Young lawyer navigates tough economy with grace

On the day she graduated from law school in the spring of 2008, as the great ship of the global economy began to list and take on water, it would have been easy for Lindi von Mutius to throw up her hands in despair.

True, she soon managed to land a job in Philadelphia with a small real estate law firm. But the firm's finances quickly went south, lawyers began to jump ship, and paychecks started to bounce.

Recruiters, as recruiters often are, were cheery and buoyant and promised the moon, but time after time the jobs and engagements they promised evaporated as the big law firms cut back.

Von Mutius, a 27-year-old graduate of Vermont Law School, with a master's in environmental management from Harvard, an undergraduate degree from Williams College, and fluency in both Arabic and German, was determined to strike out on her own.

She took on a handful of private probate and foreclosure clients.

And, in a decision that surprised some of her peers, she started working as a waitress in Ardmore two nights a week.

This might seem an unusual course for a lawyer whose father is the chief financial officer for a German multinational energy company and traces his lineage to Prussian nobility, and whose mother, a native of Guyana of black and Indian heritage, is an assistant dean at Harvard. Nor is it the usual course in the at-times snooty, acutely status-conscious world of law.

But von Mutius is not one to put on airs.

"My family was like 'Oh'," she said of the reaction when she took the waitressing job. "I said 'whatever, you guys, I am not asking you for money to pay my bills so you should be happy.' My family said if you need some money call us. I said no, 'I will deal with this on my own.'"

In the end, it appears to have worked out smashingly for von Mutius. She landed what she calls her dream job with Flaster Greenberg, a smallish, 75-lawyer firm in Philadelphia and South Jersey that finds itself in what has become a legal market sweet spot.

It is large enough to handle complex, difficult cases for big corporate clients but small enough that its rates remain well below those of bigger law firms, and thus attractive to companies looking to cut costs.

It also has, like many firms in the region, a booming bankruptcy practice, which is where von Mutius works.

Self-deprecating and modest, von Mutius's story offers something of a road map for young lawyers seeking to navigate the obstacle course of the current recession-wracked legal market.

Her personal biography is something of a global gadabout. She was born in Essen in Germany and came to the United States in 1989 with her mother after her parents split. In the U.S., she tagged along as her mother hopped from one academic job to another, finally ending up at Harvard.

At 13, she won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter, the prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, and from there it was on to Williams, a year-long stint in Cairo in a World Bank-funded environmental job, and grad school at Harvard before law school in Vermont.

Her guiding principle in the face of roadblocks is simply "Do something."

When her first employer came apart at the seams, she took a handful of clients with her and went out on her own. That helped pay the bills. It also helped to have a gainfully employed fiancé, whom she described as a rock of support during the tough times.

"I had my moments of despair," she said. "I was never on unemployment, which I was kind of proud of," said von Mutius, who had moved to Philadelphia to join her fiancé. "What is the point of sitting at home and being depressed about this? I did that for three weeks and said, yeah, I'm over that now."

She tried to stay realistic. She soon realized that recruiters, hit hard by the recession, had very little to offer, although they were always suggesting otherwise. But she did take advantage of the few contract jobs that they tossed her way.

After her disappointing experience with the real estate law firm, she decided she wouldn't take just any job. So she applied for a very-hard-to-get spot with the Judge Advocate General's division of the Air Force, interviewed with another firm, and took a shot at a year-long document review job with the accounting firm Deloitte.

The waitressing job also had its ups and downs.

"It was interesting. There were these people who were really stuck up with all their little persnickety demands like, 'Can you make sure the chicken is fresh?' and I am thinking, 'No, I will go and get one out the garbage for you,'" she recalled.

She also worked her contacts. One of those was a Flaster Greenberg lawyer named Kevin Greenberg who also had gone to Williams and whom von Mutius met at a local reception for Williams alumni. When von Mutius appeared to be getting close with another firm, she e-mailed her Greenberg contact to ask him about the firm.

She also mentioned that she was intensely interested in bankruptcy law, which she had developed a taste for while working for a Chapter 13 trustee as a student at Vermont law.

"He said, 'Wait a minute. We're looking for a bankruptcy associate,'" von Mutius said.

Suddenly, there was an embarrassment of options.

Within a short time, von Mutius was interviewing with Flaster and soon had an offer. She also got offers from the Air Force, and the Deloitte job came through. She said she chose Flaster because she liked the collegiality and the commitment to quality work.

It also didn't hurt that it started first-year associates at $125,000, high for a firm with less than 100 lawyers.

Now she is making money, practicing sophisticated law with people she likes in an area that she says is socially consequential.

Although it is a painful and traumatizing experience for many, she said bankruptcy also offers the hope of redemption. And she finds her role in engineering that immensely satisfying.

"Bankrupty law is a litmus test of the economy and how people are doing in it," she says. "I think there is a stigma about bankruptcy that if you file you are a bad person, and that is not true. Why people are filing is because they are getting laid off and they cannot afford health care."