Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 029: Sonal Mehta on decisions under uncertainty and opportunity cost in litigation and careers

Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 029: Sonal Mehta on decisions under uncertainty and opportunity cost in litigation and careers

Sonal Mehta is a partner at WilmerHale, the managing partner of the firm's Silicon Valley office, and a member of WilmerHale's management committee. Her career has moved in a straight line to the top of the profession, but what makes this conversation unusual is how openly Sonal walks through the parts that were not straight at all, including a mortifying first deposition, a year of struggling with what she thought was a core skill, and the hardest decision of her career.

In this conversation, we dig into the relationship between gut instinct and formal analysis in legal decision-making, why a weakness early in your career can become a strength if the right people push you, how to find your own voice when none of the senior mentors in the room look like you, and what it actually looks like to take a risk and bet on yourself twice in a decade.

Keep reading below for the full episode and the complete transcript of our conversation.

Top Insights

Below are the highlights of our conversation:

• Playing Lawyer vs. Being a Lawyer: Sonal's early deposition struggles came from trying to mimic senior lawyers she admired rather than listening to the witness. The breakthrough was realizing she was playing lawyer instead of being one. Once she trusted her own judgment about what the follow-up should be, depositions became one of her favorite parts of the job.
• Gut + Process, Not Gut vs. Process: Sonal believes strong legal instincts already contain a pro-con analysis underneath. The formal framework, listing options, weighing secondary and tertiary consequences, ranking against end-goal priorities, is often a way to express what the gut is already doing. The job is not to suppress instinct but to understand what it is telling you.
• Bet on Yourself When Things Are Going Great: Sonal's two biggest career moves, leaving WilmerHale for Durie Tangri and later returning to WilmerHale, both happened when nothing was wrong and everything was working. Each move required an internal push to see what she could do with a different set of resources and without the safety of the team she had grown up with.
• Find Your Voice Without the "Hey, Buddy": With no senior women to watch as role models early on, Sonal had to invent her own way to build rapport with opposing counsel. The senior partners around her started calls with "hey, buddy, you catch the game last night" and that was never going to work for her. She had to figure out a version of rapport that was hers, and she did.
• Grab Mentorship From Anywhere, Including Opposing Counsel: Twice in Sonal's career, senior opposing counsel reached out after hard-fought matters to offer career mentorship. Her advice to younger lawyers: do not draw a narrow line around who you think your mentors should be. If someone invests in your success, take it.

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Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: Sonal, I'm so glad that we are having this conversation. I know you're skeptical that you had an interesting story to begin this episode with, but I'm excited to jump in with this story of your first deposition.

Sonal Mehta: I'm not sure it's that interesting, but it was pretty mortifying. I was a young associate. I was taking a deposition of a witness who we weren't sure what he knew about a particular topic. So we needed to take his deposition just to figure that out. I go into this deposition, and the guy was so mad that he was being deposed. I think what particularly angered him was that this kid was taking his deposition. So I show up, I take the deposition, he's super hostile. Turns out he doesn't know anything. So fine, it's a very short deposition. I report to all the people on my team that it was a short deposition and a non-event, and the guy was kind of a jerk to me.

Sonal Mehta: Then later one of the more senior lawyers was reading the transcript. He came to me and said, so I know it was your first deposition, but when you asked those questions at the beginning, does the witness understand that they're under oath and are they able to testify truthfully and accurately, and is there anything that would preclude them from testifying truthfully and accurately, you can't just say all of those things and then move on to your questions. You have to stop and ask a question, and then have the witness answer before you move to the next point. I was so mortified, because it turned out I'd taken this deposition that ultimately ended up being a total waste of time, but I couldn't even get the five questions at the beginning that came out of the deposition textbook correct. I totally screwed that part up. That was quite the experience, and I now actually know how to ask those questions. Everyone knows that I know how to confirm at the beginning that the witness knows they need to testify truthfully and accurately. The deposition can get through those questions before I start my depositions.

Khurram Naik: How did your second deposition go?

Sonal Mehta: That part went better. I will say that part went better. We could talk about this more, but I at the beginning of my career definitely struggled with depositions. There was a deposition not long after that, probably a few months after, that I took and a partner was with me. Afterwards, he said to me, you know, you're so good at everything else in this job, it's really strange that you're so bad at taking depositions. So that was a really affirming moment for me in my early practice as an associate, that I was so bad at taking depositions that I was getting that comment back. It did turn around, and I would like to think now that I'm actually much, much better at it. It's actually one of my favorite parts of this job. It just goes to show that you could be good at some things and be really bad at others.

Khurram Naik: What do you attribute early on to the challenges around depositions for yourself?

Sonal Mehta: I actually spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. I realized I was trying too much to emulate other questioners. I had examples of people I thought were really great deposition takers, and I would go in and try to do the deposition the way I thought they would do the deposition. I would get in my head about it, and it would be awkward for me. I wasn't really connecting with the witness or being able to read the witness properly. I was more focused on, okay, now how would this person ask the next question? It ended up just becoming this weird vortex of me trying to figure out, predictively, what someone else would do in response to answer, instead of listening to the answer and then thinking about, as the human sitting across the table from the witness, what's the appropriate follow-up, or what's the admission I want to try to get. If I go back now and think about what I was doing, I was playing lawyer as opposed to being a lawyer. Once I got out of that, it got a lot easier and a lot better.

Khurram Naik: How did you make that transition?

Sonal Mehta: I wish I had some trick for how I did it. Candidly, I had just weird rhythms in my cases, where there was a period of a year where I had no depositions at all. Then I went and took another deposition, and it was completely different. Some switch had been flipped. I suddenly felt like I knew what I was doing, and I could do it. I remember the deposition. I remember where I was. I was like, oh, I can do this. I know how to do this. This is great. Maybe it was the year in between that had me distancing myself from trying to mirror people, that somehow made it better. Then suddenly I was comfortable and I could do it, and from then on it's been great.

Khurram Naik: You're still taking depositions today, right?

Sonal Mehta: Yes. I mean, I try very hard to give the younger lawyers on my team as many opportunities as I can. But I love taking depositions. I don't think I'll ever give it up.

Khurram Naik: Do you have a preference between fact and expert depositions?

Sonal Mehta: My favorite are expert depositions. If I could just take expert depositions every day for the rest of my career, I would be so happy. Unfortunately, there are other parts of litigation you also have to do to get there. But that would be my absolute favorite. I enjoy taking damages expert depositions. I also really love taking technical expert depositions. I've recently done a bunch of economist expert depositions, absolutely love taking expert depositions. Fact depositions are great too, don't get me wrong, but the material you have to work with with an expert makes it especially fun.

Khurram Naik: Describe at a high level, what's your philosophy around expert depositions? What's the strategy in terms of how much time you're taking, what other kinds of admissions or work you're getting, how you're thinking backwards from trial strategy?

