Samuel Levine is the Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. He runs an organization of about 450 people charged with enforcing federal consumer protection law — and he got there through one of the most unusual ascents in his field, without ever working in BigLaw, without ever chasing prestige, and largely through bottom-up, on-the-ground work that started with knocking on doors of homes facing foreclosure in Boston during the financial crisis.
I met Sam through the world of state AG consumer protection work, and I wanted to sit down with him because his career is a kind of counter-narrative to the standard elite-law-school playbook. He went from City Year Chicago to Harvard Law to the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where he argued a case before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as a third-year law student, to the Illinois Attorney General's office, to a clerkship with Judge Milton Shadur, to the FTC's Chicago office, to advising Commissioner Rohit Chopra, to running the Bureau under Chair Lina Khan. In this conversation, we get into the mentor who shaped him, the foreclosure clinic that taught him what law looks like for people who can't afford lawyers, why the "prestige is a stepping stone" theory of BigLaw is riskier than people think, and what he means when he tells young lawyers to develop the courage to write their own playbook.
Keep reading below for the full episode and the complete transcript of our conversation.
Top Insights
Below are the highlights of our conversation:
- Prestige Is a Trap, Not a Stepping Stone: Sam's clearest piece of advice for law students and young lawyers — don't chase prestige. The BigLaw pitch that you can parlay a fancy firm name into whatever you really want to do is true for some, but it's not the low-risk option people assume. Many associates burn out, others lateral to less prestigious firms with better hours, and the ones who do want to leave for government or nonprofit work are at the mercy of which partners they worked for and which cases they happened to staff. Sam chased experiences that felt fulfilling and let recognition follow from being good at something he cared about.
- Learn How the Law Operates for Real People: Sam's view is that lawyers who advance to positions of power without ever seeing how the law actually feels on the ground — in eviction court, unemployment hearings, foreclosure auctions — end up not understanding the power they wield. The rules of civil procedure look nothing like what happens in housing court. Limited assistance representation, courthouse-floor lawyering, scanning the recorder of deeds the night before a hearing — none of that resembles what you learn in 1L. But it's the work that actually moves the needle for people whose government benefits, housing, or family are on the line.
- The Sword and the Shield: Sam's mentor at HLAB, David Grossman, taught him that lawyering for low-income clients works best when it runs in parallel with organizing. The lawyers are the shield, keeping people in their homes case by case. The organizers — at groups like City Life/Vida Urbana — are the sword, pushing legislatures and the executive branch to change the underlying rules. Sam carries that frame into the FTC: case-by-case enforcement is necessary, but durable change comes from also rewriting the legal regime so that the next generation of consumers don't face the same abuses.
- Reliability Beats Brilliance: The thing Sam credits for getting onto David Grossman's radar wasn't being the smartest 1L in the room. It was showing up — almost every Saturday morning to knock on doors, almost every Tuesday night at the City Life organizing meeting, again and again over the course of his 1L year. Consistency, passion, and willingness to do the grubby work created opportunities that test scores wouldn't have. The same principle followed him into the AG's office, where he was taking depositions weeks after passing the bar — not because he was a prodigy, but because state offices need every capable person they can get and they don't have the luxury of letting anyone sit in a corner.
- The Financial Crisis Built a Generation of Regulators: Sam, Rohit Chopra, Lina Khan, Erie Meyer — the cohort now running consumer protection and antitrust enforcement came of age in 2008-2009. They grew up inside Reaganite orthodoxy about deregulation and self-correcting markets, then watched that orthodoxy collapse, watched banks get bailed out while homeowners got displaced, and watched zero bank executives face consequences. That experience reshaped what they think the government's role should be. The agencies they now lead are an answer to a question their generation asked in their twenties.
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Full Transcript
Khurram Naik: Sam, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with me today. Really looking forward to this conversation.
Samuel Levine: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Khurram Naik: I'm going to do something I don't typically do and take a very chronological approach to your career, because I think every step has some interesting premonitions for the parts that come later, and there are interesting jumping-off points at each stage. The first thing I want to talk about is your time in City Year. I live in Chicago, which is also where you were in the program. Can you talk a little about the program and the impact it had on you on the way to law school?
Samuel Levine: City Year is an incredible program. A lot of people have heard of AmeriCorps — City Year was in some ways the precursor to AmeriCorps. It was a national service program founded in the late '80s, and AmeriCorps was in many ways modeled on it. The model was drawing people from very diverse backgrounds — people who had dropped out of high school, people who were mid-college, people who'd graduated and were heading to grad school, which was my circumstance — and recruiting them to serve communities in different ways. I was working in City Year Chicago, where the primary mission was educational. We weren't teaching in classrooms — that's more the Teach for America model. We were playing a support role. I did literacy tutoring throughout the day, generally one-on-one. I ran an after-school program with dozens of kids, which was sometimes a lot of fun and sometimes incredibly stressful and made me question whether I could ever be a teacher. When we weren't in the school, we were doing other service projects. City Year pioneered doing service on Martin Luther King Day. We'd get random assignments — cleaning buses, doing customer service for the city. There was a culture of service that inspired me and so many of my colleagues, and it introduced me to people from walks of life I don't think I ever would have met any other way. I could not recommend the City Year experience more highly for people who care about the world, care about public service, and want to work with a great group of people.
Khurram Naik: Have you kept in touch with any of the people you served with?
Samuel Levine: Oh, sure. I was just in touch over the weekend with someone I hadn't spoken with since City Year. Other friends I made there I'm still in touch with all the time. When you're in the trenches in sometimes challenging situations on very low pay, you become very close with people. Those are connections that will last the rest of my life.
Khurram Naik: I certainly had that when I worked on political campaigns as a field organizer. It's very similar — low pay, long hours, very stressful, and a bonding experience like no other.
Samuel Levine: And it wasn't just that. We had to wear uniforms every day. I don't know if you maybe had to wear a suit or something, but we wore uniforms every day to work. You've probably seen people in City Year uniform on the street. When we were on the train, we always had to stand up for people, which is the right thing to do — I learned a valuable lesson in etiquette. You could not chew gum. It was very regimented in terms of how a City Year corps member presented themselves.
Khurram Naik: How do you feel about that part?
Samuel Levine: I think it made a lot of sense. One thing that was unique about City Year — and I don't want to say anything ill about other service programs — is that it wasn't just drawing from elite students at top universities. The goal of City Year Chicago, for example, was that the demographics of the organization should reflect the demographics of the city, and that was true in City Year chapters all over the country. So part of the idea of having a uniform was as an equalizer. We came from very different backgrounds — truly eye-opening in so many ways — but when we all put on that uniform, it's the same principle the army uses, that lots of school uniforms use. The basic principle that we're all wearing this uniform, we're all equal, and we're all reminded that when we're in that uniform we're presenting City Year and we have to behave in a certain way. I did not always love it. It was not fashionable. It did not fit well. It was not particularly comfortable. It was very hot in the summer. But I think it really served the interests of the organization. I still keep my uniform proudly in my closet.
Khurram Naik: Have you ever thought about some application to the practice of law? So much of law has bar associations and you're regulated at the state level — there are standardized aspects of practice. But have you ever thought about applying something like a uniform principle to the practice of law, where there's some standardized experience that no matter what your background or trajectory, whether you're heading to BigLaw or a small family-law firm, you're all doing something that's public-service-minded? You've got pro bono culture in the practice of law already. Any applications like that?
