Disrupting Drinking with Jaimie Nawaday

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Bar Review, a space where we talk honestly about life and the legal profession. I'm Carrie, and I'm Anika. Welcome to the conversation. Just a quick note before we get started, we are not your lawyers, and this is not legal advice. - And to the extent either of us are employed by the time this airs, this is where we share our personal opinions and not the opinions of anyone else, especially those kind enough to employ us. - And one more time for the people in the back? - We are not your lawyers. This is not legal advice. Thank you for listening. - Jamie, thank you so much for being on Bar Review. We're really grateful to chat with you. - Happy to be here. - Jamie, you are the co-head of the government enforcement and internal investigations practice group and a partner in your litigation and investigations group at Seward and Kissel in New York City. Before that, you were with the Southern District of New York's United States Turnies Office where you were in both the criminal and civil divisions which never happens. And you have led some of the most groundbreaking cases including civil asset forfeiture, including month long Rico conspiracy trial that involves securities and healthcare fraud. And most importantly, you are a member of the Women's White Collar Defense Association as Onnigun IR and we're grateful to be part of any club that you're a part of, Jamie. - Thank you. - Anything else that people should know about you? - I guess that I'm the first lawyer in my family. So when I started out as a lawyer, I really felt like I just didn't know anything about how the business of law worked, how to be a lawyer, what was expected. And so with that came obviously a lot of insecurity, anxiety, imposter syndrome, and just looking around to other lawyers to try to absorb, but it meant to be a lawyer and how I should conduct myself and what I should wear, what I should eat, what I should drink, all of that. - Why did you go to law school? - I decided to go to law school when I was in philosophy graduate school at Rutgers. I was working on my PhD and it was, in some ways a great way to spend my 20s because I was hanging out with really smart people and I had all this flexibility in my day and it was fun to think about, it was just fun to analyze problems as a graduate student and talk with other smart graduate students about those problems. But kind of been looking ahead to my future, I realized I was more of a people person than I thought and then you sort of need to be, I think to really be in philosophy as an academic long term. And I also saw a statistic at one point that said the average journal article is read by three people and I thought all of this work and all of this time spent thinking and drafting and editing to get published to have an audience of three. And if I go to law school and become a lawyer, I'm going to have more than an audience of three for pretty much every idea and piece of writing that I have. There's going to be, the client's going to read it, other people at the firm are going to read it, the judge is going to read it, a posing council, at a minimum. And so I think it was a combination of those two things. Realizing I might really enjoy the theater of the courtroom and having a larger audience for ideas and also just wanting to interact with more people on a day-to-day basis. - What were you working on for your thesis? - My area of specialty was epistemology, which is the study of what we know and how we know it. - So I was a philosophy major and I say all the time that being a philosophy student taught me had a thing. - Yeah, I would totally agree with that. And I think it really teaches you critical thinking and analytical skills. And in that sense, it definitely made the transition to law school much easier, right? Because you hear about, oh, the first year of law school is all about learning how to think like a lawyer. But if you think like a philosopher, you probably already think like a lawyer. So that's a pretty easy transition. - I like that. What was it like adjusting to the practice of law after law school? How did the motivations for why you wanted to be a lawyer compared to actually being a lawyer? - I think what was most challenging initially was just the culture shock of starting out in law, even as a summer associate. I was a summer associate at a very prestigious white shoe for not my current firm, but another New York City law firm. And one of my first days as a summer associate, another partner, an M&A partner at the firm called me into his office. And he said, I noticed that you're from outside of Alentone, Pennsylvania. And I said, yes, I am. And he said, well, I'm from Alentone also. And I thought, oh, great. And he said, there are not a lot of us who make it out of there and make it in New York City. And I didn't think there was anything particularly unusual about my background at the time. But the fact that he called me into his office is if we were, I mean, I'm from two hours outside of the city. And it is culturally different. But to draw attention to it in that way was not helpful to my confidence at the time. Right? Like there's no one like us at this type of firm. And I noticed, and it was a very large summer class which was maybe 150. This was back in 2002 when the summer classes were very large at the big firms. And there were just a ton of people from New York City, from Boston. They went to the same high schools. They were from kind of the private school network. And I grew up barely middle class in Central Pennsylvania. And it went to public high school. So it was-- we'd go around the table when we'd go out to these lunches and people say, where are you from? And other people would rattle off. Oh, and I went to Andover. I went here. I went there. And they were from places that everyone recognized. And then I would say I'm from outside of Elantone, Pennsylvania. And people would just say, oh, OK. Nobody knew