enjoyable. After six years, I was ready for something different – when I heard about the job opening at my current employer I leapt at the chance, both for the people, the subject matter, and a chance to do different work.
When you’ve made career decisions—such as entering journalism, attending law school, switching to nonprofit work—what have been the motivating factors? What considerations do you weigh when considering new jobs or paths? Do you have long-term plans that you’re working toward or do you have a less scripted, more opportunity-based approach to your career?
The primary motivating factor, for me, was always excitement – I wanted to be truly excited about the people I was working with, the work I was doing, the subjects I was immersed in, and so forth. I let other opportunities pass me by if they didn’t excite me, which may or may not have been wise without at least further investigation.
Funnily enough, one of my earliest decisions – to go to j-school – wasn’t based so much on excitement but pragmatism: I liked writing, and my parents wanted me to be assured a job after graduation. My mother’s degree is in English and Philosophy, and she frowned on those kinds of subjects. (Meanwhile, my father was convinced that I should become an engineer – and now that I know more about that career, he was probably right – but at the time I knew I hated my science classes and thought engineering would be more of that.) Journalism seemed like a great compromise, and Medill was one of the best schools. (Similarly, my second major – Political Science – was chosen based on pragmatism. I always did well in the classes, even if I didn’t enjoy them, and it seemed easier to complete a major in Poli Sci than it did in Psychology, which I really loved but couldn’t see a use for since I didn’t want to be a psychologist.)
At the law firm, what were your observations of the women partners? What sorts of sacrifices did they have to make to get where they were, and do you think the opportunities are equal for men and women to obtain management-level positions in the legal industry?
I will say that it seems to be true that if you want to have kids, one parent has to have a scalable career. A lot of the really successful women lawyers I’ve known seemed to have husbands with those kinds of careers, which allowed the father to be home more with the kids. Money can bridge a lot of barriers, though – with the right help you can do a lot.
Working at a nonprofit must be very different from working in the private sector. What do you like most about the nonprofit environment?
Going from a firm with 500+ employees to a nonprofit with 8 employees has been a huge change! Just the office space – my executive director sits two doors down from me; whereas at Cahill if I wanted to go see a partner I was working with, I sometimes had to take use different elevator banks to get to the right floor.
What does a typical day at work entail?
Reading a ton of different news sources to aggregate them for our members, as well as to generate ideas for articles and conference panels. Researching certain topics farther, and possibly writing articles – I just wrote a monster tome on the law against aggregators (I think it was about 30 pages). Polling the members on topics that are important – pending bills and the like – and writing memos to advise the board. Conference planning – lots of logistics. We’re in the midst of trying to get ready for a website redesign, so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that. Brainstorming about how to get new members, how to better serve the members we have.
In March of this year, you revealed your identity as the blogger behind Corporette. Nonprofits tend to be more laid-back environments, and you were working at one when you discarded anonymity. Would you have felt comfortable revealing your identity if you were still working at a law firm, a traditionally conservative work environment?
I actually “came out” to Cahill in September 2008 – I really wonder if they would have cared if I had outed myself more publicly. By the time I interviewed at MLRC, I had realized that Corporette added a lot to my portfolio of skills, and so it was on my resume. My executive director was extremely supportive of the blog since we started talking about it – she used to proudly tell people that they should go check it out, her new staff attorney wrote it. So I think that half of the MLRC members already knew that I was the author – it was old news to them by the time the Above the Law interview and so forth happened.
On a related note, how has blogging affected your professional life? How do you juggle a full-time job as a lawyer with the demands of daily blogging?
I’ve gotten pretty good at doing things very quickly in terms of writing and coding my posts – the biggest time investment is generally finding an acceptable item of clothing or whatnot to feature! Some things I have to do on the weekends – I try to have a longer post midday Monday that is usually written on the weekend, and a lot of the “Previously. . .” posts have to be put together over the weekends also (I use it as an opportunity to revisit older posts now that I know more about SEO and so forth). A lot of times, with regard to reader mail, I’ll print stuff out with me and take it on the subway and start scribbling answers, and then just type it up when I get home.
But a lot of the work in the blog isn’t just in writing it. Answering emails, managing relationships, assessing my analytics, networking, etc. – all those little details take forever, let alone to think about expansion. (And keep in mind that I have no formal business training, so I end up reading vast amounts of stuff on running a business, marketing your business, etc.) I do my best to get what I need done in the morning before work, and try to work on other tasks on Sunday also. I try to take Saturday off.
You’ve received tons of recognition as an authority on women’s workplace fashion. What wardrobe staples would you advise a woman newly entering the workplace to purchase? What are your favorite online fashion resources?
I say women should just bite the bullet and buy some suit separates – jacket, trousers that look nice by themselves, and a skirt. Then, you’re set if you have an interview, but you also have a ton of different pieces that can be worn by themselves. (Be very careful to dryclean or launder all three pieces together – that way, the wear will be consistent, even if you wear the trousers a ton more than you wear the blazer.) I’m a huge fan of blazers – even now I like to throw one on over my outfit if I have a meeting.
In terms of online fashion. . . I generally look to things like the “wear to work” categories on Nordstrom’s site, or Bluefly’s site. I love my daily ShopItToMe emails (I have them set up under several different email accounts so I can monitor my sizes, my mother’s sizes, and my husband’s sizes). I also think that SheFinds does a great job of providing both fashion news and “wear it now” fashion ideas. I think YouLookFab.com also has a lot of great discussions on styling.
What do you know now that you wish you knew then?
I wish I had known that for most people, you sort of have to create your own adventure, career-wise. As a kid you think there are a finite number of jobs – teacher, lawyer, doctor – and you make career choices based on that limited understanding of the world. I’m always fascinated by people with jobs that I never knew existed, and fascinated by the paths they took to get there.
Thanks Kat!
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Great interview! I enjoy reading about people’s career paths, especially when they have a range of positions that don’t connect on the surface. I wish a wider variety of positions were explained to kids so they would realize more of what’s out there. Like Kat mentions in her last response, it amazes me when I see all of these different jobs that I didn’t know existed. I worked in the marketing department of a staffing company for a while, and seeing the variety of jobs was interesting. Maybe this comes partly because teachers rarely have any type of business experience, and so they talk mostly about the most obvious careers – teacher, doctor, lawyer. Interesting to think about.
Great job, Kat! So candid. And you’re such a realist (and pragmatist)… I studied whatever caught my fancy in college (marketable or not) and assumed that people would want to hire me for my sheer brilliance ;-D