Samuel Levine: In a way — far be it from me to impose my view on law students — but I think if you're going into the law, you should know how the law operates for poor people. I really believe that very strongly. When you go through law school courses and you read cases, depending on the course, but certainly in your 1L curriculum, you're not really always hearing about how the law actually operates on the ground for the people who have to deal with it. For the people who can't get fancy lawyers, whose housing is on the line, whose government benefits are on the line. You learn all of these rules of evidence, but if you go into any unemployment hearing in some local administrative forum in a city, it doesn't look like that. You learn about the rules of civil procedure, and then you look at what the eviction process looks like in actual housing court — it doesn't look like how you learned it in school. So I do worry, as people advance in their legal careers and gain power, if they don't actually have exposure to how the law feels and operates for the vast majority of Americans who can't afford real lawyers — for whom the stakes aren't some victory on a resume but their government benefits, their livelihood, their family. When people don't have that, I worry that they don't understand the power of the law, and how important it is that it operates with fairness.
Khurram Naik: That relates to a key experience you had in law school at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. There are lots of outlets for you in law school. How did you choose that clinic, and how did it compare to the other clinics or experiences you had?
Samuel Levine: Yeah. As is true in most law schools, we couldn't do clinics as 1Ls. But in the first semester of my 1L year I got involved in a group called Project No One Leaves. It was founded about two years before I started school. People thought it was a project for the incarcerated population — I don't know why you'd join a group called No One Leaves with that mission, but to each their own. Of course, that's not what it was about. This was 2009. There was a foreclosure, displacement, and eviction crisis raging across the country and in Boston. Massachusetts had — and this isn't that unique, it's true in about half the states — non-judicial foreclosure. So banks could foreclose on your home without ever taking you to court. The idea of Project No One Leaves was for 1Ls to get in a car, generally on a Saturday morning, scan the newspaper, and look for every house listed for a foreclosure auction. Again, no court process. An auctioneer would show up in people's front yards and auction off their homes. Our goal — and we met it most of the time — was to stop by every house in Boston facing foreclosure and encourage the folks living in that house to not leave, and instead to go to an organizing meeting at a group called City Life/Vida Urbana. I started doing that every week. If you didn't live through that time, or if you didn't see how working-class neighborhoods felt and looked then, it was huge — and eye-opening for me, because I had just been working on the South Side of Chicago in City Year. It was still eye-opening because by 2009, with non-judicial foreclosure, it was moving very quickly. You had a whole block — property after property facing foreclosure. You were watching the displacement of entire neighborhoods. So that immediately piqued my interest — that's an understatement. I felt deeply distressed by what I was seeing. And I was deeply curious about what those City Life organizing meetings, the meetings I was sending all these people to, were actually like.
Samuel Levine: Long story short, I started going to the City Life organizing meetings in addition to doing the canvassing door to door. And I realized that some of the leading folks providing legal services to people facing foreclosure were at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. A word on that. HLAB is unique. Most clinics at HLS and generally are one semester. HLAB is a two-year commitment. It's something you apply for at the end of your 1L year. You can apply for law review, you can apply for HLAB — and you can't do both. Famously, Barack and Michelle Obama — Barack did Harvard Law Review, Michelle did the Legal Aid Bureau. Michelle made the right choice. What made HLAB so unique was that, in addition to the great foreclosure work it was doing, it was a student-run legal clinic. There were clinical advisors who were faculty, but the organization was run by students. The cases we chose, the members we selected, the strategy in the cases — student-run. That's how I got involved in HLAB, and I immediately pivoted, unsurprisingly, to housing work.
Khurram Naik: Can you say more about the population differences? Was it a timing issue — what happened to the economy between when you were working in City Year Chicago versus these neighborhoods in the Boston area?
Samuel Levine: What neighborhoods in Boston? Dorchester, Roxbury, to some extent Jamaica Plain — by that time JP was pretty gentrified, but we had our organizing meetings there. We went to other towns outside Boston too. We weren't able to reach every house. I had a client in Somerville. I had a client in — I'm forgetting the name of the town — but it wasn't just in Boston. I think the big thing that changed from when I was working in Chicago in '08-'09 was — I was seeing the signs of financial distress in Chicago, certainly, people were leaving their homes, including people I was working with. But Illinois has judicial foreclosure. Famously in my world, the foreclosure process in Illinois was pretty slow. Banks were bullying people into leaving, but if you actually stayed and fought back, you had to go to court. There was a long process. Massachusetts had non-judicial foreclosure. By the time I was in Boston in 2009-2010 — even though the financial crisis kicked off in '08 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September — the effects really started to cascade in 2009. So what I saw on the streets of Boston was actually far worse than what I'd been seeing in Chicago. It was, as I said, deeply distressing.
Khurram Naik: Say more about the organization you were encouraging people to join, and that you were learning from — the precursor experience to HLAB.
Samuel Levine: So three different organizations. There's HLAB. There's Project No One Leaves, which is a group of students who go out — and I should say not just Harvard, Northeastern was very active, Suffolk Law participated, BU participated, it was a bunch of law schools. Then there's a third organization, which is not student-run — it's run by organizers to this day — City Life. This was around 2009, when people had been making fun of Barack Obama for being a former community organizer. But City Life was a group of community organizers — and that's not just a term I'm throwing around. These were professionals dedicated to community organizing. I will never forget my first meeting there, and just about every meeting after. You'd walk into a room — it's in this former Sam Adams brewery in Jamaica Plain — and it's a big group of people. Most of them were people of color, but it was very diverse, both among the organizers and among the folks coming to the meetings. The meeting would start by asking new members to stand up and say, "My name is Sam Levine and I'm in foreclosure." What stood out to me at the time was how much this felt like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I thought at first, that's kind of odd. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. One thing I saw as a 1L going door to door — I'd tell people their house was facing foreclosure, and they'd say, no, no, no, we're working it out. Sometimes that was true. Sometimes I'd learn later they were maybe in denial. A lot of the time they were just ashamed. How could I even come to the door and suggest they were behind on their mortgage? You weren't realizing what a sensitive nerve you were touching. So what you saw in City Life was that there was a lot of shame people felt about struggling with their mortgage. Some of these folks were working-class, some middle-class. By all appearances, more affluent people would never experience this kind of financial distress. And just like the uniform in City Year, I think it was a real way to unite people to stand up and say, I'm facing foreclosure, the bank's not returning my calls, they're not returning my taxes. Everyone stood up and said that and it opened people up. I remember one time, two people who were neighbors, who didn't know they were each facing foreclosure, realized they were dealing with the same thing. We even saw relatives both coming to the same meeting. It was incredibly powerful. At the time, people were making fun of community organizing. I don't think it was sufficiently appreciated then, but I really saw it — because you had this big group of people, and the idea was people power. We were going to work as a collective to demand that Massachusetts change its laws, to demand that the Obama administration make it easier to modify mortgages and write down principal, to show up at eviction court. When people went to hearings who were part of City Life, they did not go alone. They were joined by legal advocates like me and others. And in the seats behind the bar in the courtroom, they had their friends and neighbors from City Life there to support them. This was about providing support and a sense of community to people who were otherwise feeling desperate and isolated. Books should be written, in my opinion, about the on-the-ground movement to stop mass displacement in Boston during this period. It was inspiring.
Sam's description of a bottom-up legal practice — knock on doors, show up at the organizing meeting, build people power alongside the lawyering — is the strongest argument I've heard for the model Manisha Sheth described when she left partnership to go into government. The faith that public service is the right place to do real legal work, not a pit stop on the way back to private practice, runs through both their careers. Listen to my conversation with Manisha Sheth.
