Law Firm to Law Professor: Tenure, Teaching, and Scholarship

Kyle McEntee:

We're joined today by Sudha Setty, the current president and CEO at LSAC, but we're not here to talk about that role. Prior to joining LSAC, she worked in private practice and then transitioned to academia, where she was a law professor and eventually a dean. Like many law students, especially at elite schools, you were a 2L summer associate at a large firm, but after graduation, and this is a bit atypical, you went to a different firm instead of where you summered.

I think sometimes law students forget that the summer associate experience is more than just an opportunity for the firm to decide if they want to extend an offer after graduation. It's also an opportunity for the summer associates to make sure the firm is a good match for them. So in your third year, what led you to look elsewhere for other opportunities?

Sudha Setty:

So I really appreciated my summer, which was at the firm of Kirkland and Ellis in their New York office. That was a smaller office at the time than it is now. I think it was probably 60 or 70 lawyers at the time. This was quite a few years ago. And I learned a lot, both substantively about the areas I was working on and also about what I was looking for in a job. And that was my first corporate law job. I had spent my 1L summer working for a nonprofit. And so this was all new to me. And although I had a really good summer experience and I had an offer at the end of the summer to come back full time, I also thought maybe this was an opportunity to explore firms that maybe were a little bigger, find a larger litigation group, which is what I was interested in doing. I mean, the litigation group at Kirkland and Ellis at the time was maybe 20 lawyers or something like that.

I went to Davis Polk, which had, I think at the time, 120 or 130 lawyers in litigation and just like lots of environments. Sometimes when you have more people there, it's easier to find a group or find the type of work that you're looking for. So I applied to maybe four different law firms at the end of my 2L summer. And the folks at Davis Polk that I interviewed with, and then ultimately who were recruiting me to join, told a compelling story about mentorship and the potential they saw in me as an associate. And particularly the partner who drew me there in that recruiting process did continue to be my mentor for the entire time I was an associate there. So it was selling a bill of goods that turned out to be true, which I appreciated.

Kyle McEntee:

Well, your instincts were pretty good, right, in making this change because you were there almost seven years. Did you plan on trying to make partner at the firm?

Sudha Setty:

No, I did not. In fact, I think my original plan was to try to gain the skills that junior associates get at those types of firms and then pay off my loans from law school, which were substantial, and then move on and work in the nonprofit space. I think my assumption going into law school was that I would go directly into some sort of legal services job. I think the financial implications of law school, which I took out almost entirely on loan did not quite hit me until I was in law school, at which point I had to kind of recalibrate my thinking on this. I was really pleased to find a few things at the firm that were helpful to me in my kind of larger life plan. So I had both of my children while I was at Davis Polk. And one of the nice things about large organizations like that is that they tend to have enough people to cover cases when you go on an extended parental leave or want to come back and work part-time. And so I worked there full-time for three years and then part-time for four. And so it was not a situation where I was on a partner track at all. And it had never been my plan to try to make partner there. I appreciated all the support that the firm gave me. And I thought the work that I did was surprising to me, really interesting, but it was never my long-term plan to stay there for my career.

Kyle McEntee:

So you ended up leaving for academia to become a professor. Was that your long-term plan?

Sudha Setty:

No, it was not. I don't think I understood fully when I was in law school or even when I started in practice what it is that law professors do. And that might seem like an odd thing to say, given the fact that I had been to law school. So obviously I knew some of what law professors did. But I think my understanding going to law school, and again, not really knowing anyone in the profession and not knowing any law professors other than the ones that I was interacting with, was that they were teachers, that that's really what they did most of the time. And I wasn't sure that that would be a career path that was of interest to me. It came on me much later than that when I saw friends of mine and colleagues of mine taking that path and getting a much better understanding of what it is that law professors do.

Kyle McEntee:

When you started to see this as a possible next step, how did you prepare for that shift?

