Attorney Spotlight – Get to Know David Short

1. What inspired you to pursue a law career? I don’t think that it was a matter of inspiration, but of choice – I wanted a career that would allow me to make the world a better place, and law was one of the ways that I thought I might do so.

2. Why did you choose the areas of law that you practice? Like many lawyers, it wasn’t entirely purposeful. I started as a generalist and focused on opportunities that were both challenging and rewarding. This naturally led to anti-corruption and anti-fraud work, in part because of the firms I came to and the people I worked with.

3. What skills do you draw upon when it comes to your specific practice areas? Writing, more than anything. Being able to clearly communicate ideas and principles in an organized, digestible way that is tailored to the recipient or recipients – whether a client, opposing counsel, colleague, or a particular judge – is invaluable. But a key part of that is rewriting – being able to adapt and refine someone else’s writing while trying to preserve their voice as much as possible.

4. What is the most rewarding part about your job? There is a quietly and deeply satisfying feeling at the realization that something I thought about and wrote has become part of the common law in some way. This happens in winning, of course, at least if the judge both rules in your favor and does it for the reasons that you proposed. But it can happen even on a loss – you can at least guide the court away from adopting a particularly bad interpretation of a law, even if the outcome is not what you hoped for.

5. Tell us about a mentor who made an impact on your career. Janice Platt, a senior staff attorney at the sixth circuit, was relentless in helping me improve my writing skills. Endless, continuous, and tailored feedback to make me as effective in different styles as possible. That was the foundation I needed to find my own voice as a lawyer, and it made me much better at understanding why courts use certain words or phrases.

6. If you weren’t practicing law, what would you be doing? Likely scientific research. It was graduate school or law school, but law school presented better career opportunities for me.

7. What might people be surprised to learn about you? I used to create mods for video games. Only one set of mods really took off, and that was for a relatively niche game, but I poured a couple thousand hours into that hobby over several years between learning the relevant modding commands, researching the underlying ideas I wanted to implement, working on pixel art, and then implementing and testing my ideas until they were ready for release.

8. What is a good book or article you read recently? I’m currently working my way through The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, by Ursula LeGuin. She’s a wonderful writer. A common theme through the short stories is how culture informs perception – even when a narrator isn’t unreliable, they still might misapprehend something because a difference that someone else might find important doesn’t matter (or doesn’t even exist) from the primary narrator’s point of view.