Sonal Mehta: It's a little bit of knowing what I need for either cross-examination at trial or for dispositive motions. Often there's a substantial amount of overlap between the set of admissions you want for those two things. What I'm really thinking about when I go into a deposition, especially an expert deposition, is what are the admissions I want in sound-bite form that I could block quote in the introduction to my summary judgment motion to establish that their expert has conceded something that means my client wins. That's the frame I want to think about an expert deposition in. Once you do that, you're also getting the material you need for the cross at trial. I also want to have modules that are more jury-focused in terms of the cross we might do of the expert at trial.

Sonal Mehta: I'm usually not wedded to an outline. I'll have the expert reports in front of me. I'll have some form of an outline with the different topics I want to cover. But I'm a much more instinctual depo-taker. I start on a topic and then I see where the expert goes, and then I'm going to follow that. Often it's about creating tensions or inconsistencies in the expert's opinions with other things that are happening in the case, with the record. Often it's about forcing them to take a really extreme form of the position. Okay, well, if that's your opinion, then this must be true, and then this other thing must be true, and if those things are true, then really what you're saying is this crazy thing that no judge and no jury would ever believe, which means everything else falls apart. A lot of it, to me, is listening and then the follow-up, much more than what's on the piece of paper. There have been expert depos where I've had an outline but I actually haven't really even spent much time with it at all. I really just looked at the report and the back and forth, and followed what the expert said to its logical conclusion to get the admissions I want.

Khurram Naik: Do you have an approach for different categories of experts? I think about two kinds of experts. One is the highly credentialed big-ego expert, and there's definitely ways they can trip up. Then there's also the very sophisticated, has-been-deposed-multiple-times expert who is very good at not saying anything. Maybe there are other categories as well. Can you share the kinds of experts you work with and techniques you use?

Sonal Mehta: Those are two good categories, and a lot of experts fall into both. The other one, which in some ways is more challenging, is the first-time or relatively new-comer expert, where they're being called upon because they might truly be experts in that field but aren't litigation pros, don't really understand the process. All of those categories have different challenges and I would take different approaches for all of them. With the newbie expert, someone that's really steeped in a field that hasn't been in litigation before, one of the challenges is they don't understand the litigation process. While there's some advantages to the taking attorney from that, one of the disadvantages is they're often really reticent to answer questions. It's like they're kind of paralyzed by the fact that they don't totally understand the process, and they're afraid that something they say is going to be a problem. You sort of have to break them out of that and get them to start actually engaging and feel comfortable enough that they're not worried every question is a trap. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but they're not worried about that. They're starting to feel comfortable they can actually just answer your questions.

Sonal Mehta: With the big-ego experts, and with those guys or gals, but often guys, every question is going to have a different approach. My approach is, look, maybe it would be effective to feed the ego, but I have a really hard time doing that just in general in life. I don't have a lot of patience for people with big egos. So I don't really feed the ego, but I try to neutralize it. I'm not going to go in and start challenging this person's credentials or opinions and get them all defensive and get the ego all worked up. Instead, it's going to be more about, what are the things we can all agree on, maybe let's start there. Maybe it's about making that person feel like, oh, she doesn't really know what she's doing, she's asking me softball questions, maybe kind of soften the ground, get to some points of agreement, some points of consensus, and then start to build from there on what's the logical next step down the line. If you agree with this, then you'd have to agree with me that the other thing, and then you'd agree that the other thing, and you sort of let it go that way. If they're not feeling super challenged and you can get them to agree to that, the good thing about a witness who has a big ego is that they're also really worried about their credibility. When they feel like their credibility is on the line, they will concede, because they can't possibly be in a situation where another whoever they view to be their peers thinks they're not being credible.

Sonal Mehta: I suspect my style is actually not that different across these different modes of experts. I'm sure there's some degree of phrasing a question and friendliness and warmth that probably changes a little bit. I've heard stories about lawyers that go in and they're playing like, oh, I don't know what you're talking about, teach me everything. I just can't put on a fake personality. I just kind of have to do my thing with more tweaks around the edges of my questioning style than totally different questioning styles.

Khurram Naik: You used the word intuitive for how you approach it. Is there something about time that you're tracking? Benchmarks for what stage you want to be at at different hours?

Sonal Mehta: It really depends on how much material I have to cover and how much I feel like I'm going to be compressed for time. Usually I don't feel super jammed for time in depositions. I think I'm a pretty efficient questioner, and I'm pretty good at gauging relatively early in the deposition how much the person is just going to talk to fill the time. If I know there's a witness that is going to filibuster, that their whole strategy is the middle category you mentioned earlier, where they've done it enough to know they can dance around the question and not answer, if I know I'm going to be dealing with that type of witness, I will sometimes go in and say, okay, here are the four topics I'm going to cover, and I need to be through these three by X time, because I need an hour and a half for the last topic. I also usually will go in, when I know there's going to be time constraints, with a rank ordering of priorities of the different topics I'm going to cover. Then if I feel like time's getting tight or the witness is just rambling and eating time, there'll be things I'll skip because I know it'll just be a time sink and I don't need them.

Khurram Naik: When it comes to dealing with opposing counsel, I think of two categories of challenging behavior. One is lawyers with a strong reference to coaching the witness. Another is lawyers that are very hostile, making the expert feel this is a very adversarial proceeding. It is the adversarial process, but feeling like there's something to be gained from overtly being hostile. How do you deal with those?

Sonal Mehta: In some ways those issues are actually worse with fact witnesses than with experts, because most of the experts we all deal with have done it enough that they don't need the lawyer to be super involved in the drafting and really guiding the deposition, the defending lawyer. I feel like in my experience, the lawyers tend to be a little less involved in the deposition when it's an expert deposition. Regardless, whether it's expert or fact deposition, yeah, it's really unfortunate, but there are lawyers where you feel like it's clear that statement was made with a direct intent to suggest to the witness what they should be saying.

Sonal Mehta: Courts these days I think have done a really good job setting out, through local rules, through judge standing orders, through local practice and expectation, some real strong incentives for lawyers not to do the coaching and not to do the obstruction during deposition. So that helps a lot. Pointing out that if that behavior continues, it might get taken up with the judge and the judge is not going to have a lot of tolerance for that kind of behavior, usually ends up working. But my thing is I'm not going to make a big deal out of it and yell back. I probably will let it go the first time or two, especially if it's a younger lawyer who maybe is just trying to get their sea legs and figure out how depositions go. But if it's someone really senior, or it's happening over and over again, you just have to politely call it out. I've literally said in a deposition, quote, cut it out, you know what you're doing, you know what you're doing is wrong, stop it, end quote. And it didn't happen again. There was no more coaching, there was no more commentary and colloquy between the questions and the answers. That statement was made, the person actually looked a little embarrassed, and it went quite smoothly after that. There's an element of just calling it out, and when it's called out, sometimes people realize they need to stop.

Khurram Naik: What's one of the most surprising moments you've had in deposition?