Sudha Setty:

I'm not sure that how I prepared for it is how I would advise people to prepare for it, but I will tell you what I did. You know, the first thing I did was reach back out, not just to my mentors who I had been in touch with, but other law professors that I had had to talk to them about their work, to talk to them about how I might prepare for the market. I had written and published a note in law school, which I think was a good start in terms of trying to show that I had a research agenda and a scholarly mindset.

Kyle McEntee:

And what's a note?

Sudha Setty:

So lots of law schools, I think every law school has at least one law journal that is led by students who are the main editors and managers of that journal. And these are scholarly papers that are written on lots of different subjects.

Almost every law school has a general law journal, and then some law schools have specialty law journals that focus on a particular area of law. So at my law school, there was a journal of law and social problems that I was part of the staff of and then on the editorial board of. And so I wrote an article, something that was probably 50 pages long, that had lots and lots of footnotes and citations, a deep dive into a subject. And that was one that was selected for publication by that journal. And that journal happened to call them articles. But the most common convention for student written pieces in those law journals is calling them notes.

Kyle McEntee:

And so how did you decide what you wanted this second piece that you were trying to get published to be on?

Sudha Setty:

I had a conversation with a good friend of mine who actually happens to be the dean of a law school now, who was on the market at the time. And he said, you should write what you're passionate about. These are projects that take a lot of your time and energy. It should be something that you can build off of to write maybe a series of pieces. And you should think a little bit about what's going to sustain your intellectual interest over the long haul. And so I thought a lot about it.

This was probably in 2005 or so when we were dealing with a situation where many people were accusing President George W. Bush of overreaching in terms of executive power and thinking about institutional constraints that might exist on the executive branch. As an undergraduate, I was a history major, but my focus was on comparative civil rights movements. And so I had long had an interest in comparative law and policy. And so I started thinking about things like institutional mechanisms in other countries that people use to try to gain more transparency about what the executive branch was doing. And I did a policy paper on the prime minister's question time in the UK and whether that it was a translatable mechanism for the United States, considering the very different structure of government that we have and whether it was actually useful in terms of institutionalizing transparency.

I loved that paper. It was a project for me that felt like it spoke to my intellectual passions. And I still enjoy looking back at that paper, not so much because it was what I studied for the next 10 years, but because it really did spark my interest in writing about comparative law and policy for the next decade.

Kyle McEntee:

So a lot of the advice you're receiving is pretty ad hoc, maybe piecemeal. What else were people telling you as you were kind of preparing to, as you put it, go on the market?

Sudha Setty:

My mentors at Columbia, which is where I went to law school, had told me that I had taken an unconventional path towards academia, which I think is accurate. And therefore, they said it might take you a couple of years, two or three years to find a job because I was seeking tenure track positions. They wanted to help me manage my expectations, which I think was great.

And then they also advised me to think about what was important to me in terms of priorities. Was it the teaching package that I would have? Most law professors, depending on what school you're at, teach three or four courses.

And over the course of the year, was it really important to me that I had a specific set of courses that I was going to teach or was I flexible in that area? Was the geography of the law school important to me or was I willing to relocate anywhere? Was the ranking of the law school something important to me? And if so, why did it have to do with a question of resources that were available to faculty because the school had more generous finances or was it something else? So they asked me to think about all of those questions.

I think from my friends, I also got advice on how to fill out the faculty recruitment forms that were the kind of gateway into letting people know that you're interested in a teaching position. And for anyone who has seen these, they have a list of slots where you can put in what you might be interested in teaching so law schools can look at that and see if it matches with their hiring needs. I think the first time I filled out one of these forms, I put down like all these very esoteric subjects that I thought would be really cool to teach. And my friends were like, that's a really bad idea for going on the teaching market. You need to put in classes that the law schools will look at and say, we need someone to teach that. So it might be civil procedure or it might be property or a class like that, that almost every law school offers in their first year or a required course in their second year and that they need faculty to fill those. So you need to choose some of those classes too.

Kyle McEntee:

I think it might be surprising to listeners that you called your path unconventional because you went to an elite school, you went to an elite firm, you had a lot of great litigation experience. What is it that made your path unconventional to the norms of legal academia?