what to say in response. Nobody was ever from there. And it was kind of a conversation-ender. So I realized, OK, I'm a little bit different. I didn't know. There was a lot of conversation about things like going to the Hamptons on weekends. I didn't really know what the Hamptons were or what that was all about. And so I started to get a sense from those conversations and then going out to lunches where I really didn't know what we were eating. Like, I actually didn't know what the food was. I didn't know if it was finger food or if it was food that I should eat. I would wait and see, is this finger food? And if we had to use chopsticks, I'd never learned how to use chopsticks. So we'd go to these fancy Asian fusion places. And I was so uncomfortable to have to ask for a fork or things like that. So I was excited about interacting with more people in the legal world. And then I realized none of these people are like me. And I'm going to have to adjust. So I would say that was the challenge. Founted it impact your actual practice. I'll say for me, I will take 10 steps for every one step. I feel like somebody else is taking. Yeah, I definitely did that in the early years, right? In Poster syndrome was certainly a big driver. And so I just thought I was going to turn something in and I was going to get the response of, how did you get here? What did you do here? Right? So definitely overthinking, over-prooving every assignments, which I think is pretty common. And I probably had it to a greater degree. But just all of that constant hand-wringing, over-analysing, overthinking every step of the way. But it made you better? Yes, in some ways. And for a while, yes. What are the ways it didn't make you better? I could be easily influenced. It was hard to figure out in the early firm days who was a reliable or trustworthy mentor who wasn't. I didn't have a big range of diverse mentors. So I think I could be easily influenced by what I saw. And I just didn't have-- I didn't have good stress management and coping skills. I felt overwhelmed all the time. By the hours, by the stress, the life of a junior associate is, if you do well, you're not going to hear a lot of great job, given what your role is day to day. But if you screw up, you feel like an handful's going to fall in your hand. If you have some of those early junior associate experiences, like working on a privileged log, there's no-- you're not going to crush it. Nobody's going to say that was an amazing privilege log. But you are going to be destroyed if a privileged document goes out the door, something like that. So sort of living in that world was new pressure for meeting. deal with. And you know, I went to work, I came home at the end of a very long day, and I just I just didn't know how to decompress apart from, okay, I'll have a glass of wine or something like that. That's what I saw lawyers do on TV. So that's what I started doing. And how did that evolve? That was, you know, at first it seemed fine. It seemed what everybody does, right? Have a drink at the end of the day. And all the lawyers I knew pretty much did that. In the media, that's what we see. So at first it seemed fine. And my day-to-day routine was unaffected. But over time, it was the predictable progression, I guess. You go from one glass to two glasses, you go from two glasses to sometimes three glasses, or maybe it just goes up a little bit on the weekends. And then you go through a period where you cut back. So it seems like everything is fine. But I would say once I joined the US Attorney's Office, there was, you know, the pressure was new, the levels of drinking I saw were new and more severe than when I was seeing it, the law firm. And it was more of a hard liquor culture than I had seen before, which was more of a wine culture where I was in the firms. So I don't think I appreciated that. And one, I think one of the things that you just said that you're all taken for granted and that is the problem. And that's why we're going to talk about disrupting drinking is alcohol as part of the culture. Can you talk more about that and how alcohol is part of the culture, but also the private practice versus public sector and how those cultures seem to be different in alcohol play to role in both of those cultures. In private practice, I remember that there was very regular drinking in terms of firm happy hours and any kind of gala that you'd go to in law, there were always just long dinners with heavy wine pours and things like that. But it was this, I don't know, I guess it's just they want to be seen as more refined and wine drinking is this is this is what we federal court civil lawyers do and it's very refined. And I don't know quite how to characterize it, but I just don't remember seeing as much hard liquor. And then at the US Attorney's office, we had a tradition of Scotch Fridays where everybody broke out the Scotch in whiskey on Fridays and he had a big file that had full of liquor that that we used on Fridays and then and then but that was available sort of throughout the week and some people had liquor just in their offices and at some point I did as well and it wasn't seen as a strange thing to do. I mean I've been at a number of firms now. It never at none of those firms would have be considered normal to have part liquor in your office and just to kind of help yourself at the end of the day, but that was not a terribly strange thing at the US Attorney's office and I think it went along with maybe part public sector and part the image of the trial lawyer and that trial lawyers are whiskey drinkers. This is something that's been around for a while, but especially in the criminal law and prosecutor world. I remember even seeing old episodes of law and order and the prosecutors would go back to their office late at night after a hard day and they'd have whiskey or bourbon or they'd meet at the bar and they'd be having hard liquor at the bar with the defense attorneys, but that was in my mind very much part of that world. I graduated