Sonal Mehta: I don't know that it's one, but I've got to tell you, I have had some experts that have just given up the farm in ways that, you have to ask, were you prepped? Did you write the report in this case? How is it possible that that's the answer to the question? The only implication of that answer is that your client's case literally cannot stand any longer. I've had that with technical experts in IP cases where the technical expert has admitted something that would, maybe not in exactly those words, mean non-infringement, but basically in response to a hypothetical, where it was like, okay, well, assume X, Y, and Z, would the answer be yes or would the answer be no? And they got it wrong and they said no, which meant my client wins. Then we took that admission and we went to the judge and we won summary judgment. It's a little surprising actually when someone that's spent so much time on the case, worked on a report, presumably went through the report multiple times with their lawyers to prepare for the deposition, just gives you the absolute wrong answer from their client's perspective. I find it surprising. Now I find it awesome, and those are really, really good days, and I have some really fond memories of those days. But I still can't believe it when it happens.

Khurram Naik: What's so interesting is you went from deposition being one of those challenging things to one of your strengths. Do you feel like that's often the case for people? For myself, I would say things like being oriented to growing a network or being in a sales capacity or even writing, these are things that historically I didn't perceive to be strengths of mine, but in pursuing them I worked on them and found my own ways to practice them, and now I perceive them to be strengths. Do you think that's much more common than we realize, that the things that lead someone's career become their strengths as something that started as a weakness?

Sonal Mehta: I hadn't actually thought about it that way until you just phrased the question that way. But as you were going through those examples, I was going through my own examples of things that I struggled with or parts of this job I struggled with and that now I think maybe are among my strengths. I think you're right, it is true for some people that those areas of weakness end up actually being the areas in which they're stronger, because they put in the time to improve on them. If it's pointed out to you that it's an area of weakness, or you realize it's an area of weakness, it becomes something you're then thinking about and you're conscious of, and you're trying to improve.

Sonal Mehta: I also think there are some people where those are some areas in which, for them, it might be a weakness, but you don't have an incentive to try to improve it, or you don't want to improve it, or you think you can't because it's not consistent with your personality. So it's a little bit of a wishy-washy answer, but I do think you're right. Another area for me that was such a challenge, and I still hate it to be fair, I hate it, but I think I'm getting better at it, is network building and business development. It was awful. I hated it. I never thought I'd be able to do it. I never thought I'd be able to have any clients because I never thought I'd be able to meet any clients, because I just found the whole thing to be, there was this mystique around business development. When people talked to me about how they did it, I thought it was all super awkward social interactions that I would never want to have. Now I think I'm fine. I don't love it and I'm not great at it, but I know enough people that I can keep myself occupied and out of trouble. I had to spend a lot of time working on it, and people had to kind of push me actually, in some ways maybe more than I had to spend time working on it. People that were my mentors, people I was working with, had to push me to do it really kind of aggressively, because I was really resisting it. Thankfully they pushed me to work on it as a young lawyer, and it got better. There's an element of both the self-internal motivation and drive to improve areas of weakness, and then there's the element of people pushing you to improve. For me, I have a bit of that self-drive, but I also have been lucky to have people at every stage of my career pushing me to improve.

Sonal's experience of finding her voice as an early-career lawyer without any senior women to model resonates with what Lora Krsulich shared in her episode about coming up at Susman Godfrey as a first-gen lawyer, and how she found her own confidence to take up space. Listen to my episode with Lora Krsulich.

Khurram Naik: It's remarkable to hear someone as accomplished as you say you're having a challenge around something that would be perceived as a core function. You're a partner, that's a core function. You're also on the management committee of WilmerHale, which is a very well-regarded firm. Can you share what's working for you, how you're thinking about progressing through this and making it more tractable?

Sonal Mehta: It's been a journey, to use the cliche. When I was a senior associate and a young partner, I was given some coaching. I made partner while I was at WilmerHale, and they identified for new partners these business development mentors. They were senior partners very successful at the firm, usually in different practice areas and in my case even a different office, whose relationship was to mentor me in business development. I'm so thankful. He made me write up a business plan as a first-year partner, and I hated every minute of it. I hated the process of making the plan. I hated everything I thought I might have to do to execute on the plan. I would write down things I was going to do, and as I was writing them down, I'd be like, I can't believe that I would ever have to do this, this is going to be so awkward with people. So it really went from being forced, thankfully, to think about it and plan for it and confront that I hated it.

Sonal Mehta: The way my thinking has evolved is realizing that actually, even though I went through that whole process, that wasn't going to work for me. Having a formal business development plan, here are the people I'm going to check in with every month, here are the articles I'm going to write, I'm going to go speak on X number of panels, I'm going to go to Y conference and go to this cocktail party, that kind of formality was never going to work for me, because after writing it all down I just wasn't doing any of it. The journey has been realizing that, at least for me, what works, to the extent it works, is actually getting to know people that I like. It's amazing how many of the opportunities I've had, and the really great connections and great work, have been ones where there was no intentionality behind it at all. It was just somebody I struck up a conversation with, or somebody that asked me for a favor and I did them a favor and I never thought I'd hear from them again, and then lo and behold, something happened. It sounds oversimplified and maybe a little bit naive, but just putting good things out into the world and coupling that with doing good work has been really successful for me, to the extent anyone would say I have success in that area. It's also just a lot easier for me than doing anything formal. A lot of the people I work with as clients are people I was an associate with. That's the other thing I think people don't realize when they're growing up in the law, for those of you that are a little more junior in your career, the person down the hall that's your peer today, they will get more senior in this business as will you, even if they're not at the firm anymore. Those people end up wanting to work with you in the future when they become clients. I teach a class at Berkeley, and a number of my clients are former students from the class, who then years later went in-house and had a problem and called me. For me that's just been much more successful than any kind of networking plan I could then go execute on.

Khurram Naik: I want to go back to you talking about when you were early in your deposition journey and noticing, oh, I'm really trying to respond like this other lawyer I admire or had learned from. The way I'd phrase that is finding your voice. Were you able to find your voice elsewhere at that time, or is that just part and parcel of generally finding your voice? Can you talk about that process?

Sonal Mehta: I actually think that was maybe the most acute example of the overall process of finding my voice, because I definitely had that in other places too. I think every lawyer goes through this. For me, it was especially difficult because I did not have many women, really any women mentors, or senior women to look up to as I was growing up as a young lawyer. I had tremendously talented, off-the-charts talented mentors and senior lawyers to look up to, don't get me wrong, but they were all men. My examples of very basic things, like how do you start a meet-and-confer call with opposing counsel and build that rapport, they were all men.

