GW Law student Joe Sutter, Class of 2029, spent over a decade working in financial consulting before deciding to pursue his JD from GW Law.
As a part-time evening student, Sutter has had to learn to balance his current job duties with law school coursework and extracurricular activities like the George Washington Business & Finance Law Review, the Student Bar Association, the Schenck National Security Crisis Negotiation Competition, and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR).
Although demanding, Sutter says the experience has ultimately been energizing.
“After years of being one of the more experienced people in many professional settings, it has been healthy to become a beginner again,” Sutter said.
Read the full conversation below.
What made you want to go to law school?
My interest in law goes back to a dairy farm in southern York County, Pennsylvania.
As a teenager, I spent six summers working on a family farm connected to my church. Over time, the family became a second family to me, and I learned a lot about hard work, relationships, entrepreneurship, and what it takes to keep a business going.
I also saw how much legal decisions can affect a business and the people who depend on it. The family went through a complicated business and legal dispute, the farm eventually changed hands, and a community that meant a great deal to me changed with it. I wanted to help, but I did not have the tools to understand many of the issues, much less solve them.
That experience first put law school in the back of my mind.
I took a long route to get there. I became a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and spent the next decade-plus in the Big Four, first as an auditor and then as a consultant. As my career progressed—and as I became more involved in my community—I kept seeing the legal dimension of problems I was already helping people and organizations work through.
At some point, law school stopped looking like a departure from my career. It started to look like the natural next step.
Why did you choose GW Law?
I wanted to go to law school without putting the rest of my life on hold.
By the time I applied, I had spent more than a decade building a career I genuinely enjoyed. GW Law’s evening program allowed me to keep working full time while studying law in Washington, D.C. For someone interested in business, law, regulation, government, and public policy, that was a hard combination to beat.
What I did not fully appreciate before starting was how much I would value the people.
Evening students come to class with whole lives already in motion. My classmates are working professionals, public servants, military members, parents, entrepreneurs, and people changing careers. Many of us arrive after a full workday and settle in for several more hours of case discussion. There is a lot of perspective in that room.
The faculty have challenged me in equally valuable ways. I read more carefully now, write more precisely, and question assumptions I might once have accepted too quickly.
What area of the law are you studying? How do you see it supporting your current career?
I am most interested in business, finance, corporate governance, securities regulation, and technology.
My current work focuses largely on finance and digital transformation, including transactions, governance, controls, data, technology, organizational design, cost reduction, and regulatory considerations.
Law school gives me another way to approach many of those same problems. In business, we often ask: "What should the organization do? Where is the risk? How can this work better?"
Legal training pushes me to ask another set of questions: "Who has the authority to act? Where does the obligation come from? What does the text actually require? How has it been interpreted?"
I am especially interested in corporate and securities law and in how companies, investors, regulators, technology, and corporate governance increasingly intersect. My work with the George Washington Business & Finance Law Review gives me another place to explore those questions while becoming a better legal researcher and writer.
I do not see the JD as replacing the experience I already have. I want to build on it by adding legal analysis, writing, and advocacy to the financial and business judgment I have developed over my career.
What has the experience been like to attend law school part time while working a full time job?
There is no clever way around it: it is demanding.
Some days I finish a full slate of work meetings, switch into student mode, spend the evening discussing contracts or civil procedure, and then discover—with some disappointment—that tomorrow has remained on the calendar.
You get very good at calendar Tetris.
But the experience has also been more energizing than I expected. Work and law school use different muscles. I can spend the day thinking through a modern finance or technology problem and the evening studying a case decided more than a century ago. The contrast can be refreshing.
The biggest lesson has been that discipline is more reliable than motivation. There is not always going to be a perfect block of time when you are rested, caught up, fully caffeinated, and eager to read another 50 pages. Sometimes you sit down and do the work because it is time to do the work.
I have also become more deliberate about my priorities and more protective of the people and commitments that matter.
And after years of being one of the more experienced people in many professional settings, it has been healthy to become a beginner again. One good question from a professor can remind you very quickly how much you still have to learn.
More than anything, I have rediscovered how much I enjoy being a student.
My first year was demanding, occasionally chaotic, and humbling. It was also absolutely worth it.
What organizations/experiences have been most beneficial in your experience at GW Law so far?
One thing I would want prospective evening students to know is that part-time does not have to mean partially involved.
I wondered about that before coming to GW. My experience has been the opposite.
You can compete, join a journal, serve in student government, become a Student Ambassador, participate in student organizations, get to know your professors and classmates, and take advantage of studying law in Washington.
I competed in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), Mock Trial, and the Schenck National Security Crisis Negotiation Competition. ADR reinforced how much good advocacy depends on listening. Mock Trial forced me to think on my feet and make an argument clearly. Schenck dropped our team into a fast-moving problem where the facts kept changing and there was no perfect answer—which, after years in consulting, felt strangely familiar.
Serving as an SBA Senator and Student Ambassador has been rewarding in a different way because both roles let me contribute to the GW Law community. I especially enjoy talking with prospective and incoming students, including other working professionals, because I remember having many of the same questions about whether law school could realistically fit into an already-full life.
This year I also joined the George Washington Business & Finance Law Review. It is sharpening my research, writing, and editing skills—and giving me a new appreciation for how much time one footnote can consume.
Some of the best parts of GW, though, have been less formal: conversations with professors, friendships with classmates, and the chance to learn from people whose experiences are very different from mine.
What advice do you have for current professionals who are considering going to law school, whether part time or full time?
Be clear about why you want to go.
Law school asks a lot of you—time, money, energy, and attention. You do not need to know exactly where you want to be 20 years from now, but you should have a real sense of what you hope to get from the experience.
Then get practical. If you plan to work while attending school, take an honest look at your calendar and talk with the people who will feel the effects of that decision.
For me, the important question was not simply, Can I do this? It was, Can I do this in a way that is sustainable and still do the other important parts of my life well?
Experienced professionals should also give themselves some credit for what they already know. You may have never briefed a case, but years spent meeting deadlines, serving clients, managing people, working through disagreements, and making decisions without perfect information translate surprisingly well to law school.
At the same time, be willing to be new at something again. There is real value in walking into a room knowing you still have a great deal to learn.
When I started, I thought I was simply adding law school to my career. Instead, the different parts of my life have started to reinforce one another. Law school has changed how I analyze problems. My professional experience gives context to what I study. Community service keeps the human consequences of institutions and laws in view. And GW has introduced me to people and ideas I probably would not have encountered otherwise.
Do not wait for life to become perfectly convenient. I spent years thinking I would go to law school “eventually”—when work slowed down, the timing was better, or life became less complicated.
Eventually, I realized that “someday” was not going to put itself on my calendar.
So I did. I am very glad I did.
