Lawyer and musician, Janet Gertz, has been working in the field of law for 20 years. It was a life-changing move to switch jobs halfway through her career in marketing when Gertz’s mother asked her “Did you ever think of going to law school?”. During this time, Gertz was working for tech companies in San Diego, in the contract management department, when she received another hint for her future career from her employer in HR: “And she looked up at me and she said, have you ever thought of going to law school?”, hesitant at first Gertz responds, “I would never do that”. After a long thought she goes to her boss, “So here’s my proposal. I can go to law school at night. I said, is the company supportive of that. And, you know, he didn’t skip a beat. He said I think that’s a great idea. I think you’d be an asset to the company. and he said, well, even, you know, pay your tuition. And so I, you know, I was basically, you know, doing both at the same time I was like, “I couldn’t, I couldn’t change my mind.” Gertz’s most rewarding aspect of her job is “getting a good result for clients,” where she describes a case in which she took a risk in telling her client a crucial piece to a case. Gertz says the legal profession has “become, well, it’s a lot harder… you know, it’s like the AI is really becoming a real issue, it’s just starting and the point where, you know, it’s within view that a lot of the work that’s done by like a first-year associate can be, can be done by, by the software, which is really unfortunate because you need those that fresh blood because, you know, how else are you gonna, because they’ll build lawyers, they die off.” Janet is learning to play piano, with her current mixture of favorite artists and genres being, “Gregorian chant but then I like Chris Bodie. I don’t know if you know who he is. Keiko Matsui, who’s a jazz pianist.” Gertz says she finds a huge connection between her interests in music and her career as a lawyer. “It’s odd, there’s a lot of lawyers that are really good musicians, like concert pianists and people who play the violin and, yeah, composers. I mean, it’s actually kind of weird the, the way that it’s, it’s, it’s aligned that way”. Her takeaway message was, “It’s never too late to, to completely reinvent yourself, because, I was, 40 when I went to law school and, it actually turned out to be fabulous, kind of like a reset”.