Sonal Mehta: I often give this example to younger lawyers, but probably one of the biggest struggles I had was figuring out how to build a rapport with opposing counsel that's organic and genuine, when the examples I would sometimes see would be like the senior partner getting on the phone with opposing counsel and the start of a call being, hey, buddy, you catch the game last night. You know, the hey, buddy, you catch the game last night, I can't start a meet-and-confer call that way. First of all, I don't know what the game was. I definitely didn't catch it. Everybody knows that. There's nobody that would think that I caught the game last night. It'd be a miracle if I knew what sport we were in in terms of the season. So that was a big struggle for me, how do I do that thing, which is really important, developing a relationship and a rapport with opposing counsel is critical to being able to serve your client's needs, how do I do that if I don't have the hey, buddy? I just kind of had to figure it out. There are people that are better at that now than me. There are definitely people that have more of an ability to connect on that kind of thing than I do, but I've figured it out well enough that I can do it, and it serves my clients' needs. That's true for courtroom advocacy, it's true for depositions, it's true for business development interactions, it's true for when I go and pitch a case, it's true for when I'm interacting with opposing counsel. In every aspect of this job, I think there was a learning curve for me to find my voice.

Khurram Naik: Can you speak to the learning itself as far as legal decision-making judgment analysis? How did you come into your own voice there? It's easy to say, how would you think about this case? But there's a lot to be said for how you approach your own case. This is something I just covered with Silpa Maruri, and that was something that was a hallmark of her early on, following her own instincts. I'm curious where your thoughts are on how you found your voice in legal judgment.

Sonal Mehta: Okay, so now this is going to sound arrogant. I don't mean it to be arrogant, but that's actually not somewhere I felt like I struggled as much. Even from when I was a very young lawyer, rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, I always had a pretty high degree of confidence in my judgment about things. I almost always had a pretty strong, early instinctive reaction to what the right thing was. Of course, I would need the factual and the legal inputs to that. I needed to understand what the legal frame is that we're looking at, I needed to understand what the facts on the ground were. But what we should do after we know what the facts are and what the law is, and we've laid out the different options, here's the, should we do A, B, or C, which of those things we should do and the why and how we should execute on them, rightly or wrongly, and probably a lot of instances naively, I always just had a gut of, okay, I thought about A, I thought about B, I thought about C, I can see the pros and cons, we should do B, here's why we should do B, and here's how we should execute on B. That was a place where I needed to find the skills to do the execution, I needed to gain the credibility to convince people I was right, but I didn't struggle with figuring out what I thought the answer should be.

Khurram Naik: Let's take someone who has the inverse problem. Early in their career they were told, hey, you're really great at deposition, but you have a challenge around exercising your own judgment, around confidence in your own decision making, around applying frameworks. How would you counsel that lawyer?

Sonal Mehta: This is hard for me, because for me it is more instinctive. But what I would counsel them to do is essentially what I said my gut does for me, which is, the baseline for all of this, of course, is knowing the law and knowing the facts. Once you have that, I would counsel them to think about what are the options, what's the menu of options, what are the pros and cons of the menu of options. There I think you have to think expansively. There are obvious pros and cons in any decision, but there are often secondary or tertiary pros and cons that are less obvious, that require some effort and some experience to really think through. I would encourage people to think about first-order pros and cons, but also secondary and tertiary order pros and cons.

Sonal Mehta: Then it gets hard. Okay, so now I looked at all the pros and cons, how do I make a decision? For me, it would be priorities in terms of end goal, because those priorities are going to let you weigh the pros and cons. If you have a bunch of pros and a bunch of cons, and you're like, there's a lot of pros and a lot of cons here, how do I make a decision? One of those, either in the pro column or the con column, is going to go to whatever the most important goal is of a particular project or a particular matter or a particular business. You're making a judgment based on, I have to do something here, even when I don't have perfect knowledge. Let me go with something that, based on what I think the priorities are, is going to help me optimize to the outcome that I want.

Sonal Mehta: The other thing I would tell people that are struggling with that is, you're not always going to get it right. If you are paralyzed by the desire or the need to know with certainty that the decision you're making is going to work out the way you think it's going to work out, you've got to just get over that. We make decisions in law, but in life, you can only make the best decision you can at the time you have to make it with the best information available to you at that time. That's all we could ever ask for from anyone. You don't always have all the information. Circumstances might change. But you've got to just make the decision, and then you've got to be able to live with the consequences, and trust that you're doing the best you can now, and that your future self will be in a good position to deal with whatever the consequences are. Hopefully it all works out exactly how you wanted. But if not, you have to trust that you'll be there to deal with the consequences, and your future self will exercise its judgment to optimize at that moment in time.

Khurram Naik: That's a jumping-off point to explore another moment in your career. I'm going to flag back that you're saying, you don't always know if you're going to get it right. You've got a certain set of facts before you, the world is uncertain, you may not have all the relevant facts, the world will change, but you just have to move forward and you have to apply your judgment based on pattern insights to move forward and make decisions in the face of uncertainty. I think that's a very powerful concept, because in my role as a legal recruiter, I see this routinely with lawyers, big law lawyers who are so used to what's largely driven by the billable hour, so used to mining for more and more facts, more and more analysis as the solution, as a legal advisor. How did you apply that concept to your career change, when you were moving from WilmerHale to Durie Tangri? Did you apply that decision-making tool to make that change?

Sonal Mehta: Yes, I did. But again, in the way that I make decisions, which I think part of it was my gut, too. I would say that decision, still to this day, it's been almost 10 years now, is the single hardest decision I've ever made in my career and maybe in my life, honestly. It was an agonizing decision. It took me a really long time to even be open to thinking about it. Then it took me a really long time once I was open to thinking about it to make up my mind. Then there was a period after I made up my mind where I didn't think I'd made up my mind, and I was agonizing over whether that was really the right decision. It was a long process. There were a lot of sleepless nights over that.

Sonal Mehta: The decision-making process that I went through was funnily enough formal. It was a more formal decision-making process than what we've been talking about. It was along the lines of what I just talked to you about, pros and cons and evaluating them and thinking about the importance. I actually wrote it down, and I had a spreadsheet. This is so not-Sonal, the most non-Sonal way to make a decision, to have a matrix of all the factors and the pros and cons, and I weighted it and everything. When I said it was sort of funny you asked that, I had this super formal process. But honestly, if you put me back in the headspace I was in at the time, everything about the process was really ultimately being driven by my gut. What I mean by that is, I had all these factors, and it was this agonizing decision, and at the end, the way I weighted them and the way I came to the decision was really based more on instinct than anything else. That really just goes to the point we were talking about earlier, which is, my instinct in some ways just inherently does the pro-con analysis I'm talking about. Or maybe the pro-con analysis is a way to manifest what's happening when I make a gut decision. I think that's probably true for everyone. Maybe when we talk about people that are more instinctive and people that are less instinctive, it's really less about, is it a different decision-making process, and more about how much you trust your instinct in an express way. I know that I can trust my gut, versus people that feel like they want to go to the more formal process, and so they're not calling it instinctive, they're saying that they're going through a process. In a lot of cases, it reduces to the same thing. Anyway, that was my process. It was an agonizing, awful process, worst year of my life, and hardest decision I've ever made, and then I ended up going with my gut.

