On Dec. 2, Shikha Mittal ’05 spoke to middle school students via Zoom about her path to becoming a lawyer. Starting out as a finance major at Santa Clara University, she decided to lean into her love of debate and negotiation and go into law. “I realized pretty early on in my college years that law was an area that might be a good career fit for me.” She ended up in the tech industry as an in-house lawyer at a Bay Area startup, and currently works at Databricks, an enterprise software company.

While discussing the rigors of law school, she recalled long study sessions for exams and preparing for the bar exam, which she described as “one of the hardest exams you’ll ever take in your life.” However, she advised that those factors shouldn’t dissuade students from seeking a career in law. “If you feel like you are interested in law and you want that to be your career, I wouldn’t say law school should be a detractor,” she said.

Mittal also talked about the differences between being an outside counsel lawyer, who works at a firm that is hired by companies, and an in-house lawyer, who is an employee of the company. She said that she has enjoyed the work-life balance as an in-house lawyer, as well as other perks of being an employee where she works.