Khurram Naik: I want to pick up on this bottom-up approach to work, because I think it also affects legal practice and the decisions lawyers make about what to pursue in their careers. I've been very strategic in my career at different stages — very top-down at times, often. And I've also used bottom-up techniques. I think it's an interesting theme to explore — the things you learned from being boots on the ground and how that's influenced the career decisions you made. Anyone looking at the objective success you've had in your career might attribute it to that technique, not some strategic gunning for the spot you're in today. So let's spend some more time on HLAB. Was it a no-brainer for you to choose HLAB versus any other commitment you could have made?
Samuel Levine: Yes. It was a no-brainer that I was going to apply. It wasn't a no-brainer that I was going to get in. A lot of people applied. But I really wanted to do it. I'd be remiss not to mention the clinical director. HLAB was a student-run group, but there was a clinical director who was a professor — David Grossman. We could request a faculty mentor, and he was the mentor I requested. The reason going to HLAB was a no-brainer is that I got to know Dave. He was both the clinical director of HLAB and the advisor to Project No One Leaves. So I would frequently be in the car with him going around Boston neighborhoods. I hope we have an opportunity to talk about David. He was — I get emotional — he passed away in 2015, far too young. We started a fellowship in his name that goes on. But David was an inspiring, truly inspiring mentor to me and to so many other students. He's the biggest reason I think I pursued HLAB. He was a great lawyer, but he really saw the law as a vehicle for justice — and not the only vehicle for justice. He was a big believer in organizing. He was a big believer in people power. He was a big believer in a motto we called "the sword and the shield" — the lawyers would try to keep people in their homes, and the organizers would help push the banks to do better, push the legislators to do better. Dave inspired me about the kind of legal career I could have, but more importantly the kind I wanted to have — a force for social good. Because he was director of HLAB and he encouraged me to apply, and I enthusiastically did, Dave mentored me through the end of law school and beyond.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned being in the car with Dave. It strikes me — at other clinics, in other kinds of work that I've been involved in in law school, you have faculty contact, but it's business hours, in an office. This sounds very informal, potentially long hours. Is that unique to public-interest work? Is it unique to HLAB? How can people otherwise get that quality of interaction with mentors in law school?
Samuel Levine: I think it was unique to Dave Grossman. He had the most elite background imaginable. He was a Harvard professor. He could have done anything he wanted with his career. But he chose to be a clinical professor — and not just sit in the classroom and talk about his old days practicing law, but to really get involved day to day. I sometimes go back to my emails from him. We were emailing at all hours by the time I was a 2L and 3L — late into the night, early into the morning. His wife, who I still stay in touch with, would complain a little about how much time Dave and I would be in touch. This was not a vocation for him. It was a true passion. He was a religious man. He thought of it in terms of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam — the mission we're given to repair the world. Dave poured his life into this work. There were Saturdays I missed because I had other things going on. Dave was going every Saturday, from my recollection, going door to door. He had kids. He had a job — not sort of supervising. He was in the car with me or with another student, talking through what he was seeing, going to the doors, talking to folks facing problems. He also led, for new HLAB students, a bus tour of Boston — so that people who maybe flew into Logan, went up to Cambridge, and barely left, actually got to see how Boston felt outside the confines of Cambridge and Somerville. Dave poured his life into making the world a better place, but also into making more students into better people — and inspiring them, as he inspired me, to pursue a public-interest career.
Khurram Naik: What you're saying strikes me. Maybe this is specifically public-interest work — I remember on the Obama campaign, I worked for Richard as a field organizer. There was a manager who managed my team. He wasn't much older than me but he had progressed a lot. And the thing about Glenn is he didn't just sit down with us and talk through our strategy for outreach — he was willing to knock on doors himself, get on the phone himself. There wasn't anything that was too small for him. I've had a few managers like that, and they've been very rare. But it strikes me — that's much less common in the practice of law, right? How often does a partner walk into an associate's office and say, hey, let's sit down and look at this document together? Let's go through these documents together. I think it does exist. But it's way less common. So I don't know if it's specific to public interest or not, but I think it is a hallmark of a good manager.
Samuel Levine: Law, unfortunately, is very hierarchical, and most of us sell our time. So the incentives are not quite right for collaboration. But on the point you made about working those hours and making yourself known — hopefully there's a lesson here. I was not the smartest or most talented or most generous applicant to HLAB or to that project. I think what set me apart, and what got Dave's interest, was that I was consistent. I went the vast majority of Saturdays of my 1L year to do this work. I went to meetings — Tuesday-night meetings — very frequently. By the time I was in HLAB, I was in the office most days, at least once a week, usually more than once a week. There's great value in any career people pursue — people put a lot of weight on test scores and beautiful resumes, and those are important — but showing up, being reliable, being hardworking, showing passion and commitment, there are trade-offs in your personal life, but in your professional life it's really valuable. It was for me, and it sounds like it was for you on the campaign.
Khurram Naik: Tell me how you came to work on foreclosure matters as the focus in HLAB. Were there other things you could have focused on? Was it just the most obvious thing because that's what your 1L year had been about?
Samuel Levine: It was somewhat obvious because it was my 1L involvement. The way HLAB worked — it's somewhat different now — but back then it was basically divided: half the students did housing law, half did family law. Then everyone did a smattering of unemployment, veterans benefits, and other issues. It was very clear to me I wanted to do housing, and the leadership recognized that. There was an interesting divide within the housing group, between people doing traditional housing work — rent-paying tenants facing eviction — and people doing owners facing foreclosure, or rent-paying tenants living in foreclosed properties facing eviction as a result of the foreclosure. There were interesting debates in HLAB at the time about whether it's appropriate to be representing homeowners — they often come from better economic circumstances than rent-paying tenants. But Dave and I both had pretty strong feelings about that, and I gravitated strongly toward the foreclosure work. I did some other work — I had clients who were tenants, I did an unemployment case, some other stuff — but the overwhelming majority of my docket was foreclosure. I represented many, many clients. I don't know the number — certainly more than 20, probably more than 30 or 40 clients facing eviction as a result of foreclosure.
Khurram Naik: There was a path to your getting through a really unique experience — actually some groundbreaking experience in this role. What was the outcome, and what was the path that led you there?
Samuel Levine: As a law clinic — and I certainly played a role in it — we changed Massachusetts law pretty significantly to make protections a lot stronger for people in foreclosure. Before I joined the clinic, HLAB brought the first cases — I think the first cases — establishing that you could challenge a foreclosure. For the lawyers listening: the way it works is that you can foreclose without judicial process. You can change ownership from the homeowner to the lender, or to whoever buys the property at auction. But then you still need to take someone to court to evict them, to gain possession of the property. We brought one of the first cases, and I went to the State Supreme Judicial Court, establishing that the validity of the foreclosure itself could be challenged at the eviction stage. On the straightforward basis that if the foreclosure was illegal it was void, and the subsequent owner had no right to evict the previous owner. When I was there, the big question was — and people who lived through this might remember — when you own a property, there's a note (the loan) and there's a mortgage (the collateral, the right to the property). Massachusetts law at the time, as it was being applied by the courts, was that lenders did not need to establish that they held the note in order to pursue foreclosure and eviction — in order to hold a foreclosure auction and pursue an eviction action against homeowners. We took the position, in case after case, that that was not true — that you needed to show you had a beneficial interest in the note. We ended up winning the first-ever-in-the-state preliminary injunction against proceeding with an eviction on the basis that Fannie Mae could not demonstrate it held the promissory note. That case was quickly appealed by Fannie Mae — at the time it was in government conservatorship. So this was us, law students, representing low-income homeowners against the U.S. government. Pretty shocking when you think about it. Fannie Mae appealed the case. The Supreme Judicial Court ended up taking it sua sponte — I don't think it ever even got a brief at the Court of Appeals. The SJC grabbed it because they realized the big implications. I had the really unique opportunity at the beginning of my third year to argue a case before the Supreme Judicial Court. We can talk about how that went, but it was an incredibly unique experience. And working with legal aid providers all over Boston, I think we really transformed the experience of people facing foreclosure. We designed model answers, model briefs. We set up lawyer-for-the-day programs. It was a really multifaceted effort to strengthen protections for homeowners — and also on the sword side, to fight for legal change at the legislature.
