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Jonah Perlin answers some questions about his successful podcast for lawyers "How I Lawyer"

How you came up with the idea of the podcast ‘How I Lawyer’? 

I teach Legal Practice at Georgetown Law (where I also went to law school). In that capacity I spend a lot of time teaching students about how to be effective legal practitioners (legal writing, legal research, oral advocacy) but also about what "real lawyers" do. My scholarship is also focused on the contemporary practice of law. As I thought about it more I realized there were not enough informal ways to connect lawyers to other lawyers and lawyers to future lawyers at scale. This became even more true during the pandemic. The How I Lawyer podcast seeks to help fill that void. 

Which subjects do you want to talk through your podcast? 

My goal is to interview people from throughout the profession and at different career stages. You can do so much with a JD and I think that needs to be celebrated. Each episode focuses on three things: (1) the featured guest's path to the law and what they do today; (2) what they do; and (3) how they do it better. It is amazing to see how much we can learn from one another. 

Podcast How I lawyer, created by Jonah Perlin / Podcasts.Apple.com

Which aspects do you think lawyers have to learn to adapt to the new normality? 

The legal profession is both forward thinking and responsive. Lawyers have an opportunity to make the world better by shaping the law but also need to respond to the world as it is including the challenges of the moment. I attended law school soon after the financial crisis and saw the ways that that moment affected everything: the kinds of classes people took, the availability of jobs, and even the cases I worked on once in practice. I think COVID will have a similar longterm effect. For example, I think lawyers will need to further learn to embrace remote work and will need to continue to understand that technology as a source of strength not weakness.   

Do you think that lawyers are more conscientious in explaining their work through the creation of audio-visual content? 

I am a firm believer that the media and genres in which lawyers convey information is rapidly evolving. And that is a good thing! In addition to producing a podcast where I can interview any lawyer anywhere in the world and immediately push that interview out to anyone in the world who is interested, I am also finalizing an article on how to train lawyers to convey information using digital presentations. This article builds on the robust literature on visual rhetoric in the law. Will these new ways of conveying information replace traditional genres of legal communication? Absolutely not. But by that same token they are absolutely going to play a role in what it means to be a lawyer in the coming years.