Associate, Milbank Hadley Tweed & McCloy, New York
Order of the Coif
As an intern with the Administrative Enforcement Unit of New York City’s Department of Buildings during summer 2011, Matthew Kusel got substantive experience in both reading and interpreting regulations—in this case, building codes—and in presenting oral arguments to a judge. “My job was to represent the city in administrative hearings where somebody who received a building ticket was defending their case,” he explained. “Attorneys handle the really important, high-dollar cases, but the Department of Buildings handles between 500 and 900 cases a day, and they use legal interns to deal with smaller cases.”
While the internship was unpaid, Kusel received course credit for his work. He discovered the position while searching online for legal internships in New York City and was immediately intrigued by the opportunity to spend the summer doing legal work. “I dealt with a lot of illegal occupancy violations, where building owner chops a building meant to have, for example, five apartments, into several smaller units,” he said. “It’s a widespread practice, and fires have resulted in fatalities because building owners had put up walls that blocked fire escapes. I wanted to win all my cases, but these were especially poignant, because people’s safety was at stake.”
Professor Tracey George, from whom Kusel took Contracts and Evidence, supervised his internship. “Before I started law school, I couldn’t imagine being interested in Contracts,” he said, “but Professor George taught the class so well, I genuinely enjoyed it. It was a great introduction to thinking like a lawyer.” George was also faculty advisor to the Vanderbilt Law Review, for which Kusel served as Articles Editor.
Kusel recalls his Civil Procedure Class, taught by Professor Brian Fitzpatrick, who uses the Socratic method of teaching, as “terrifying but also a great experience. He takes the cold-calling Socratic method very seriously. My seat was front-row center, and I read most assignments twice just so I’d be prepared.”
His positive experiences in George and Fitzpatrick’s courses during his first year of law school led him to choose George’s upper-level Evidence course and Complex Litigation with Fitzpatrick.
Kusel spent summer 2012 working for Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy in New York and joined the firm after graduating in May. He was selected for the Order of the Coif in September 2013.
A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, Kusel had planned to go to law school in his home state until he visited Vanderbilt. “I’d heard great things about Vanderbilt—that it was a very good and very friendly law school—and when I was admitted, my father and I made the 10-hour drive from Raleigh to Nashville to visit,” he said. “I was really impressed with Nashville and with the law school.” Kusel also acknowledges another important factor in his choice of Vanderbilt. “I want to work in New York, and Vanderbilt does a good job of placing students there,” he said.
After earning his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina, where he majored in journalism and minored in music, Kusel spent a year working two jobs—as a copy editor for a yellow-book company and as a night stocker at PetSmart—to save money to pay for law school. To relax, he played guitar in a rock band he formed with two other law students—Eric Fackrell and Greg Robinson. He connected with his roommate, David Mitchell, on the Class of 2013 Facebook page soon after both chose Vanderbilt for law school. Kusel and Mitchell became friends as well as roommates, and after commuting from an apartment in a Nashville suburb during their first year, they moved to a townhouse nearer campus before their 2L year and remained roommates throughout law school.
“I feel really good about my decision to come to Vanderbilt,” Kusel said. “I didn’t take a class here I didn’t enjoy enjoyed.”