Sudha Setty:

I guess two things. One is I didn't think my path was unconventional until I was told it was unconventional. I assumed for the reasons that you were saying that, oh, it should be fine for me to go and teach at a law school. But I had not done some of the things that other candidates on the market had done. There were a lot of folks who had done teaching fellowships or kind of a pathway, taken a step in a lawyering program or something else that would help prepare them for the market. And these are programs that are run by a lot of law schools that are one or two years where you might teach a class. But the law school invests its time and energy in helping you develop your scholarly profile. They kind of do mock presentations that you can give to other people, mock job talks where people will pepper you with questions and kind of get you ready for what it's like to be on the actual teaching market. And they also have a network of folks to help place you or at least get interviews at different law schools and things like that. And I just had not done any of that. And I had also worked at a law firm for a long time, as you pointed out earlier. And I had thought that that was a good thing before I got to know the teaching market. But what I learned is that oftentimes if you work at a firm for more than a couple of years, that the assumption that law school hiring committees might have is that you really wanted to make partner at a firm, you didn't do it. And now you're looking at academia as some sort of second choice field and that you're not really focused on that or interested in it in the way that they would want people to be.

Kyle McEntee:

Well, while we're poking holes in your resume, you also didn't clerk, didn't have an appellate clerkship in particular. Did that come up at all?

Sudha Setty:

Yeah. So, I mean, this is the type of thing that my mentor, when I was still in law school, was trying to get me to think about. Like, if you want to teach, you should go and get a clerkship. You know, again, I was very dismissive of her very good advice at the time. So that's on me. But yeah, I don't think it came up as much as I thought it would overtly, but I am sure that it was part of the thinking of hiring committees who were looking at my materials. I don't think I fit neatly into the space that they expected a lot of candidates to be in.

Kyle McEntee:

So for full-time professor jobs at law schools, your work really has three components. We've got teaching, service, and scholarship. So did the interview process reflect all of those components?

Sudha Setty:

The interview process, I think, depends on what school you are interviewing with. So many of the schools that I ended up getting an opportunity to get past kind of the initial stage of interview, so the screening interviews that you might have would be something like 30 minutes with a bunch of different schools and in that, I think they try to ask you a broad range of questions that cover all three aspects, much more the teaching and the scholarship than anything having to do with service. They will ask you to talk a little bit about your research and your agenda for not just the article that you're working on, but the ones that might come after that. I think by the time you make it to the campus visit, which is usually a full day visit or depending on the law school, maybe a little more than a day. And this has changed over the years also with the advent of a lot more online interviewing. But I'll just share from my experience. Most of my callback interviews were with schools that are considered much more teaching institutions. This is a generalization, but those tend to not be so much the really elite law schools. They tend to be other law schools where they know that most of their students are going to go directly into practice. In fact, maybe many of those students might go into small firm practice, at which point the kind of need for them to hit the ground running is higher than at a lot of other law schools. That's where most of my callback interviews were. And so that focused both on the teaching piece and on the scholarship piece. And the kind of central point in the interview day is always the job talk, where you talk about your research and people try to poke holes in that and ask you a lot of hard questions and get a sense of both how you're thinking about your work and whether you are doing a good job in the process of writing and developing your research. But they're also trying to get a sense of how you think and how you would interact with them as a colleague in a space that requires a lot of intellectual rigor.

Kyle McEntee:

I think it's an important distinction between the schools that maybe put a little bit more focus on the teaching portion of that compared to the scholarship portion of it. And I don't want to lean too hard into this and then have it sound like I'm endorsing one style or another. But do you feel like because you had that maybe non-traditional pathway that you are limited to those so-called teaching schools more than the more elite schools that would be much more scholarly focused?

Sudha Setty:

I think that that's maybe a fair assumption. I mean, obviously, I don't know. But if you look not just at me, but at a lot of folks who have applied to teach at law schools, that is often the case.