from law school in 2022. When I was in law school there was definitely a culture of trying to limit drinking so we often didn't have alcohol at events. There were a lot of conversations around well-being and that alcohol use in the profession is a problem and then I got into practice and I remember going to events where there isn't a nano-ocohoic option. I remember one in particular I was like oh could I just get a sparkling water and they were like no, want a beer? I was just like okay, no, I didn't really want to drink tonight and there's just not that alternative. So that is just interesting to me and to hear about how prevalent alcohol use was kind of in your career just in the office's day to day and I think it still is in my career. But I'm curious if you've seen a change over the years if there are more alternatives or other options or if it just kind of remained the same. I think it's changing. I mean when I moved to my current from a few years ago and and I made sort of a I mean for me a big deal about it in the sense that when I went there I was very clear that I don't drink. I didn't want some sort of cocktail hour when I started and when we had firm events happy hours and things like that I always wanted non-ocohoic options to be visible, widely available, not just juice and soda, not just sparkling water and I got a really good response, especially from junior attorney saying like oh that's that's so much better. We don't really, you know, Gen Z doesn't drink nearly as much as my generation Gen X and they really appreciated that and there are just lots of people who just are drinking on a particular night, right? I mean if you're doing a lot of networking events you can otherwise just be drinking alcohol every night of the week in order to socialize and obviously people want more options now. I'm still kind of going back and forth between these two worlds where I'm in this one world where it seems like things have changed a lot because I see maybe more outside the legal world. I just see the boom in the non-alcoholic beverage industry for instance like at the grocery store you can get non-alcoholic wine, beer, all these different things but in about two weeks I have the annual ABA white color conference and I've gotten a flood of invitations for cocktail hours at that conference and I keep trying to get the word out doing posts whatever about here's how to update your cocktail hour your social reception whatever by having non-alcoholic options here's how you do it here are three simple steps that you know the where you can make everyone feel included by bringing it non-alcoholic options making them visible and accessible for everyone but I'm not seeing any of that yet on actual invitations I'm still getting a lot of invitations to wine tastings I'm still getting a lot of invitation to mezcal tastings and they're they're actually great non-alcoholic wines now and non-alcoholic mezcels and it would just be so easy to make that and maybe they will have them there but I don't know they're still that uncertainty if I go to this event if there's going to be anything at all because I've you know I went to an invite only lawyers conference a few years ago where there was a bourbon tasting and they had not even water other than bourbon so we were just standing in a room and it was pure bourbon and if you didn't want to drink bourbon you were standing there empty handed which was so I stood there empty handed and I didn't die from the experience but it was just obviously not merely as fun as it couldn't been and why why do that to your guests you just made an inferior and you made somebody uncomfortable and it's again it's so easy to include something non-alcoholic so it's I would say the the progress is very spotty I hear from some people oh my firm is really great about always including an array of non-alcoholic options but at conferences and things like that and still at a lot of firms throughout the country there's been very little movement I have a close friend who stopped drinking in law school and she always talked to me about just the importance of having something in her hand that people will try to offer you a drink if you don't know something in her hand that she would always get a sparkling water with a slice of lime so people thought it was a gin and tonic and wouldn't try to offer her something else to drink but it she and I have talked a lot about the importance of non-alcoholic options that aren't just a sparkling water non-alcoholic drinks can be so fun and they're so easy so why not have it it does seem like such a simple thing to have right so Jamie what is disrupting drinking disrupting drinking is a new project and business I launched it encourages both personal change and cultural change around drinking and I wanted the audience and the message to be as broad as possible and so I chose disrupting drinking as opposed to something around quitting drinking or stopping drinking when I first changed my drinking I I did it as part of a challenge I didn't really want to think about the rest of my life but I thought I wanted to stop drinking for a year and see what my life looks like at the end of that year and that was an incredible motivator for me if I just started to visualize what does my life look like if I have not had alcohol for one year what might my weekends look like what might my exercise routine look like might might you know what how might I be able to fill that time and what would be the benefits at the end of the year and that was an incredible motivator and I wanted to continue after that year but I was still in the never say never like there might be some opportunity down the road where I'd want to drink and so I'd go back and forth for a year or so and then ultimately I decided I'm seeing all these benefits in my life and I do think there's kind of a compound interest effect that happens the longer you go with without alcohol. And I really wanted that in the end and I just decided it wasn't worth it. So I stopped