Gregg Cashmark began working in restaurants in his teens in Northern California, eventually moving up to sous chef and then chef de cuisine. After a decade in the industry, he was already thinking about making a change when the restaurant brought in a lawyer to help with some legal issues. “I saw and met an attorney for the first time in my life, and I was already kind of looking for another career, and I realized that that’s the thing that I wanted to do,” he recalled.

Gregg went back to school to earn his bachelor’s degree and then worked for a year as a paralegal while applying to law schools. He and his family were excited at the possibility of moving to a new state, and he was impressed with Vanderbilt’s reputation. “Its professors are ranked very, very highly, and they’re cited a lot. It places people in jobs and clerkships really well, and those are the three big things I care about in law school… Vanderbilt’s kind of a no brainer,” he said.

He also appreciated Vanderbilt’s collegial atmosphere and lack of ruthless competition. “There’s this nice, welcoming environment where everybody knows each other. It feels a lot more like a neighborhood,” he said. “Everybody’s very competitive with themselves and wants to succeed and do good, but there’s no sharp elbows or trying to push other people down.”

Gregg didn’t start law school with a particular specialty or practice group in mind, but he has grown more interested in transnational and international legal work— especially after taking classes with Professor Ingrid Brunk on civil procedure and public international law.

He spent his 1L summer working with Professor Brunk as a research assistant. For several months, Gregg researched legal issues and helped to write and edit articles for the Transnational Litigation Blog and the American Journal of International Law. “I saw a job posting, and I had been wanting to do a research assistant position over the first summer. People usually get a job at a law firm, or sometimes they do an internship or something else… I wanted to just pursue academic interests, and so I’ve been doing that with her,” he said.

Gregg also used his 1L summer to apply for summer associate positions at law firms his 2L summer. He received offers from multiple firms and was immediately drawn to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. “I’d see their name come up a lot while I was researching for Professor Brunk over the summer. Even before that, right, I would look at the firms that argued a brief, and it was almost always a handful of names, one of them was Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher,” he said.

Gregg accepted the firm’s offer and looks forward to returning to California to work at the firm next summer. He says he’d love to receive a full-time offer from the firm and is also exploring clerkship options after graduation. In the meantime, he’s spending his second year at Vanderbilt Law participating in moot court and working as a staff editor for the Vanderbilt Law Review.

When asked about his advice for new law students, Gregg says, “I think the biggest piece of advice is to trust the system a little bit, which I think is really difficult. Everybody comes in their first year, and they’re very stressed and worried that things aren’t going to work out for them. But things have worked out for every single person I’ve talked to at Vanderbilt,” he said. “As long as you’re putting in the work, it pays off.”