Khurram Naik: What even prompted this decision? You started out at WilmerHale, you made partner there, so things clearly were going well. What even got you thinking about making a change?

Sonal Mehta: Like I said, it actually was a process to even get me to be open to the idea of leaving. I loved my time at WilmerHale. I genuinely had the best experience. Could not have asked for a better place to grow up as a young lawyer. Felt like I got such amazing experience and opportunity and mentorship and training from the best in the business. The people that were there at the time that I was working with are just so incredible, and I'm so grateful for the time I had there. I honestly thought I would be there my whole career. I wasn't thinking about leaving.

Sonal Mehta: What got me thinking about it, or got me to be open to the idea, was the Durie Tangri opportunity came up. It was a new thing for them too. I was the first lateral partner ultimately that they had, and they hadn't really ever thought they would do that, because they formed as a boutique of people that knew each other professionally but also were really close friends. So it was, in some ways, kind of like a family firm. They were all so close and they'd all worked together for so long. They were thinking about whether it might make sense to bring someone else on. When that opportunity presented itself, it was the kind of thing that never had occurred to me would be something I could do, because they had never had a lateral partner before. Suddenly there was a conversation, and I was like, oh, I guess I should think about this, because I never would have thought about this before.

Sonal Mehta: I think it was a combination of, sometimes I need a push. This push actually came from myself, not from other people, but it was an internal push to bet on myself and do something that was not the safe, obvious thing to do. Things were going great at WilmerHale. I loved it there. I'd worked with the same people for 12 and a half years. I loved those people, I still love those people, they're still friends. I still respect them as lawyers and as people and consider them close friends. So it was such the safe, easy thing to do to stay. But I felt like I needed the internal push of, okay, maybe you need to try to go do something a little bit different and take a little bit of a risk here, even though things were going great. To have that independence, to see how I could operate as a lawyer without the same set of people I'd been working with for 12 and a half years, without the comfort of knowing exactly who was going to be on my teams and who the clients were. That push to bet on myself and see what might happen if I went out and did something different ultimately was the instinct that drove the decision.

Khurram Naik: When you say bet on yourself, what was the potential upside and what was the risk?

Sonal Mehta: At WilmerHale, I was a very young partner. I had a few of my own matters, matters where the clients were primarily coming to me, but not a lot. I didn't have a huge set of matters and a huge track record as a first-chair lawyer. I had done a trial as co-lead with someone, and I had a few small cases where I was first chair, but it was all sort of new. The potential upside was, I would be able to go and be the lead lawyer. I don't mean that in a your-name-at-the-top-of-the-caption kind of a way. For me, it was more about, it's my strategy and my judgment that is going to guide the outcome in this case. That was really appealing to me, to be able to think about, how do I see this case, how do I see us winning this case, trusting my gut on that, and being in a position to steer the outcome of the case. That was the potential upside. I could maybe do more of that if I was at a place where I wasn't with the same people I'd been working with forever, and where there were new clients too, where the clients didn't already have people they had worked with and teams they'd worked with forever, but there would be potentially new clients and new people to work with.

Sonal Mehta: The downside is the obvious downside. Nobody would ever hire me or want to work with me. I'd show up and have no work and nothing to do. The notion that I was going to be able to lead cases was a delusion. That was the risk, that that was all totally delusional, and nobody would trust me with their matters. Thankfully, people did trust me with their matters and it worked out okay, but that was the risk.

Sonal's decision-making framework, formal spreadsheet on top, instinct underneath, reminded me of my conversation with Rakesh Kilaru, who walked through the decision tools he honed at the White House and uses now at Wilkinson Stekloff to simplify trial strategy and career moves. Listen to my episode with Rakesh Kilaru.

Khurram Naik: Tell me about the spreadsheet. Were there three top factors? How did your spreadsheet work?

Sonal Mehta: Oh, Khurram, there are so many more than three factors. There were three tiers. In anticipation of this, you prompted me to go back and look at it, which I hadn't done in nine years. There were three tiers of importance. In each tier, there were multiple factors and they were given weights. Tier one had a 50% weight, tier two had a 30% weight, tier three had a 20% weight. Then there was a point value assigned to each factor from one to five.

Sonal Mehta: I'll give you a couple of examples of the ones in the different buckets, so you can see what was driving it. In the first tier, the highest-importance tier, independence was one of them. Going back to what I think ultimately drove the decision in a lot of ways. That was a really important factor. Collegiality and collaboration was really important to me as well, and that was not something pushing me away from WilmerHale. If anything, that was weighing in favor of staying, because I had a family there in terms of the people I'd worked with. But that's super, super important to me, working somewhere where I was on the team, I was part of the team, the team had my back and vice versa, and there was no internal competition. Easy-to-work-with clients was on there, because the quality of life you have as a lawyer depends a lot on the clients. Having clients that are collaborators and partners and respect their outside counsel and view it as a long-term partnership is super important. There are some clients that are easier to work with than others, and it was important to me, from a quality of life perspective, that I would have clients that would fall in the easier-to-work-with side of the scale. Practice reputation, those were kind of in the top tier in terms of importance.

Sonal Mehta: The second tier, I'm not going through all of them, just examples. Second tier was tranquility and lack of internal politics, competition, drama. Feeling like you're at an institution that's a stable institution, where everyone's generally rowing in the same direction. That was important and that was in tier two for me. Senior lawyers that would be mentors to me was on the list. As much as I was looking for independence, I definitely didn't want to be in a situation where I didn't have access to high-quality, high-caliber senior lawyers who could mentor me. The size and complexity of the matters I would work on was in that category as well. It was important to me that the quality of my peers would be incredibly high, both from a collegiality and interpersonal perspective and from a, these are all lawyers that I think are amazing and really talented, and learning from them, and I'm proud to be at the firm and be their colleague.

Sonal Mehta: The third tier included things like location and my commute. It included things like firm economics and stability, which I'm not sure should really be a third tier, but it was at that time for me. It was a little bit more of a structural question at that particular time, because I was deciding between a big law firm and a boutique. So there was less about sort of evaluating the financial stability of the individual firm, as more of the model question. Work variety and diversification was also on my list in that third tier. What you would find interesting, maybe, is that comp, like compensation, was in the third tier, and it was also expressly termed as compensation over five years, because I wasn't really focused on compensation in the first few years at all. Even over five years, it was only a third-tier consideration for me.

Khurram Naik: Looking back in terms of doing a post-op of that decision, were there factors that turned out to be almost irrelevant? I ask this because there's another partner I know who made a move and worked with a skilled recruiter. The recruiter explained to him, let's figure out what's important to you in advance. As he was going through interviews, this partner would rank the different firms by this criteria and also rank which firm he was enjoying the most. And then the recruiter could have pointed out, hey look, the things you said at the outset were most important to you aren't in fact the things that you're valuing most in the firm. What you thought was important is not as important as you thought it was. Did you experience that in life? Or was it pretty validated that the things you knew in advance to be important turned out to be the things that were really important to you?

