🎙 Episode #047: Austin King (Government Lawyer at FTC) + 20 Lessons from 50 Interviews
👋🏻 Greetings from Washington, D.C.
As we move into 2022 with challenges eerily reminiscent of early 2021 and even 2020 (but with new tools to help solve them), I hope you and yours remain healthy and safe.
I can’t believe that I announced the creation of the podcast just 363 days ago. I’ll make a few exciting announcements about Year 2 of How I Lawyer next week. But this past week, I posted 20 lessons I learned from 50 interviews. The post went viral with roughly 250,000 view across Twitter and LinkedIn. A quarter of a million views. Wow!
If you want to see them on a single page they are available here. If you learned other lessons please feel free to share them by e-mailing me back!
And with that I am excited to share this week’s episode featuring my dear friend and former co-clerk, Austin King. Austin is currently the Associate General Counsel for Rulemaking at the Federal Trade Commission. I conducted this interview when Austin was in his former role at the FTC as Attorney Advisor to Chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Before joining the FTC in 2018, Austin was a counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an attorney at the nonprofit Better Markets, Inc.
Before law school, Austin was an elected official serving as an alderperson in his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. He also worked for the SEIU and Acorn. Austin is a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin, New York University School of Law (where he graduated summa cum laude as a Root-Tilden Scholar), and the Harvard Kennedy School from which he holds an MPA.
He served as a law clerk to Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York and Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit where he and I successfully shared an office for 11 months.
He spoke with me purely in his personal capacity and his views on the episode do not represent the views of the FTC or the government.
In our conversation we discuss his path to public interest law from local politician, the unique role of government lawyer and attorney advisor, the power and importance of being both a good writer and a good editor of the writing of others, ways to land a legal government job, and the differences between clerking on the district court and on the court of appeals.
As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for the podcast you can just respond to this e-mail. And if you liked the episode and can share the podcast with a family/friend/colleague and/or leave a review on iTunes I’d appreciate it.
See you next week,
Jonah