Kyle McEntee:

So obviously, since we're having this conversation, your efforts paid off. You landed that first job at Western New England University School of Law. So you hadn't been in the classroom for a while and when you had you were a student, so you'd never prepared a syllabus or used the Socratic method to lead a conversation in the classroom. What was it like to prepare for the first class of your new career?

Sudha Setty:

It was nerve wracking, I think is probably the best adjective to use for it. The first class that I taught was contracts, and it was a 50-person section for contracts. And I had been asked to teach that partly because that was the teaching need of the law school in the first-year curriculum. And partly because at least I had some familiarity with some aspects of contracts. Having been a commercial litigator, I'm not going to suggest that it is the same thing because it is not. But in the world of academia, sometimes it's close enough that the associate dean feels comfortable assigning you to that role. And so I spent a lot of time preparing for that class. I think even throughout my teaching career, when I was prepping any new class, the first time I went through a new prep, I would spend probably eight to ten hours outside of the classroom for each hour in the classroom. And it was even more so for that first year, because it was just so much stuff that I felt like I had to read and learn and understand, and then think about how to make it accessible in a classroom.

I think folks in legal academia tend to be quite generous with each other in terms of sharing notes and sharing syllabi. But of course, in order to develop your own notes and syllabi, you want to look at a lot of other people's materials, read the books yourself, choose a casebook, think about how you want to structure your class. And all of that takes just a lot of time. So I felt nervous, I felt excited. And I have to say, I will never forget that feeling on the first day of class when I started talking and 50 people started typing what I was saying into their laptops. And I thought, oh, boy, this is, this is a lot. It's really different.

Kyle McEntee:

Did you find yourself adjusting throughout the semester based on the feedback you were receiving?

Sudha Setty:

Yes. So I do think that one of the things I did, which was good advice I had gotten from a colleague who was a professor at another school, was to kind of give people a mid-semester open ended set of questions, like asking them for feedback on how the class was going, things that are mundane, like, can you write bigger on the whiteboard in the classroom, which is actually really helpful information to get back. And things like it would be better to get the reading assignments seven weeks in advance instead of three weeks in advance, which is what I was doing. And some of those were easy to honor. And some things were harder to honor, because my first year of teaching, I was still developing that syllabus as I went. And so I could not give them what was seven weeks in advance, because I did not have that.

Kyle McEntee:

So teaching clearly takes a lot of time, and you ultimately did earn tenure.

Sudha Setty:

Yes.

Kyle McEntee:

How much do you think your teaching factored into earning tenure?

Sudha Setty:

I think at Western New England, the teaching is a big part of the evaluation for tenure. I loved classroom teaching. As you said, it was very hard work and took a lot of time and energy, but I really enjoyed it. And I really dedicated myself to working hard on getting better at it. And so I felt like this was a really important part of my job, one that I took really seriously and one that I loved, and also one that is obviously the core function of the law school in terms of having these students gain substantive knowledge and then critical thinking and analytical skills that were going to help them. At Western New England, again, that was a big part of what that tenure consideration was. And I had my articles that I had written that I also put together and the outside reviews of those articles and other things like that, that kind of helped build the case that I was a scholar that was deserving of tenure.

Kyle McEntee:

How did you continue to develop this scholarly agenda? Was it really just what you'd started with and you kind of just let inertia take over? Or were you constantly thinking, maybe I should go this direction or maybe I should go that direction?

Sudha Setty:

So I think that the persistent national security issues that came out in the post-September 11th context in the United States, in some senses, took over a lot of discourse in the area of constitutional law, presidential accountability, constraints on government overreach, questions of civil rights. And so I think national security became the frame that a lot of folks were thinking in at the time that I wouldn't describe it as inertia, but definitely the ecosystem was one that encouraged that kind of scholarship and that kind of engagement. And I felt like the comparative national security work that I ended up spending a lot of time doing was an outgrowth of what I had done before, but was also something that was really resonant in the conversations and really helpful to discussions at the time.