Sonal Mehta: The things that I thought were important to me, I think did turn out to be important to me. But part of the reason for that is there are literally like 25 things on here. So it's hard to miss anything. I covered every single possible factor you could have. It was not the case that as I was going through my process, I was like, oh, I didn't have that on my list, but now I'm realizing that's really important. Everything was on my list, important or not. What I did find that's consistent with what you just said is, looking back at it, it's very clear to me that the numerical values I assigned for these different things are not in any way objective, and were completely driven by what my gut was telling me the decision should be. That was driven by independence. As much as I loved WilmerHale, the thing that drove me to go was feeling like I kind of needed to do my own thing and see, sink or swim, what it would be like just to be me. Everything about this matrix and the values I filled out, I think were colored by that. As much as I thought I was doing this super-rigorous diligence process and very objectively assigning these point values, I don't think I was.

Khurram Naik: Did the fact that the WilmerHale team was your family, did that cut in the direction of, oh wow, I shouldn't leave, as equally or did it just as equally factor into, hey, they're always going to be in my life in some way?

Sonal Mehta: You're right, that's what turned out to be the case. The people I was close with, I stayed close with. I'm still their cheerleader and I root them on and want them to be successful. At the time, though, when you're in that moment, you don't have the clarity to know that the people you're going to be friends with, you'll be friends with forever. At least I didn't. Part of it was, that's the only real job I ever had. I had a summer internship in college, and I was a paralegal for six months between college and law school, and I taught LSAT and GRE classes through the Princeton Review. But the only real job I'd ever had was working at WilmerHale, and I'd been there forever, and I had been with these same people forever. At the time, the people I was closest with, I knew we would still be in touch, but I just thought it was going to irrevocably change the nature of our relationship. I thought they would be mad at me. I had a lot of guilt around leaving. So it wasn't a comforting thing that I was really close with them. I think it actually made the decision so much harder. If I'd had a little more separation from them and hadn't felt so close to them, it would have been easier, and I would have made the decision a lot faster than I did.

Khurram Naik: What led you to move from Durie Tangri back to WilmerHale?

Sonal Mehta: Again, this was a similar process, which is, these are things that at least for me are more about external or internal pushes to take risks. Things were going great at Durie Tangri. It was a great firm, really, really, I mean, talk about punching above its weight. The caliber of the lawyers and the matters that small San Francisco boutique was handling was really kind of amazing. It no longer exists in that same form, but at that time it was really kind of amazing. Things were going great there. My practice was booming. I went from in 2019 wondering if anyone would ever hire me to be their lawyer, to having this booming practice, having all these amazing clients, and trusting me with things that frankly I'm not sure I was qualified at the time as a younger partner to be entrusted with, but I was learning and growing and rolling with it, and I was able to deliver great outcomes for some of these clients.

Sonal Mehta: The internal push this time wasn't independence, but it was, wouldn't I be able to do more if I had more resources? If I had more people, more expertise across different practices or different areas, couldn't I help clients solve bigger problems? Some of that was internal, and some of that also was from clients who were like, you know, such a great firm, you guys are awesome, but there's sort of a cap on what we can give you in terms of the scale of the matter because you just don't have the resources. Have you ever thought about what your practice could look like if you were back on a bigger platform? It was the coupling of the internal and the external push of, everything's going great, why would I take the risk? Well, maybe I should take the risk and see if the practice can expand into more complicated, more interesting matters or bigger-scale matters if I have the resources of a firm with broader expertise.

Khurram Naik: Why WilmerHale and not WilmerHale again?

Sonal Mehta: I had been working with WilmerHale on some matters as co-counsel and was really impressed by the lawyers. We had a lot of common clients. So the client map really kind of worked out well. There were a couple clients where unfortunately the conflicts wouldn't make it possible going forward, but by and large it was almost complete overlap in clients. That was really attractive. I'd been working with WilmerHale lawyers in a co-counsel capacity and had just a tremendously positive experience. Very often when you're co-counsel with another law firm, there are sharp elbows, competition, attempts to one-up one another in front of the client. With the WilmerHale lawyers, there was none of that. We were all one team, genuinely, and I was the outsider and felt that way. So that was really attractive to me. That was the pull to WilmerHale.

Sonal Mehta: Maybe this is just, someone said this to me later, and I don't think I was processing it at the time, but when they said it later, I thought, huh, that could be part of it. They said, you know, wouldn't you be worried that if you moved back to WilmerHale people would perceive that as a failure? Like, you tried to go out on your own and then you couldn't make it, so then you went back to the comfortable. I never thought that expressly, but maybe that was subconsciously part of it as well.

Khurram Naik: Part of what I'm interested in is some of what's made you successful as a lawyer. We've been talking about your core competencies. What would you say are the two or three things that you feel really drive your success?

Sonal Mehta: Given the way this conversation has gone, it won't surprise anyone to hear I think my gut and my instincts are pretty important. I also think, God, this is hard, I don't like talking about this sort of stuff because it makes me seem braggy. If I were hiring myself, if I were in-house counsel and I was like, why would I want to hire Sonal, if I had to come up with a list, I do think my instincts are pretty good. I am pretty good at figuring out what's going to matter and what's not going to matter. If we're dealing with a complex set of facts or issues, going back to my gut, I usually am like, okay, these things are going to matter, we need to spend a lot of time and attention. If it's a litigation, these defenses are going to matter, so we really need to develop our defenses here, or this witness is going to matter a lot, or this set of meetings in 2022 is going to matter a lot. For some reason, through gut or whatever experience or combination thereof, if you kind of lay out everything, I'll be able to tell you usually, here are the things I think are going to matter in the end, and here are the things I think are going to fall away over the course of the case.

Sonal Mehta: The third is, I may not be the best lawyer, but I do care a lot. There are a lot of really fantastic lawyers out there, and I'm not suggesting I'm one of the best. But if you hire me for something, or if I take on a client's problem, I am going to sweat it to the last detail. I am going to lose sleep over it. It's going to be the thing on my mind when I'm brushing my teeth in the morning. It's going to be on my mind when I'm driving to the grocery store on Sunday. Probably in a way that's unhealthy, I really, really, really, really care about my matters. I live and breathe them. They become my life for whatever period of time I'm involved in them. It's probably unhealthy for me as a person, but it probably does serve my matters well.

Khurram Naik: It does make sense, because you can't become really good at something if it isn't on your mind most of the day. And that was part of my criteria for being okay with pursuing patent litigation, because I just knew, I'm never going to be thinking about an expert report in the shower. I'm just not. The things you think about in the shower are such a great measure of what you're driven by. As for sitting in front of a laptop, there are only so many hours that even the most elite worker can do that. The real competitive advantage is if that's just always going on in the back of your mind, or at some point in the front of your mind, pretty much all day.

