🎙Episode #019: Kannon Shanmugam (Supreme Court Advocate) + New Website
👋🏻 Greetings from Washington, D.C. to all 399 of you on the podcast e-mail list (can you send to a friend to get me to 400?).
Before telling you about today’s guest, a quick announcement!
I am excited to announce a brand new webpage for the How I Lawyer Podcast at www.howilawyer.com. You’ll still be able to access the podcast every week using this e-mail list, but all of the content is now also available in a much more easy-to-follow format at the new website. The website also allows me to create categories of episodes and eventually will allow me to integrate transcripts as well. If you have any suggestions or feedback on the website (or anything else) please let me know.
I am also hoping to interview more guests this summer to get a head start on the fall. If you have a recommendation please let me know. I am still a bit backed up but I will try to get to everyone over time!
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
In this week’s episode I speak with Kannon Shanmugam who is a Partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP where he is both the Chair of the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group and the Managing Partner of the Washington D.C. office. Kannon is one of our generations most prominent and prolific Supreme Court advocates. He was recently named 2021 Appellate Litigator of the Year by Benchmark Litigation and has argued 32 cases before the United States Supreme Court. Prior to joining Paul Weiss, he spent ten years as a Partner at Williams & Connolly LLP and more than four years as an Assistant to the Solicitor General. Kannon clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig (Fourth Circuit) and Justice Antonin Scalia. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School as well as Oxford where he earned an M.Litt. in Classics as a Marshall Scholar.
In our conversation we discuss his path to appellate and Supreme Court advocacy, the role that his clerkships play in his approach to advocacy, how he prepares for and conducts oral argument, and how to stand out both as a young associate and as a more senior lawyer tasked with transforming the work of others into his own. Make sure to sign up for future episodes at www.howilawyer.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
As always, if you have any questions or suggestions 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