That was a time when pre-September 11th, most law schools did not teach a class in national security. It was not something that was on the radar, although that maybe in retrospect, that feels hard to believe it was the case. And so that was a field that was being shaped during that decade that I started teaching. And so to have a voice there, to be present in the conversations where how we were teaching this, how we were thinking about it in terms of policy, was something that I could be a part of, was really exciting to me.

Kyle McEntee:

So not all scholarship is especially impactful. How did you make sure that you were able to not only write something that was printed somewhere, but write something that was impacting this growing world?

Sudha Setty:

I would love to think that my scholarship was impactful all the time. I'm not sure that it was. I mean, there's the idea that one of my friends describes legal research and scholarship as like a mosaic and you kind of contribute your tiles to it and hope that it helps build a picture that you think is the more appropriate and, in my view, just way to look at the law and look at the way the law ought to be evolving. I hope that that's true. I don't know that it always is.

I think the work that I did in the area of writing about state secrets was one that resonated with a lot of folks to understand how other countries, other liberal democracies were dealing with these kinds of issues and what constraints they had on them was really resonant in the discourse in the United States at the time.

Later in my years as a professor before I became a dean, I spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and constraints on surveillance that exist in the EU and in different jurisdictions. That also, I think, was really resonant with populations both in the United States and in other countries. I was really gratified to see that because it doesn't always land in a way that's impactful.

Kyle McEntee:

I think it's a little tougher to know how it lands, too, in national security because by its nature, it's not transparent. It could have been having a major impact on conversations that you will never know happened.

Sudha Setty:

I think that that's possible. I think that's a nice way of looking at it. And I will say, I had a lot of really good conversations with people who look at the world in a very different way than I had, and I do.

When I was writing my book and was doing a lot of research for that, I really had a lot of feedback from people who were current or former employees of NSA and other agencies. And they all spoke to me off the record, which I completely appreciate. But that was really helpful in thinking about how it is that we problem solve in a realistic way in this space. Because it's one thing to write an article that is completely in a vacuum of like, this is what the law ought to be. And another to think with people who are stakeholders in very different places about what realistic changes could be made in order to make our law a little bit better. It might be a more incremental approach, but in my view and the way that I wrote about things, it was something that felt like I was proposing realistic ideas that maybe landed with people and maybe didn't. But that was my approach.

Kyle McEntee:

So you taught for a number of years before you transitioned into upper administration. First, you became the Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Intellectual Life. How did this next step come about?

Sudha Setty:

I, even as a pre-tenure faculty member, was a regular person who shared feedback with the dean about what I thought we could do better to support pre-tenure colleagues, what we could do better to support people who were interested in research and developing their scholarly profiles. And I think that dean at the time had heard those complaints for a number of years. And so if you look at the timing of when I became Associate Dean, it is right after I was tenured, at which point he said, you've been talking about this for a long time. Give me a proposal for how we can solve some of these issues. And I give him a lot of credit for that. And I did that job for seven years until I became dean. And it was really gratifying. I loved that Associate Dean work where I was mentoring pre-tenure colleagues, helping to develop symposia and conferences, helping people place their work in articles or find conference opportunities. It was a wonderful job.

Kyle McEntee:

How long did it take for you to decide that you wanted to be interested in becoming the dean?

Sudha Setty:

So I don't think I had any aspirations to be the dean when I became Associate Dean. I really liked the type of work that was in my bailiwick in that Associate Dean job. But I do think once you have that Associate Dean title, that a lot of folks start assuming that you do want to become the dean.

And I actually did not consider it seriously until folks from other law schools, as it happened, started talking to me about as a when and not an if. It was actually the dean of another law school who asked if he could take me out for a cup of coffee when we were at a conference and started asking me to think seriously about what deanships might look like for me. I think I might have laughed or something in reaction to that. But it did get me thinking and got me curious about what this job would look like and what it meant, assuming I would need to apply elsewhere, what kinds of schools I might be interested in doing that work at. And also, to be very candid with you, assessing whether it made sense for me in terms of my life. My children were still relatively small at the time, and the question of whether this was a good time for me to go and take on a job that had much different demands in terms of travel, in terms of time at the office. There was a lot of thinking that went into that.