Sonal Mehta: Yeah, I do think that's right. I think it's also sometimes where the creative ideas come from. Sometimes I'll be in the car going somewhere and I'll be like, what if we did this crazy thing, and I'll call my colleague and be like, hey, I know this is totally random, but what if we did X, Y, or Z? And they'll be like, oh my god, yeah, and then we could do this, and then it's like that. It's not even maybe a concrete thought process. I wasn't sitting in the car like, okay, now I'm going to think about this case. Your mind just wanders, and mine never shuts off, ever. The most creative things come to me when my mind is just wandering. A lot of the brilliance when you see someone do something really brilliant in this profession is not the playbook. It's something that came up kind of totally out of left field, or someone's creative idea. I aspire to do that more than I do. I would love to be the person that's always coming up with brilliant creative insights.

Khurram Naik: Tell me about the parts of your work that you enjoy the least. Depositions you love. What do you dislike about litigation?

Sonal Mehta: This has changed over time, as you might expect. When I was a younger lawyer, I used to love discovery, which is a weird thing to say, I know, but I used to love it. I used to love the meet-and-confer with the other side and the letters that you write back and forth, the sort of, it was fun, it was outsmarting the other side on a discovery issue. I used to really, really enjoy that. As I have gotten more senior, or just older maybe is really what it is, I find so much of the back and forth of litigation to be unnecessary and focused on things that don't really matter. There's so much posturing that happens. There's so much lack of civility that goes on. Maybe it's that it's getting worse, maybe it's just luck of the draw of the people I'm interacting with, maybe it's me having less tolerance for that as I get older and grumpier, but that part of this job I could definitely do with less of. Discovery is necessary and appropriate and we have to do it, but a lot of the incentives people have are really perverse in the discovery context, or in litigation generally. There's not as much discipline as there needs to be around that, and it's really a shame, because it's such a tax on our system and such a black mark on our system that we all spend so much time and money fighting over things in non-productive ways, and people end up becoming uncivil or completely unreasonable in that context. I'd say that's one thing I like less.

Sonal Mehta: I hate doing bills and time entry and all that stuff. I have said to many people, this job would be perfect if you didn't have to do any of the money associated with it. If I didn't have to go out and do budgets or enter my time or submit bills or follow up on bills, if I were infinitely, independently wealthy and could just be a litigation partner for free and never had to think about any of the money associated with it in any direction, I'd be very happy.

Khurram Naik: There's another role you've taken on. You are on the management committee, which is a lot of responsibility for an institution, a big institution. A couple questions on my mind. One is, I've talked to other people I've interviewed, like Moez Kaba, who's a managing partner of Hueston Hennigan, and Kalpana Srinivasan, who is the co-managing partner of Susman Godfrey. Both are trial lawyers with very busy dockets, and then also in this management capacity. How do your trial preferences inform your approach to being on the management committee, and vice versa?

Sonal Mehta: One thing is, thankfully, I'm just one of many members of our management committee. So unlike Kalpana and Moez, who have to balance their trial practices with actually running the firm, we have a real managing partner and deputy managing partner who do the work, along with a tremendously talented executive team that do all the hard work. The way I think about it, I'm on the management committee of the firm, and I'm involved in leadership of the litigation department, and I'm also now the partner in charge of our Palo Alto office. So thinking about management from a few different angles.

Sonal Mehta: The way my litigation background influences the way I think about management, and I think it really annoys people to be honest, and probably rightly so, is I ask a lot of questions. The way my mind works as a litigator is to interrogate everything. We have to make a decision about something, and my first instinct is, okay, well, what about this, and what's the basis for that, and what's the fact that supports X, Y, and Z, and where do we get that data, and what's the other data, and what's the source for that data. I start to ask all the questions you would have if you were a litigator either getting a position ready to present, or if you were the judge going through and trying to make a decision. I interrogate everything. Sometimes I interrogate things that probably don't matter. It's my instinct to ask a lot of questions. That's how I think my training as a litigator influences the way I think about management, because I have a small role among a lot of super-talented people that have tremendous judgment and wisdom, and I'm just trying to add some value where I can. The way I think about my value is asking all those questions, because maybe a lot of them are obvious or a lot of them don't matter, but maybe every once in a while, I will ask a question that's a different way of thinking about it, or make an underlying point someone else hadn't thought about, or elicit new information or data that contributes to the conversation in a way that's helpful.

Khurram Naik: Has your role on the management committee influenced how you litigate?

Sonal Mehta: I think it has, in ways that I could sort of concretely express, but also subconsciously. One is that the people I'm on the management committee with are people I might not otherwise get to spend a ton of time with, because our management committee includes people from other practice areas and other offices. I would know them, but I wouldn't really know them well, and I wouldn't get to work with them. I get to sit in a room with them and talk to them and hear how they think about things and how they go about making complicated decisions. There's a perspective I'm able to gain from these incredible lawyers I would never otherwise get to see, that has really been valuable for me. I don't know that the last time I had a decision to make in litigation, I was channeling someone from the management committee, but I do think we all absorb things we learn from other people, and being surrounded by these brilliant leaders, I have to be absorbing from them, and that's making me better.

Sonal Mehta: The other thing, in the same vein, is taking a step back and thinking about the big picture, taking a step back and thinking about the perspectives of people that don't have the same experience as you. We always have to do that as litigators and trial lawyers, because we're going to ultimately have to present our case to a judge or jury that doesn't have the same perspective we do, or the same information we do. But when you're thinking about running a firm that has a lot of different people in a lot of different geographies with different practices and different clients, every decision you make, you have to affirmatively step back from your own perspective. While you want to contribute your perspective, because the reason we're elected presumably is so that all these different perspectives are reflected, you also have to very consciously say, okay, but that's great, how does that impact this other office, or this other practice area, or this other set of clients, or this other industry? As a litigator, and especially someone getting more and more senior, dealing with really complicated webs of considerations and problems and legal challenges, and doing a lot of advising clients even outside the courtroom on those kinds of problems, the muscle memory of forcing yourself to take a step back and think about it from the perspective of other constituencies has been really valuable. That came from management, and I think it's now a big part of how I think about how I advise clients as well.

Khurram Naik: Speaking of looking outside for inspiration, is there a firm that you really admire?

Sonal Mehta: There are so many firms I admire for so many different things. I was thinking about this question, and I predicted you might ask it. This is like a totally apples-to-oranges comparison, but that's part of why I was thinking about it. You mentioned earlier Kalpana, that you interviewed Kalpana, who is co-managing partner at Susman Godfrey. That firm is so completely different from our firm. I think it has to be. Our system only works if there are firms like that, and firms like ours, and different types of matters and different types of clients. We just are operating in different areas of the industry, and the industry needs both. I really do respect so much of what a firm like that does in terms of the way they think about the business, the way they think about recruiting and retaining talent, the way they structure their trial teams, the tremendous trial successes they've had, the business successes they've had. We could never be that firm, and it would make no sense for us to want to be that firm in every respect. But I do really respect a lot about what I've observed about that firm from the outside. We should always look for learnings from firms that are a lot like ours, but also from firms that are really different, to see what parts of the way other people are doing it we can steal.

