After Graduating From NYU School of Law, Young Alum Begins Legal Career
Max Krinsky ’20 is a corporate law associate at Fenwick & West, which focuses on the tech and life sciences sectors.By: Meghan Kita Wednesday, December 11, 2024 02:37 PM
Max Krinsky ’20After his senior year, Max Krinsky ’20, a prelaw economics major, had intended to take a music management job at a company he’d interned for before pursuing law school and a career in entertainment law — a job that disappeared with the onset of the pandemic. Fortunately, he’d been accepted to a few law schools, so he decided to begin right away, starting at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law. He did well enough that, after a year, he was able to transfer to the New York University School of Law, one of the top law schools in the United States.
“The exit opportunities [after NYU] were literally limitless. You have the opportunity to go to smaller, niche-focused firms that are still very prestigious. I always have done better, like at Muhlenberg, in those smaller types of learning environments.”
—Max Krinsky ’20
“The exit opportunities [after NYU] were literally limitless,” says Krinsky, who was also on the baseball team at Muhlenberg. “You have the opportunity to go to smaller, niche-focused firms that are still very prestigious. I always have done better, like at Muhlenberg, in those smaller types of learning environments.”
Once he arrived at NYU, he saw similarities between his undergraduate work and the work he was expected to do in law school.
“I couldn’t have picked a better major [than economics] for law school, when I think about the high-level skills that I used every day. [Associate Professor of Economics Lindsey] Nagy did a really good job — there were no calculators allowed on her tests. You had to show your work the whole way through, and that’s what you do on a law school exam every time.”
—Max Krinsky ’20
“I couldn’t have picked a better major [than economics] for law school, when I think about the high-level skills that I used every day,” he says, noting that economics requires you to apply rules and equations to numbers while the law requires the same application of rules to a set of facts. “[Associate Professor of Economics Lindsey] Nagy did a really good job — there were no calculators allowed on her tests. You had to show your work the whole way through, and that’s what you do on a law school exam every time.”
Krinsky finished law school last year and began working full-time at Fenwick & West in New York City in January. In his role, he and colleagues work with life sciences and technology companies on a variety of legal processes and documents. Some of the most recent cases he has worked on include the acquisition of the online platform Yardzen, the pending acquisition of the work management platform Smartsheet, and the merger between the software providers Insightly and Unbounce. He draws upon his time as a student-athlete to manage his busy schedule and the variety of stakeholders involved in each project.
“Being a lawyer is a lot of life-work balance and getting things done in the time allotted, which, as a student-athlete, that’s like every day,” he says. “And anyone who goes into a firm will work on a team. Managing personalities, internally and externally, is a big part of the job.”