Khurram Naik: Operationally — on one hand, you had to focus your attention on this legally novel position and make sure it was well-briefed and be prepared to take it to the Supreme Court. That's a very focused effort. On the other, you're focusing on scaling your efforts to make it replicable for other people to do this as well. How did you manage both those needs?
Samuel Levine: It was an incredible model that you can't do in every court. Massachusetts housing court allowed limited assistance representation. You could show up for a hearing and enter an appearance and then withdraw your appearance. Or you could keep your appearance through. Flexibility — which by the way I'm a big believer in, because there are never enough lawyers to help low-income people in court. It allows us to expand our scale. What we would do — and I was often the one doing this — on a Monday, we'd go down to the housing court in Boston and we'd get the list of all the people facing eviction on Thursday. Thursday was the eviction date when all the cases were being heard. We would reach out to those people. We'd send them letters, encouraging them to come to City Life and to find us in court. We'd also try to find them at the organizing meetings on Tuesday night at City Life. For clients I got to meet early on in the process — like the case I brought to the Supreme Judicial Court, I met that client through City Life. I knew a lot about her. We worked together. That was a more traditional form of representation. But the other thing we did is we had those names on Monday. On Wednesday night, the day before court, I would look up public records of their foreclosures, because all of this is in the recorder of deeds. The foreclosures that had happened — remember, they were now facing eviction. And I would see if I could spot some problems. Maybe I knew that this particular mortgage trust had a history of illegal foreclosures. Maybe I saw — and these are all real examples — that a signature on a power of attorney on a foreclosure deed had expired. The minutiae of Massachusetts foreclosure law. I'd look for issues in their foreclosure, and I'd go to court the next day. It wasn't just me, it was a group of us. We'd hear people's names called at the beginning of the hearing, and we'd try to corner them and see if they wanted representation. Now, a lot of people — most people, or many people — didn't even show up. They got defaulted, which we really tried to prevent, but that was a real struggle. But there were a lot of clients we met on the courthouse floor, where I got up, or my colleagues got up, and we represented them having not met them 15 minutes before. And the extent we'd seen their case file was whatever manila envelope they'd brought and whatever we'd seen the night before at the recorder of deeds. This is not how federal court usually operates, but this is how things worked in eviction court. As I said at the top, this is not the kind of lawyering you learn in law school. But it's the kind of lawyering that made a big difference in slowing down a mass displacement machine that would have otherwise been going at full throttle in Massachusetts.
Khurram Naik: So you took this matter to the SJC, you argued it, and you prevailed.
Samuel Levine: It was interesting. Could I jump in on this? We argued it in October. In December or January, the SJC, as we just covered, requested supplemental briefing — whether, if they ruled in my client's favor, it would have a sort of cataclysmic effect on the housing market in Massachusetts, because it would cloud title on all of these properties. We argued very strongly that title insurance can deal with that — these companies shouldn't get a break just because banks broke the law at scale. Just because banks broke the law at scale doesn't mean they should be unaccountable for breaking the law. But what the SJC did, pretty interestingly — they ultimately issued their ruling, they ruled in our favor, but they made it prospective only. Except with respect to my client. So they ruled that going forward foreclosures needed to be proven up by showing the note, but it had no effect retroactively. Which I think reflects another lesson for me about the kind of power large financial institutions have in our economy — when they can break the law for years, have the SJC recognize it, and not have to face the consequences.
The SJC ruling for Sam's client but only prospectively is a real-world version of what Vince Chhabria has talked about — that case management and procedural choices are themselves a form of justice, and how a court structures the relief it grants is itself a policy decision. Listen to my conversation with Vince Chhabria.
Khurram Naik: So what was the aftermath of arguing? You had a mixed victory — a certain kind of victory. Then what? For you, professionally — then what?
Samuel Levine: I continued my work. I wasn't going to sit around waiting for the argument. One effect on my casework was wonderful — we'd go for months while that decision was pending where, at least in the court I was practicing in, evictions weren't happening. Every case, I'd go up there and say, well, you can't rule on this until the SJC rules in the Eaton case. Evictions weren't moving. We kept people in their homes for many months just through that case being pending. I did a jury trial my second semester of my third year, and that was actually a more traditional tenant case — also against Fannie Mae, coincidentally, not very coincidentally actually. Fannie Mae had subjected my client to some horrible conditions in the apartment she rented. We took that case to trial. We brought two counts. We won on one. We lost on the other. But it was a positive outcome for my client. I stayed very busy throughout that year.
Khurram Naik: What did it feel like? You're doing this very grubby work — almost like literally manual. You're walking up to a total stranger saying, can I represent you, any number of times, getting rejected — what is this, who is this, you know? Difficult work. And then you have this impact where there's a Supreme Court decision pending, and assuming it's a rotating number of judges, they probably know who you are at this point. And you're saying that every case in housing court, they can't run until this decision is resolved. Even at that stage you had to be feeling an enormous amount of power at some point. Did you feel that? What did it feel like?
Samuel Levine: By the time I argued the case, and afterward, it was pretty surreal, honestly. Katie Porter was a law professor at the time. I worked with her on the case. I'd been interviewed in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. NPR did a story on it. A novelist who went on to write a hit book came to shadow us in housing court and speak to our clients about the research he was doing. By 2010-2011 there was a lot more attention on this issue, a lot more recognition of what was happening on the ground. I think there was more recognition of what I and my colleagues had been able to do. But I will say — as a second-year law student, I'm not having a bad day. What I did have, which was more fulfilling and more important — my first time appearing in court — I mentioned that City Life sent organizers to these court hearings. I got up and made an impassioned argument, the only way I knew how, drawing on my high school and college debate background. I made a really impassioned argument for why not holding the note and these other issues weren't just technicalities, that these were illegal foreclosures and my clients had suffered a great injustice. I didn't win that. We ended up getting it continued. So I didn't lose it, didn't win it. But when I turned around — this was my first time in court — a group of people from the organizing meeting stood up and cheered. That is not why I did it. If anyone's going into law so they can show up in court and get cheered after they sit down, they should find another profession. That doesn't happen very often. But it was deeply fulfilling to me, because of how it made me feel. And this is how we consciously talked about it — I was not just representing one client. I was trying to represent this movement, this organization. Again, I can't emphasize enough — this was not just me. Many colleagues, including a colleague who's at the FTC now, were right there with me, and many others, fighting for people. To actually have that reaction, A, because I was really nervous, I'd just stood up in a courtroom for the first time. And B, because it really made me feel like I was part of something broader than one case or one client. I was part of a movement to try to restore some measure of economic justice for people who had been denied it.