Kyle McEntee:

And it was a tough time for law schools. There was a lot more dean turnover than I think there had been in the prior decade. So that has to be weighing on you. But also that means there's more opportunities.

Sudha Setty:

That's a good point. We're talking about 2015 or so, certainly law schools are still dealing with a strong downturn in enrollment that had put so much pressure on so many institutions.

I feel like at the time that I was thinking about it seriously, many law schools were starting to turn the corner. But there was, to your point, a lot of dean turnover. I think people were understandably very tired after dealing with the enrollment fall-off that had occurred a few years prior.

So it did get me thinking, and I kind of dipped my toe in the water with a couple of searches. And then, to my surprise, the dean, my predecessor at Western New England, in 2017, announced to us in the fall that would be his last year, that he was stepping down. And I was really gratified to get a lot of encouragement from my colleagues at Western New England, faculty and staff, which meant a lot to me to apply for the job.

Kyle McEntee:

So far, we've talked about your time as a full-time employee of a law school, but law school classes are also taught by part-time faculty who practice full-time or close to it. And honestly, there's a lot of value in securing law students that sort of exposure. And as dean, you put a lot of effort into finding and developing these adjuncts. Were you looking for the same thing in them that law schools look for in you?

Sudha Setty:

I don't think so. I think I'll speak just for what I was experiencing at Western New England when I became dean. I think adjunct faculty are incredibly valuable assets to a law school. Many of them are practicing attorneys or judges who bring perspectives that are really incredibly helpful for students to think about what the life of a lawyer is like and what real-life questions are coming up in whatever subject area they're learning. I think we often see lawyers and judges in trial practice classes or related simulation classes, but sometimes in other classes as well, having to do with professional responsibility or other subjects that are kind of germane to their everyday life, and sometimes for other substantive areas of law where the law school just needs someone to teach for a semester. I think the adjunct faculty, they're often alumni, which is great, who view this as a way of giving back to their community, and they really do need to view it that way because it is, for most institutions, not a particularly well-paid gig.

So I felt like it was important to really think about who our adjunct faculty was to kind of broaden the bench of people that we have who are available in this space, have it be a mix of people with different levels of experience. So sometimes it's actually really helpful to have folks who are only a few years into practice being the ones who are coming back and teaching, and I think that's especially true oftentimes in a bar support program, oftentimes in other places where those of us who took the bar decades ago maybe are not the best folks to be teaching in that space. So I did think of this as one of my projects, and I'm really proud of the fact that we brought back a lot of alumni and other non-alumni into the teaching fold there who just had a real wide variety of experiences to share.

Kyle McEntee:

Well, as you point out, a teacher's lawyering experiences really do shape their approach in the classroom. How would you say that your time in the classroom was shaped by your seven years in private practice?

Sudha Setty:

I do think that my approach to preparing for class was really well-informed by my years in private practice. I found myself to be a person who was probably over-prepared for the classroom many times, which is perhaps part of the work culture at some of the larger firms to kind of think about all the contingencies and really plan for them in the kind of belts and suspenders model as it used to be called. I think for the teaching and engagement with students, I maybe drew on other aspects of my life rather than the work that I did at the firm.

So one of the things that I did at Davis Polk was run a mentoring program with high school students, and I had in different capacities taught students at summer schools and taught English for a year in Japan before going to law school. So things like that I think really helped me in terms of my engagement in the classroom. And I honestly think I was also helped by just remembering what it felt like not to know and not to understand and sometimes being afraid to ask a question.

I think this is one of the areas in which remembering your own kind of space and vulnerability there can be really helpful. And so I wanted to make that classroom a comfortable place of trust and to have people feel like they could ask questions and that it was kind of our collective commitment to move forward together in this pursuit of knowledge that we were all going to be dedicated to.