How does one get into the practice of defamation law? I don’t suppose that’s a very interesting question for non-attorneys. But then, autobiographical anecdotes are always engaging.

Warren Buffet says, “Don’t invest in what you don’t understand.” There are many areas of practice that I don’t understand. But the first amendment is fairly straightforward.

I went into law school in my thirties. At that point I already had a family and had been through a series of dirty, dead-end jobs. My favorite of these was driving an ambulance, but my last job prior to law school was waiting tables.

Although I wasn’t very young, I went into law school quite naive. In fact, I don’t think my naivete fully left me until I’d been practicing for a few years. This is a kind of archetypal tragedy that happens to everyone, but it’s still tragic because idealism and naivete are very closely aligned. There’s no going back from being disillusioned. Perhaps that’s why so many people start looking for God in late middle age.

Anyhow, my favorite class in law school was constitutional rights. This is a naturally interesting area of the law that attracts attention from non-attorneys and generates a lot of media coverage. Of course, the first amendment (and defamation, via New York Times Co. v. Sullivan) figured prominently in the syllabus.

One of the mistakes I made in law school was being open about my politics, which were heterodox in that setting. This got me into a handful of avoidable conflicts and limited my options after graduation. Eventually, though, I found something.

My first associate position was with a firm that did a lot of flat fee criminal defense work—not just DUIs (where a flat fee is typical) but also felony cases.

Paying a flat fee for criminal defense incentivizes your attorney to sell you a plea deal. In most cases that’s fine because a plea deal is in the client’s best interest, which was certainly true at the firm where I was working.

However, there were a handful of cases where I came to understand that a plea deal was not in the client’s best interest. In those cases, the clients were being urged by my employer to accept plea deals where their chance of beating the charges at trial were quite good. I was even instructed to finesse the clients in specific ways so that they would “feel like” they were choosing to accept the plea.

At the time, I was not very experienced to be deciding whether to recommend accepting a plea versus sticking it out through trial. But even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I believe that those clients were being shafted by my employer. There was maybe one out of four that I was wrong about.

Attorneys are obligated by the rules of professional conduct to exercise independent professional judgment. This is supposed to mean that you do what you think is right within the law, even at the risk of going against your boss. Practicing law as an associate means treating this duty with nuance, but I took it literally.

Do you think my superiors were pleased when I announced that we were going to be driving out to some rural county for a week-long trial of a case that could’ve been resolved with a couple phone calls and a Zoom sentencing?

When my employer got frustrated and tried to clue me in, I stood my ground. Although I resigned, I did not leave on good terms.

Albuquerque attorneys are busy, but the market for associates is spotty here. Being principled and jobless in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic (remember that?), I took to the internet and started casting about for remote document review jobs.

That was when a handful of want-ads for more interesting work caught my eye. These were remote law clerk positions—research and writing, drafting legal briefs on a 1099 contract status. Eventually, I responded to an ad for a “first amendment law clerk” with an east coast firm.

The first amendment area that this firm was practicing in was defamation law. Just what that entails, I’ll leave for another post. Suffice it to say that after about a year of working for this other firm, I knew exactly what I would do differently, and decided to hang my shingle.

If you have a defamation matter, visit my law practice at latenightlaw.com.

All content © Aaron Cress 2025-2026