Khurram Naik: How did this drive your career? You've had this extraordinary beginning of a career, almost distortingly so. How did you contextualize what came next and what you could expect out of your career?
Samuel Levine: It took some twists. By 2012 — you know this — the job market was not great. If you were going to a good law school, the job market at top firms was pretty decent, but it was pretty tough for public-interest law. I had a good record in law school. I'd done interesting things in the clinic. So I was a strong candidate. But getting a public-interest job was tough. I originally thought I wanted to do legal aid, because it most resembled what I was doing on the ground and at the clinic. I ended up — I did not get every job I applied for, at all — having a choice between doing a two-year legal aid fellowship in Chicago, or going to the Illinois Attorney General, which at the time was on the front lines of trying to negotiate the National Mortgage Settlement with the mortgage servicers. Because I'd done legal aid work before, and obviously had done a lot of work in Boston on foreclosure, when I was interviewed at the Illinois AG, I sat down with people like Debbie Hagan, who was the division chief at Chally Raul — these were people like me who geeked out on mortgage law and foreclosure law. I got to geek out right with them, which probably they were not used to in an interview. I knew some of the same advocates they knew. I knew the issues. We worked in different states, but we could really compare notes in a substantive way where I felt that, even though I was a third-year law student, I had a conversation with them at the level of a peer. I wasn't coming to this saying I'm totally green, take a chance on me. It was: I have a track record of keeping people in their homes and fighting illegal foreclosures. So I think that put me in a good position to work for the Illinois AG — though I have to tell you what Dave Grossman told me, which is that he wanted me to work in legal aid. He said, "You're going to work for the man." I reminded him that the AG, Lisa Madigan, was a woman, in fact, and was a real champion for consumers. He ended up coming around to it after some time.
Khurram Naik: So he just didn't believe in the state AG process? He just felt like that was captured by business interests or something?
Samuel Levine: He didn't say that, but I think he was a movement lawyer to his core. He was trained by and mentored by Gary Bellow, who was a lawyer for Cesar Chavez and a leader at Harvard Law School in the clinics. Dave really was a believer in ground-up change, in people power. I had more of an open mind about government than Dave did. Toward the end of his life I tried to convince him — I'm not sure I ever did — but he was certainly pleased I was doing public-interest work on behalf of consumers. I think his ideal always would have been legal aid on the front lines, and I can certainly respect that.
Khurram Naik: Was there anything that you directed in your course of work at the AG's office? You had such an active role in the kind of work you did at HLAB. What level of agency were you able to have in directing your work at the AG's office?
Samuel Levine: When I started at the AG's office I hadn't even passed the bar yet — September of 2012. I was still waiting for my bar results. Fortunately I passed in October. But they put me right to work. I came on to work on the mortgage settlement and mortgage work. But by the time I joined, the mortgage settlement had already been entered. The office needed me in other places. What I ended up working on was a problem that felt eerily parallel to what I'd worked on in housing — for-profit schools. Predatory for-profits, sometimes publicly traded colleges and universities. The interesting thing about being at an AG, which I tell people all the time, is the AG did not have the luxury of having me sit in a corner doing doc review. I started appearing in state court within days — within literal days of passing the bar. I was in court a lot. I was taking depositions. I think I took my first depositions as a real lawyer before the end of the year. So I started in September. I think part of it is because they saw some talent in me and some potential, and I had some real experience from HLAB. Part of it was just that these are small offices doing big things. They need every person they can get. They can't afford to have someone sitting in a corner. The pay is not good. It wasn't then, it isn't now. But if you want to get actual experience as a lawyer, it's a wonderful place to work at a state AG.
Khurram Naik: What led you to leave the AG's office to clerk?
Samuel Levine: The AG's office was an incredibly fulfilling experience. If I could briefly digress about some of the for-profit school work, because I think it's telling. I described the mortgage foreclosure work as lenders telling people, this is the path to the middle class, these houses are sure things. We heard the same thing from for-profit school operators. Just as in the foreclosure context, the federal government, I felt, was asleep at the wheel when it came to stopping predatory lending and helping homeowners who got caught. I felt the same way about for-profit schools — the Department of Ed needed to do a lot more to hold these schools accountable. But by 2014-2015 we were really seeing a change in the Obama administration. The Department of Ed was beginning to do serious investigations of for-profit schools. They were working with us. They were moving forward on some very important rulemakings I participated in. I kind of felt that we were winning. Things were going well. Some of the biggest changes I was interested in — Corinthian actually collapsed in 2015 or 2016, as did ITT Tech, two of the worst operators in history. I felt it could be a good time to move on and do similar work at the federal government. I was interested in being in federal court. I was interested in a salary that was a little more manageable than state government — the pay differential was really dramatic. I was interested in challenging myself a little more. The problem was I had very little experience in federal court. What I was told by some folks who worked in the federal government was: go clerk. That's how you get experience. You go to a law firm or you go clerk. So I applied for a clerkship. I applied only in Chicago. I figured if I didn't get a clerkship, I'd just keep working at the AG. That's fine. I wasn't desperate. I applied for clerkships in Chicago and I was lucky enough to find a clerkship with a really legendary judge, Milton Shadur.
Khurram Naik: I appeared before Judge Shadur. One of the most remarkable judges you could ever appear before. At the time, I think he was already maybe 90 when I appeared. Right. And I don't think there's another judge that has these little trinkets and tchotchkes on the desk — old-timey artifacts I never knew the significance of. Dolls.
Samuel Levine: Yeah, that kind of stuff.
Khurram Naik: I think what I was really struck by was that he was such an independent thinker. He would challenge things like — if you had an answer to a complaint, he would challenge, what do you mean by "information and belief"? What information do you have? What is your belief? He was a real stickler. So he was very anti-anything formulaic. He'd make you really think hard and long about what objections you were putting into responses to discovery, or just any of that stuff. He was remarkable that way. What impact did he make on you?
Samuel Levine: He was a remarkable judge. He passed away in 2017. He was maybe 90 years old. The man's career was legendary. He enrolled — I'm going to get this wrong — but he enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School at a very, very young age. I think he became the youngest-ever partner of a prominent smaller firm in Chicago in the early '50s. One of his partners was Arthur Goldberg, who would go on to join the Supreme Court and become ambassador. He represented Adlai Stevenson, who was the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956. So this gives you a sense of Judge Shadur's history. He was appointed to the bench in 1979 by President Carter. He had deep experience. He was a very, very principled but also very pragmatic judge. He was old school — a real stickler on the rules, did not like shortcuts that lawyers like to take, for example in filing answers. He would routinely dismiss cases before I even got to the office because of some deficiency in the pleading. But he had a real strong sense of justice as well. We would have conversations — I don't think I'm revealing anything inappropriate — we of course would always follow the law, but he was a person too and had a sense of what was just. He was not afraid to take independent positions. He was not afraid to take unpopular positions. He sometimes did and got a lot of attention for it. He was a real believer in being a district court judge. He loved being a trial judge. It was a real loss to the bench when he stepped down and passed away. For me personally, I both got to know the federal courts better and how they work — it's not that different in the rules than state court, but it feels very different than at least Illinois state court. I think I was a good writer. He made me a much better writer. Judge Shadur was a very good writer. One thing I slowly got better at was learning to capture his voice, and I've incorporated a lot of it into my own writing since. He had a rule: you could not start sentences with "the." Which was annoying if you're trying to write a long opinion, but it forced you to use variety in your syntax that ended up making opinions a lot better. He gave me a little slack as a clerk. He didn't really let his clerks break that rule. So it forced you to be really imaginative in your syntax. Read any of his opinions from a short order to a lengthy ruling on summary judgment — there's a real verve in his writing that's both deep and scholarly, but also a pleasure to read. And very funny sometimes.