Khurram Naik: Is there a lawyer whose career trajectory you really admire?

Sonal Mehta: I really hope that they don't listen to this, so we're going to try to avoid ever mentioning I did this podcast, so that I don't embarrass them. Someone that's been really influential in my career is Paul Grewal, who I suspect a lot of your listeners are familiar with. I knew him when he was on the bench, and I appeared before him as an associate, and have very fond memories of that. Then I knew him when he was at Facebook, and know him now that he's at Coinbase. Part of this is, I couldn't be more grateful to Paul than I am. In terms of impact on my career, he's probably one of the top three most impactful people I've ever worked with as a mentor, and he was really largely responsible for the expansion of my practice to move beyond just IP litigation to also covering all types of complex litigation matters, because he gave me my first non-IP matter. I can't imagine why he thought that was a good idea, but he did, and then it grew from there.

Sonal Mehta: Setting gratefulness aside, objectively thinking about why I admire him so much, there are a couple things. One is he is in some ways the epitome of the, everything's going great and then you break it anyway and go do something else. If you think about his career, he's a great IP litigator, and then he takes the judgeship, and then he's one of the most well-respected judges anywhere in the country, and people were desperate to be in his courtroom as much as possible because they loved being in front of him. And he gave that up to go take this really hard, complicated job at Facebook, and then he's running litigation at Facebook and is in the thick of it, dealing with the most sophisticated, most complex legal issues, and it's going great. And then he goes to be the CLO at Coinbase, and is now in crypto, as if it was going to be easy to be the CLO of Coinbase in the current environment related to crypto. It's really hard to walk away from something when it's going great and go into something that's going to be harder and more uncertain. He's the epitome of someone that's done that over and over again, and just jumped in and then killed it when he went to the next place. I admire that so much.

Sonal Mehta: The other thing I really admire is, we were talking earlier about civility. He is really tough as a judge and as a client. He's super smart. He asks hard questions. He's not giving anyone a free pass. But he's so unfailingly kind. I remember being in his courtroom and I was waiting for a discovery hearing, and there was a matter before ours. I think it was a traffic violation or parking ticket on federal land, so it actually went to a federal judge. I was there for this massive discovery fight, a really consequential discovery fight in massive IP litigation, big tech companies, big law firms on both sides, high stakes. And then there was this small matter, probably a few hundred dollars at most. I think it was a parking ticket. They were before us, and he was just so respectful. It was an individual, it wasn't even a lawyer. He was so respectful to the individual, welcomed them to his court, went through the process, gave them full airing of the issues, full opportunity, explained the process to them. And then he came in and did the exact same thing for our big fancy high-stakes patent dispute. I was thinking, that kindness and respect, which I've seen him have in every context, God, I wish we had more of that. I wish we had more of that in the law, I wish we had more of that in the world. I wish we all had that kind of respect for every single person we encounter. I admire that a lot too.

Sonal's description of Paul Grewal's courtroom, tough on the merits, unfailingly kind to everyone in the room, echoes how Judge Vince Chhabria talked about running his docket: process and civility as the substance, not the packaging, of justice. Listen to my episode with Judge Vince Chhabria.

Khurram Naik: I observed that from a great judge in the Northern District of Illinois, Chief Judge James Holderman. Routinely he had people pro se, and there's a selection factor for the kinds of people who have a pro se. They tend to have no case, they tend to be, shall we say, cranks, or potentially have some mental health issues. I observed, just like you're saying, that character of how he approached those people and those conversations and those hearings. He said of that, my approach is, I'm a public servant, and part of why I'm here is to give people an outlet so that they don't take out their anger on the world in some other format. I think that was beyond his job. He went beyond the call of his job as someone who's genuinely interested in the public well-being and policy. It sounds like Paul is the same way. Part of what you're talking about in admiring Paul is his willingness to bet on himself and invest in himself. Can you share some tips for people at any stage of the career, could be geared more toward junior people, but at every stage of the career we're all trying to grow something, right? You talk about business development, that's the frontier for you. We all have something we're developing. In terms of advice on investing in yourself or betting on yourself, what frameworks or tools do you want to impart on people for identifying opportunities and investing in yourself to make the bet?

Sonal Mehta: Part of this is, you have to kind of get comfortable that you're going to do things that are not always going to work out perfectly, but you've got to be willing to take risks. Some of the best things that have happened in my career have been risks I've taken, or things I've done where I was like, I don't know why I'm doing this, but I'm just going to go with it, and great things can come from that. So part of betting on yourself is getting comfortable with the risks.

Sonal Mehta: I also think part of it is, it's easier to bet on yourself when you know you have the safety net of support. I think that comes from mentoring and from people that are your advocates and your supporters. I've gotten incredibly lucky in that arena, from so many different people at different stages of my career. But the thing that's really important about that, looking back, is it's easier to bet on yourself when you know you've got those people. It's easy to have preconceptions about who those people are going to be or what they're going to look like. I would just urge especially the younger lawyers to not worry about that. Anyone that's willing to invest in you and your career and your development, grab that person. Try to get them to engage with you. Try to get them to invest in you as much as possible, because if they invest in your success, it's amazing how much more successful you have, right? If all these brilliant successful people are invested in you, they're going to want to see you do well, and that's going to help you.

Sonal Mehta: For me, I didn't have really any women or people of color as mentors when I was a very young associate. But I had amazing mentors who were men. It was great. They went out of their way to help me in every way possible, with no reward for themselves, give me opportunities and support my career. If I had been really focused on finding a woman of color mentor and closed myself off to that, I would have cut off all this mentorship and support.

Sonal Mehta: Another example: I had this really hard-fought case against another firm for many years. There was a senior partner on the other side. Now that I'm thinking about it, this has happened to me twice. There's a senior partner on the other side, who, as much as the cases were hard-fought and litigated aggressively on the merits, in both of these cases, the senior partner on the other side after the case was over reached out to me and said, they were both men, by the way, neither were people of color, they were both white men, and they were a lot older than me, and they both reached out to me, a decade apart, and said, I think you're really tremendously talented. If there's anything I can ever do to support you in your career, I really hope that you'll reach out to me. These were my opposing counsel. We should grab that mentorship and support anywhere we can get it, because it will allow you to take those risks and bet on yourself.

Khurram Naik: I think we have a lot of food for thought here, and I think, notwithstanding your initial counsel, there are very interesting stories and ideas you have throughout your career. I'm really glad we took the time to explore those.

Sonal Mehta: Thank you so much for having me. I'm not sure that that's true, but as I told you when we first embarked on this, if there's even one younger lawyer that actually made it all the way through this and listens to it and found a nugget or two that might be helpful to them as they're navigating their career, then it was a joy for me to do it, and it was well worth it. I'm grateful to you for the time and the opportunity.