Will Simpson (’17) Joins Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP
BU Law’s robust on-campus recruitment program, along with a vibrant alumni network, helped Simpson find his dream job.
Will Simpson (’17) grew up in Mountain View, Arkansas, a town with a population of less than 3,000. After studying finance and economics at the University of Arkansas, he looked toward the East Coast for a change of atmosphere while he completed law school. During the application process, Boston University School of Law caught his attention.
“For a small-town Arkansas kid, BU was a gateway to major legal markets,” he says.
Now, as an associate in the Global Litigation group at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York City, Simpson has taken his BU Law education and launched himself into one of the largest legal markets in the world.
Simpson’s early experiences “have been surprisingly broad.” Rather than the typical first-year associate work load with only limited litigation work, he has found more opportunity to build on his BU Law education.
Only six months in, he has attended motion hearings at the US District Court and oral arguments at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He even “helped conduct international discovery under The Hague Convention.”
Before deciding on law school, Simpson looked for ways to fulfill his love of “narratives, arguments and the way logic works.” Undergraduate experiences with of journalism, politics, and public policy narrowed down his academic focus, but his final decision to pursue law came from an Oxford study abroad program that focused on law in the United Kingdom.
“I loved the way that you could build arguments based on past arguments,” he says. “I figured if I loved reading cases as a junior in college, I could probably handle three years of doing it in law school.”
His appreciation for the law continued during his time at BU Law. As a student, he served as an editor of the Review of Banking & Financial Law and participated in Moot Court and in the Civil Litigation Clinical Program.
“The amount of time I spent on Westlaw, researching and writing a moot court brief, in [BU Law’s] litigation clinic, or proofreading and checking citations for the journal, took up a huge chunk of my time,” he says. Now that he is working, he has put those experiences to good use and found that “you’re doing the same kind of stuff [in the workplace] and it is kind of funny.”
Simpson fell in love with legal research and writing while working a summer job with the Arkansas Attorney General’s office. His duties covered consumer protection litigation and included contributing to an appellate brief for the Arkansas Supreme Court. The job helped foster the skills he later refined with the Civil Litigation Clinical Program and Clinical Associate Professor Connie Browne.
Later, Simpson served as a summer associate at Cadwalader, an experience which later turned into a job offer.
Beyond the practical experiences, Simpson credits BU Law’s alumni network for giving him more opportunities to learn and rounding out his law school tenure. “I met a lot of alumni for fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there… and learned a lot that way,” he says. “Not just about practicing law, but about what makes firms different, what makes practices different, and work that different associates do.”
Through these informational interviews, he created an aggregate picture of what his future could look like after graduation. Sometimes the alums he met with were only a year older. In other instances, alumni brought experiences from their extensive backgrounds in the field.
Finally, with classwork, practical experience, and anecdotes in hand, Simpson left BU Law with a toolkit to apply his love of narrative and logic to his legal career.