Khurram Naik: Yes. So from there, you burnished your standing in federal court from this experience. Then how did you figure out what came next?
Samuel Levine: It was natural. I'd been a consumer protection lawyer at the Illinois Attorney General. My job was enforcing Illinois's mini-FTC prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts or practices. So when I wanted to stay in Chicago, I basically wanted to go to a consumer protection agency. There aren't that many. I looked at CFPB. I looked at SEC. And I looked at FTC. FTC was my top choice. I got very, very lucky that they had a job opening and they took a chance and hired me.
Khurram Naik: But you did some advocacy to make this happen, though. You didn't just — what did you do?
Samuel Levine: When you apply for any federal job, you go through USA Jobs, which probably hasn't gotten easier since I applied a decade ago. Your resume goes into a little bit of a black box. You don't really know what's happening — even now that I'm on this end of it, I don't know what's happening at the USA Jobs level. But I reached out to Harvard. Harvard had an extraordinary public-interest advising office, led at the time by Alexa Shabecoff — who, OK, at the law school was an absolute force of nature. Even though the job market was not very good for public-interest students, Harvard offered extraordinary support for students looking to pursue public interest. Alexa and Judy Murciano and others — I had them on speed dial. They knew everything I was applying to. We're still friends to this day. That was the kind of relationship I had with my career advisors. So I was very lucky. When it was time to find a job, even though I was a couple of years out of law school, I did not hesitate to reach out. So I reached out to Alexa. Alexa connected me to someone else in her office, their friend Anya, who does federal hiring. She did not know anyone at the FTC in Chicago. But she knew another HLS grad at FTC headquarters — someone I work with closely now, Terri Cross, who's a deputy director. Terri connected me to a lawyer in the Chicago office of the FTC. Harvard really went above and beyond. They didn't have a connection, but I think there was one more degree of separation there — they just kept persisting until they found a connection for me. And then for me it was easy. I got coffee with Joni Wei, who was a staff attorney at the time. Now she's an assistant director in our Chicago office. We talked through why I was interested in the FTC and my experience, and she put in a word for me to the director at the time, who also just retired. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn't done that. I'd like to think they would have found my resume in the stack. But I was able, through my law school's alumni connections, to find a human face at that office that I'm sure helped me land that job.
Khurram Naik: From there, you had some advocacy that led you to work for Commissioner Rohit Chopra as well.
Samuel Levine: It was a little — it was not advocacy at the FTC actually, but what happened was, when I was at the Illinois AG, I told you we were struggling to get the federal government to pay attention to for-profit schools, with one exception: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that had been Elizabeth Warren's — who was a law professor when I was there — brainchild. CFPB had a very energetic young student-loan ombudsman named Rohit Chopra, who was working on two fronts. He wanted to put student debt on the national agenda — and I think he, with many others, succeeded. And he wanted to make sure for-profit schools that were breaking the law were being held accountable. For that, he worked closely with a coalition of state AGs. I got to know Rohit through that work. I would fly to DC not infrequently to meet with him and other CFPB and state officials about our overall strategy on these different cases. He ended up going to the Department of Ed. I ended up going to the FTC. We stayed in touch. To my surprise — well, by the time it happened, I wasn't surprised — he was nominated to be an FTC commissioner in probably 2017. I did something that was hard for me to do. It did not come naturally to me. Which was reach out to him and see if he'd be willing to hire me as an advisor.
Khurram Naik: What did that teach you about reaching out to him?
Samuel Levine: I'm someone who's always afraid of sounding or being presumptuous. To this day, it's something I struggle with. I think a lot of people probably do, but it's certainly something for me. I knew Rohit. I thought he respected me. But we didn't — he wasn't reviewing my briefs in Illinois. He wasn't firsthand reviewing my work product. We weren't co-counsel on a line of cases together. He's not even a lawyer. I knew him pretty well, but I didn't know if I knew him well enough. He at the time was a pretty prominent figure. Now he's prominent generally — then he was prominent in the student-debt world. I thought, he could have the pick of any consumer lawyer in the country for this job. Everyone saw him as a rising star. For me — I was in Chicago, I wasn't even in DC, I had been at the FTC for a short time — to ask to be in this pretty important role as an advisor to a commissioner felt like — I remember thinking to myself, well, I have nothing to lose. I had to really convince myself, and talk to people. I really had to steel myself to reach out. And I did. He set up what was like a trial period. I'd go for a three-to-six-month detail. We'd see if it worked out and see what happened. That required me to pack my bags and move from Chicago to DC. I had the good sense — I wasn't married, I wasn't tied down — I had the good sense to recognize this was an opportunity I should take. I did it. I never thought I would move. I never thought I would.
Khurram Naik: How do you go from attorney-advisor to director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection?
Samuel Levine: Well, the first thing was that Rohit took a chance on me and brought me — still a relatively junior attorney — to be his only consumer protection advisor. He had a legal aide and a technologist as well, and a chief of staff, who all worked very closely together. But basically every consumer protection case, I was working with him. There was a big responsibility there. He really took a chance on me. And he also took a chance on another young legal fellow. She became a legal fellow who had just graduated law school, had gotten some attention for a law review article she wrote in 2017. Rohit hired her for the summer. Her name was Lina Khan. Lina at the time — people had heard of her article. I don't think she was the figure she is now. But she came in and worked as a legal fellow with Rohit. They were working on a law review article together on unfair-methods-of-competition rulemaking, which is a hot topic these days. I got to know Lina. One of the things, the day I met her, that I learned was that she had also done a foreclosure clinic in law school. So she had that same experience of witnessing how the financial crisis was affecting real people. Long story short, Lina just stayed for a few months. Then she went to Columbia to be a law professor. Fast forward a couple of years. By this time President Biden has been elected. He nominates Lina to be an FTC commissioner. She is confirmed. The day she's confirmed, or maybe the day after, he names her chair of the FTC, which is the head of our five-person agency. She's the head of it. And she appointed me a couple days later as the acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Khurram Naik: Then what happened? What was the process from acting director to director?
Samuel Levine: The leap from advisor to acting director was much bigger than the leap from acting director to director. The leap from acting director to director was a mindset shift. It was like, OK, I'm the leader of the Bureau now. But there was mostly paperwork. I became a political appointee. There were a lot of additional financial disclosures. I had to complete — the Commission votes on my appointment. I sat down for interviews. I sat down one-on-one with each commissioner to talk through my vision for the Bureau and my vision for how I'd work with them. Then they voted. I was pleased to get a unanimous vote to be named the director of the Bureau, which I remain.
Khurram Naik: Talk about that first leap from attorney-advisor to acting director. What had to change in that role for the first three months or whatever? What was the biggest surprise in that transformation?