entirely. But I like the concept of disrupting drinking just to encourage. I like the concept of disrupting drinking to encourage a change. Maybe that change is cutting back. Maybe that change is stopping entirely. Whatever it is, I want to be a source of tips and strategies and encouragement for those people. And for those people who maybe have already stopped drinking or never were drinkers and are looking around them and sometimes feeling out of place in the legal industry or whatever industry they're in because whether you're in law, law enforcement, finance, consulting, we have incredibly boozed, soaked professional cultures. And I want to encourage those people to share their stories about why they don't drink so that we can all feel more included so that we can start to move the needle and change the culture. And really elevate a healthier lifestyle and healthier behaviors because when I was coming up in law, like I said, I just didn't have any mentors who didn't drink or maybe I did, but I didn't know that they didn't drink because they weren't vocal and visible about it. And I think it's so important for people to have those mentors and hear those stories because it just would have made a world of difference to me, especially like as a young first generation lawyer looking at what everyone is doing, if there had been a senior attorney, especially a senior female attorney who said, you know what? I started out drinking and it was not for me and it was leading me in the wrong direction and so be very careful about what you do around drinking. And here's what I do instead. That would have had such a beneficial impact on me. And my daughters are teenagers and I think about the or place that they'll be entering in a few years and I just want there to be more stories out there of healthy behavior and a different way to be a lawyer. So for all those reasons, sort of the personal change, interest, the cultural change, interest, those things come together and disrupting drinking. You said that there are three things that you would tell event organizers that they could do differently. What are those three things? First, to including non-alcoholic options, make it make it visible on the invitation, right? Eliminate the guesswork because where you have uncertainty about should I go, should I not go? Are they going to have something that just creates friction and people are less likely to attend your events, especially if it's inconvenient to get there, they're already feeling a little bit tired. If I'm in downtown Manhattan, do I really want to go up to Midtown at the end of the day to sip a sparkling water as opposed to if I see on the invitation that they're going to have like fantastic zero proof spirits, that's going to make a difference in whether I attend and just eliminate the guesswork, put it on your invitation. The second, a lot of times they think, okay, well, we have this kind of juicence soda quote unquote mocktail. That's enough. Here's some ginger ale and pineapple juice or something like that, but it's not really what people want. It doesn't feel like an adult beverage. It feels a little too close to a surely temple for a lot of people. I think they need to educate themselves on what the options are. It's so easy to get better options even in the supermarket now. At a minimum, I would encourage event organizers to have a non alcoholic beer, a non alcoholic wine, and some non alcoholic spirits. Just at least have options outside of juicence soda that are in each of the three main categories that you would have for alcohol drinkers. So, beer, wine, spirits. What the third thing is to make it visible to your guess as they're coming in. So, if you have servers circulating with wine, for instance, if you have wine on trays, have non alcoholic wine on trays as well and make sure that the servers are circulating and saying, would you like glass of wine? We have both alcoholic and non alcoholic and just point those out to the guests because for drinkers, it's so easy for them to just reach without breaking stride in the conversation. They just reach in glass of wine and non drinkers are sort of standing there empty handed. Do I just stand here empty handed? Do I go on this scavenger hunt and try to find something not alcoholic? And again, we have that friction point. We're breaking out of the conversation and then we have to break back in. It's such an easily fixable problem. So, if you have people circulating it, including it on the trays, is hugely beneficial. And at the bar itself, make the non alcoholic options readily visible. Have them on a card upfront, have them displayed. Maybe you have a sample beer wine spirit of the alcoholic variety on one side of the bar and non alcoholic on the other. So you can see, oh, here's athletic brewing company or whatever, some familiar brand. And you know that's available so that you're not going up and you're saying, which we've all done is what do you have that's non alcoholic? And they will say, in the bartender so often says, we have juice, we have soda. I can make you a surely temple. And I get offered a surely temple. I would say it's still several times a year, which just seems crazy to me. Or it's, well, maybe I can make something and then it's a long delay and you feel sort of bad, you're holding up the lot. It's just have it at the ready. I love that. To sign up for the disrupting drinking newsletter, you can send an email to Jamie at the email address in the show notes below. Thank you so much for being here, Jamie. Thanks for joining the conversation. You can find bar review wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and share. Want to keep the conversation going? Follow us on social at bar review LLC. On it, we'll see you there and she'll tell me all about it. Not a question you want us to tackle in a future episode? Send it our way. We try to read every email. And just a reminder, we are not your lawyer. This is not legal advice and these opinions are just our own. Cheers! (upbeat music)