Samuel Levine: The scale of the responsibility was a little overwhelming, honestly, for me. As an advisor, I had a big job for an advisor — most commissioners have two consumer protection legal advisors. Rohit had one. He also, as I said, had an outstanding technologist, Erie Meyer, and others — but he only had one attorney advising him on consumer protection. So I had a large volume of cases. I had to learn about a lot of FTC law. Remember, I had been in Chicago, so I didn't know a lot of this. I had to learn about the organization, learn the managers. I came in with some real strengths — I knew the managers of all the offices, I knew the substance, I knew the kinds of cases, the rhythm. I knew how cases got out of the Commission. But I had not really been a manager before. Suddenly I was managing a group of about 450 people. Rohit had sketched as a minority commissioner during the Trump administration a very ambitious agenda for consumer protection — think of him as like a shadow government — the vision he laid out when he was in the minority. Obviously my job now was to carry out Lina's vision, but I felt expectations were high of what we'd be able to deliver. The size of the organization, the ambition Lina felt, that Rohit felt, the trust both of them had placed in me — getting to know the people, many of the people sort of in the front office that I became the head of, I didn't know very well or only knew from a distance. Figuring out how I wanted to staff the office, how I wanted to organize — these were all totally new experiences for me. I had to learn on the job.
Khurram Naik: Was there something remarkable about being this young in this role? Rohit Chopra is in his 40s. You're young as well, in your 30s. Lina Khan is also young. Is this historically novel for so many young people to have such leadership roles in these key parts of consumer protection?
Samuel Levine: In recent history, yeah, I think it is. And I don't think it's a coincidence. Rohit, Lina, and I — and Erie Meyer, and many of the people I worked with — were shaped by what we saw in 2008-2009. We were inspired by Elizabeth Warren. We were excited by the notion that the CFPB was a sign that the government could play a bigger role in protecting the public. Obviously Lina came in with her own antitrust perspective, which was not my world, but I quickly became interested in. We grew up in this sort of Reaganite orthodoxy that the government that governs best governs least, government should stay out of the way, markets should be trusted, in particular government should deregulate the financial markets — which both President Clinton and President Bush supported and contributed to. Then suddenly we graduated college and were hit. Everything we'd learned in this culture turned out to be wrong. The deregulation was a disaster. Everyone said we were on a free market, but here were these banks who got these massive bailouts. Everyone said the law was supposed to apply equally, but none of these bank executives faced any consequences. All of us came up and were reshaped profoundly by the financial crisis. It really motivated each of us in our own way to believe that we need some big changes in how the government sees its role in protecting the public.
Khurram Naik: An interesting aspect of your career to explore — it's been very bottom-up. It's not been very highly strategic. It happened. Someone might look at your resume and say, OK, you don't accidentally end up as director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection. You must have been working backwards in some way to make that happen, and you had the right pedigree. Everything was in place. So I think we've got a clear counter-narrative for that. In choosing these experiences, I don't think you could use the word "strategic" — like, hey, I'm going to join HLAB because that's going to be better for my career than law review, or in HLAB I'll take on this kind of work because it's most likely to get me in front of court. There's some mild strategy involved — if I want to get into a role in federal government, clerkship, et cetera. So there's some strategic aspect to your career. But largely it's been bottom up. Can you say a word for the merits of a strategic approach to a career? Do you have a strategic approach to your career now? Is there some way you can encourage students to have a strategic approach? And then I definitely want to hear about ways people can be more bottom-up. But let's start with that.
Samuel Levine: One thing I did — I'm not sure was strategic at the time, but in retrospect I'm going to call it a good strategy — I did not chase prestige, which is a trap. A lot of people, especially people at elite law schools, fall into it. When you do well in high school, you do well in college, you're used to getting a certain level of validation from elite institutions in the form of grades or recognition or the like. Many people in law school then pursue law firms because they resemble the hierarchy they had been used to when they were applying to law school. There's a ranking of law firms, and they'll interview you, you get a very nice office and nice pay, and it's very fancy when you say where you work. I did not chase prestige. I chased experiences that were fulfilling to me and where I felt I could do good. By "do good" I don't just mean good for the world. Do good and work I liked and cared about. Work I could do for hours and hours and still enjoy. I'm not sure I would have made law review if I had applied. But I wasn't interested in law review. I hated blue-booking. I have now published a law review article, and I'm actually working on another one now — but I'm not that interested in working on law review itself. I wanted to practice. So I pursued the Legal Aid Bureau. The summer internships I did were at a legal aid group and a public-interest organization. Illinois state government has many great things — it's not particularly fancy. I worked in a really, now-condemned office. The experiences mattered to me more. When I applied for clerkships, I applied only in Chicago. I applied for district court and Seventh Circuit. If I'd gotten a Seventh Circuit clerkship, I probably would have taken it, but I actually wanted district court. So I have many examples of people who chase prestige. There's nothing wrong with prestige — I went to a fancy law school, and the fact that it was prestigious certainly played a role in why I went there. There's nothing wrong with prestige. But when you graduate law school you really have to think about this as the rest of your life. This isn't just a stepping stone. You're setting yourself on a path. Chasing prestige does not a fulfilling career make in the long term. If you can go to law school and find something you like to do, and chase that — use law school to figure out what you like to do, chase that — then I think the recognition and the job opportunities will follow because you'll be good at it.
Sam's "I did not chase prestige" line is essentially the moral that Sunny Kim arrived at by a totally different route — she had to quit BigLaw to figure it out, where Sam never went in the first place. Same conclusion, different on-ramps. Listen to my conversation with Sunny Kim.
Khurram Naik: That's definitely helpful advice. To build on it or additionally frame it — I think some of the challenge you see with a lot of people in BigLaw is, like anybody, I think — I mean, I was in BigLaw for similar reasons of status and prestige — the narrative you can tell yourself is, oh well, I can leverage this for whatever else I want to do. So I'll have money I've saved up, and I'll have this procedure, probably good experience. Then that'll be the ultimate jumping-off point. How would you address that?
Samuel Levine: That is true for many people. I think for many more people, I'm not sure that is true. There are a number of issues. First, a lot of people go to law firms and just burn out really quickly. They leave the law. I have a number of friends who left the law altogether. Others go to firms and maybe they can tolerate it, but they're not getting great experience. So when they apply for, say, US Attorney or assistant US attorney positions — a lot of people say they'll go to a law firm and then go to government, but at the FTC we get a lot of applications from third-year, fourth-year law firm associates. At the US Attorney's office, you get a lot too. If you're not getting that experience at the top firm, it's not a sure thing you're going to get a job at a US Attorney's office. What you often see instead is people going from one law firm to another law firm — maybe less prestigious, but also better hours. That's a totally reasonable career path. But if the goal was to parlay the prestige of a law firm into something you really want to do, whether that's government or nonprofit, that is not a sure thing. And you're somewhat — you'd know this better than I do — but from what my friends tell me, you're at the mercy of what partners you end up working with, what work you end up getting, what cases you end up being on. It's a risky proposition. People think of it as the lowest-risk option. I don't think it's the lowest-risk option.
Khurram Naik: What would you say is the lowest-risk option?
Samuel Levine: The lowest-risk option is a privileged one that not everyone can do — which is to find something you like to do. I'm not delusional about this — not everyone has that opportunity. But what I would encourage people to do is be open to jobs that are not the most prestigious. Especially when I went to law school — it was either a big law firm or a very fancy public-interest group like the ACLU. If you went into government, it was usually the DOJ, an assistant US attorney role. There were certain career paths that were sort of associated as sufficiently prestigious for Harvard graduates. People should look beyond that. People should look at local government, state government, legal aid — which many people do. So the safest path is, if you can find something you like and you're good at, pursue that. Then hopefully you're succeeding in a way that you can stand out in your career and go on to bigger and bigger things.
Khurram Naik: Let's be more specific. Let's say you're a fifth-year associate at BigLaw trying to figure out what comes next. This fifth-year comes to Sam Levine and says, Sam, help me figure out what comes next. I'm trying to incorporate the principles you talked about. How do I apply those? Five years in at a big firm, the experiences I've had are very specialized. How do I figure out what comes next for me if I want to pursue your thesis of being more experienced with experiences and finding things I love?
Samuel Levine: It's a question of whether that person knows what they want to do. If it's something the person knows they want to do, obviously the first thing is, if you're able to do that through your job at the law firm, that's great. I've not worked at a big law firm, so I don't want to speak to what the dynamics are. Certainly if you're able to find a partner who can give you opportunities to do the things you're interested in, getting some real experience in that is going to be really important. If you can't do that — one thing I did when I was at the AG, and I guess this was strategic on my part — I joined the local bar association and at some point became co-chair of the Consumer Law Committee at the Chicago Bar Association. One reason this was strategic is it allowed me to keep my toe in the consumer protection waters even while I was clerking. I made sure that as co-chair I could do this. And it was the nice thing about it, if we're talking strategic, because people I wanted to meet, I would invite them to speak to the bar association. I wanted to meet people at CFPB — I invited a bunch of them in and we had a panel on what was going on at CFPB. I remember wanting to learn about privacy and inviting Jay Edelson to speak. There were other opportunities. I was also involved in my alumni organizations. There were other opportunities outside your law firm to try to get involved. Oftentimes these groups, like the local bar association, need people to volunteer to do the grunt work — organizing speakers, tracking CLEs. If you're willing to do that, it's a real way to gain experience, exposure, and connections, even if you're not getting those in your day job.
Khurram Naik: Is there anything intentional you're doing with your network, or similarly with developing your expertise, at this stage?
Samuel Levine: At this stage, it's something I probably should do more. I'm fortunate — I do a lot of speaking events and conferences plus meetings. I get to meet a lot of people in the course of my work. But the reality is the hours in this job are very, very demanding, and it's hard. At the end of the day, I might have an event after work. By the time I'm done with many hours of work starting at 6:30 a.m., then you have an event after work, you've got to eat dinner, you want to see your partner, you want to relax — you don't want to then go to some other networking event. It's a challenge for me. It's something I probably should be more intentional about. But I'm very sympathetic to people who say, look, that sounds well and good, but I'm working crazy hours and don't have time. I have a lot of empathy there.
Khurram Naik: Going back to your first oral argument — there was a group of people behind you literally cheering you on. As you said, you didn't pick this path for that public validation, but of course we're human beings, and of course it's helpful and satisfying and gratifying to get that. Something interesting about your role is how public-facing it is. I haven't heard anything about media strategy that you used earlier on — was there any kind of media strategy component to that work at HLAB? You mentioned you got coverage. Was that intentional?
Samuel Levine: It wasn't a media strategy — which is interesting that you ask. I'm not in charge of media strategy at the FTC, even though we have a public affairs team. And I didn't do it in law school. I don't think we really had a strategy — we had reporters come to us. But through that experience I got my first real exposure to the media. I started doing interviews for the first time. I had a reporter from The Nation shadow me on a Saturday during door-to-door canvassing, and they ended up doing a cover story on our foreclosure work. I did a fair number of interviews with reporters at both local and national publications. One thing I did realize is, I was pretty good at that. I did forensics in high school. I did some debate in college. I've always enjoyed public speaking. I've always enjoyed oral arguments in court. One thing I have tried to do in this job is to use whatever skills I have there. Especially when I was starting, I did not have a lot of management experience. There were a lot of things I lacked. But one thing I really tried to do is — I could be a good voice for the Bureau, a good advocate for the Bureau. That's something I've tried to use, both because I think media is an important part of achieving social change — some lawyers dismiss that, but they shouldn't — and also because I wanted the people who work in the Bureau to feel that I was a good voice for them and a good advocate for them. That's something I've tried to do throughout my three years in this job.
Khurram Naik: Another way of affecting this kind of change could have been through private practice, through plaintiffs' consumer law. Have you ever thought about what your career might have been like if you had pursued that path?
Samuel Levine: I haven't really thought about it. There were some opportunities I was considering on private public-interest firms. I have not thought about it a lot. I can tell you we've been able to recruit at the FTC a number of lawyers from firms like Cohen Milstein who have real great experience in affirmative public-interest litigation. They're top-notch. They're creative. They're aggressive. They're good colleagues. There's a "kind of every person" out there, but they bring a certain spirit — I'm not saying aggressiveness, but a willingness, not afraid of a fight — that I really admire. I really see the work of public-interest law firms as complementary to the work of the FTC. We're often fighting for the same things. When we're hiring people who have those backgrounds, it's very compelling in terms of how that sets them up to succeed at the FTC.
Khurram Naik: You consider them complementary. Is there anything that makes someone more suitable for one path than the other?
Samuel Levine: I think it depends on what people want. Obviously one part of working in a plaintiffs' firm is, at least what I was told in law school, the hours are often not any better than a defense-side firm. But the money is not as good. So A, you have to really care about what you do. You have to really care about the work. If someone doesn't care about consumer protection, I'm not sure I would tell them to be a consumer protection plaintiffs'-side lawyer. If you just need to make a lot of money and don't care about the hours, go to a defense side. There are some people who might be really good at generating business, might be good at sort of more entrepreneurial-style legal theories. That might make a person a good fit for a private law firm. But again, we also really value creativity and "go-getter-ness" — not a word — at the FTC. So lots of good options.
Khurram Naik: Is there anything — I don't know how close you've been an observer of the plaintiffs' bar in the consumer space — but do you have observations on how that space has changed in the past several years?
Samuel Levine: You have firms like Gupta Wessler that just do extraordinary work. It's wonderful to see. I'd be curious how many of these consumer lawyers, like me, sort of came into this through the financial crisis. It's wonderful to see really top-notch consumer advocacy in DC and all over the country. If you look, for example, at some of the litigation around arbitration, a successful case at the Supreme Court this term — I think it was Gupta Wessler. They've been successful over the last few years. Really creative, smart lawyers. You look at the CFPB today, where they basically banned medical debt from credit reports. I know some of the lawyers who were involved in that process, and they come from the public-interest bar, from the plaintiffs'-side bar. These are folks who really understand litigation, really think creatively, and they add enormous value to government work.
Khurram Naik: What do you see for yourself? What's top of mind to you in the coming year? Aside from elections, which I'm sure are top of mind — or related to that, or not — what is top of mind for you at the agency?
Samuel Levine: What's truly top of mind for me is finishing the job we've started over the last few years. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished across the agency. Certainly I'm partial to our consumer protection work over the last few years. I think we've gotten a lot more done than people thought was possible in the three years we've had so far. But there's a lot more on our to-do list. There's a lot more that we started — we need to finish. So one thing I'm committed to is — regardless of who sits in the White House — I don't want to speculate. But one thing I'm committed to now is, whoever sits in my seat a year from now, I want this good work to continue. I realize a different administration is going to come with different priorities. But one thing I'm really trying to do now is to build and generate bipartisan support for the work we're doing. We're winning a lot of that. I think we're getting a lot of bipartisan support for the work we're doing. The long-term project of making the FTC the best possible champion for the American public and for American consumers is one that I want to see through. We have a lot of work to do.
Khurram Naik: Sam, thanks for sharing your fascinating story. I think there are lots of principles that lawyers of all stripes can learn from. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us.
Samuel Levine: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.