#140: Mike G. Silver - Consumer Finance Lawyer, Ex-CFPB Lawyer

Jonah Perlin (00:00)
Welcome to How I Lawyer, a podcast where I talk to attorneys from throughout the profession about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it well. I'm your host, Jonah Perlin, a law professor in Washington, DC. This episode is sponsored, edited, and engineered by my friends at LawPods. LawPods is a professional podcast production company focused solely on attorney podcasting. I absolutely love working with them. And if you're considering becoming a legal podcaster or just want to learn more, check them out at lawpods.com. And now,

Let's get started.

Hello and welcome back. Today I'm excited to welcome Mike G. Silver to the podcast. Mike is a consumer financial services lawyer who's a partner at Hush Blackwell's DC office. Before joining Hush last year, Mike spent 12 years at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB, and before that he worked as an associate at Pillsbury for seven years. Mike's a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Go Quakers, where he was the student body president.

Very nice, maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that. And the George Washington University Law School, Go Colonials, where he was on the Law Review, Mood Court Board, and active in the Student Bar Association. He also held summer internship positions with the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and US District Judge Ricardo Urbina. And like me, Mike started his career after college as a legislative assistant at the Religious Action Center before attending law school, something I also hope we'll get to talk about. And yeah, Mike, so excited you're on the podcast. Thanks for doing this.

Mike Silver (01:25)
I'm excited as well Jonah. Thanks for having me.

Jonah Perlin (01:28)
So let's start by hearing a little bit about your path to the law. Sort of, was law always in the cards for you or what drew you to the legal profession?

Mike Silver (01:37)
I think it was preordained in a sense, but I didn't necessarily know that until I was, I believe in my junior year of college. So when I was growing up in New Jersey, I'm a generation X stereotype, graduated high school in 1996. I was interested in history, government, politics. Those were just passions of mine since I was a kid. And in a sense, my

conversations around the dinner table with my parents were often about civics and issues of the day. Neither of my parents are lawyers. There really are no lawyers in my non-extended family. I have one first cousin who's a lawyer down in Florida. Both my parents are educators. My father was a college professor for over 50 years at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Go Knights, they had that big...

Number one, they beat Purdue in 2023. It was like the finest moment of his life, but he was an engineering professor. My mother was a teacher in New York City back in the day and then started a tutoring service. They were very much about involvement in community organizations, the local synagogue and other civic organizations. So the notion of social justice was part of the equation, but not necessarily a path towards being a lawyer.

Jonah Perlin (02:53)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's so interesting because I asked this question to lots of people and sometimes the answer is yes, I knew I was going to be a lawyer from day one. Like I came out of the womb arguing and I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and everybody told me that. Or sometimes I get the version of the story that's, you know, I had one guest that once said they wanted to originally be a large animal veterinarian. They went to college for that and everything changed. Your story, though, I think is one that is pretty common, right, is you are interested.

in the pieces around the law, right? Civics, government, social justice, et cetera. And, but you don't necessarily know sort of what kind of law you're gonna practice, but the idea of working in the law is exciting to you. Does that sound about right for your start?

Mike Silver (03:33)
That's exactly right. Law was basically adjacent to the things that I was interested in and that academically I was good at. So I was always stronger as a writer, English, history, like those types of subjects when I was in junior high school and high school. You're absolutely right. mean, law, you when you grow up, particularly like during that time period, the 80s and 90s, like you associate law with how it was perceived in pop culture. So like you have Perry Mason, LA law.

You know, then Law and Order in the early 90s. You think of criminal law, you think of the OJ trial, which was a seminal moment for us. I was a junior in high school when that happened. So there are like these moments where the law is sort of primary in pop culture in your mind. But I couldn't necessarily envision myself being a criminal defense lawyer, you know, being like Judge Ida or one of the people on LA Law. But again, it was like the path was just sort of leading there in a sense based on my interests and my aptitudes.

Jonah Perlin (04:29)
Yeah, and I think it's a good reminder. think now, for whatever reason, education has got so much more siloed, right? I keep reading articles about, know, comp size the biggest department because everybody thinks like, if I have comp size, I'll be fine, or business and so much of it, I think is follow the things you're good at what you said and follow the things that you like, which you also said.

Mike Silver (04:47)
My answer is a little different than I think my mother's answer will be and I'll check this with her that I really like to argue with her and that I like to debate everything, which is probably true, and that I did high school debate and that kind of got my juices flowing as well.

Jonah Perlin (05:01)
as did I. So any high school listeners, we increasingly have high school listeners of how I lawyer know that you two can find this profession lots of different ways. So let's go straight to law school. So normally I don't spend that much time with my guests talking about law school. But one thing I noticed when I was reading your bio and after we met to chat about this conversation was that you were really active both inside and outside the classroom in law school. And that included student organizations, that included

a number of internships with the federal government and the federal judiciary here in DC. And increasingly, think students in law school tend to be a little more heads down, like I'm just gonna get good grades and all that other stuff is sort of like, I'll do one thing or I'll do two things I don't wanna overextend. Talk to me a little bit about the value or role that those internships and other experiences played in law school and how you balanced everything as well.

Mike Silver (05:48)
It's an excellent question, Jonah. To some extent, it's probably a residue of my path prior to law school. In high school, college, I was always a joiner. I was always someone that would be in many organizations at the same time take on leadership roles and things like that. That also was something I think nurtured by my parents. But in law school in particular, I think the main takeaway I would share is that

So much of it depended on me going to law school in Washington, DC. And the fact that I had opportunities to work for Judge Urbina during the school year for two semesters, you don't get that opportunity as often if you're from out of town. In fact, the way that that internship came up was that I did a job fair, I think, at my 1L year around February.

And I met somebody who happened to be his law clerk and I applied for a position, assuming it would be a summer position for my one hour a year. And they already had that slots filled, but she said, would you be interested in working for the judge in the fall? And it was like something that I never considered. And I was like, of course. And then that ended up, you know, turning into a two semester gig where I also got course credit through GW law school. So.

It really was a great experience, like from a practical perspective, helping do the research, helping write some of the opinions with the law clerk. But it also was something where I was able to get course credit, and it was kind of integrated into the curriculum at GW. And again, like there's a scarcity of those types of jobs in DC during the summer, but judges need interns during the fall and spring semesters as well.

Jonah Perlin (07:31)
Yeah, there's two cool parts about that. think one, I couldn't agree more, where you go to law school matters. And in order to do that, you need to ask sort of what are the kinds of jobs that I want to get? And I think increasingly, because of US News and everything else, it's what's the best law school I can go to is the question. And actually, for many students, the question should be, what is the law school where I can get those experiences and be around the right people? So if you want to be in a particular geography, going to school in that particular geography is absolutely a benefit. If you come to law school here in Washington and I

I teach over at Georgetown, right? You get those opportunities during the year that everybody comes and moves here for the summer. Although now I think with remote work, maybe that's changing a little bit. And we can talk a little bit about changes in the federal government and how that might affect some of this, but I absolutely think that's right. Did you find value in sort of the other activities you did in law school also, like law review and student bar association? Like, is it worth it?

Mike Silver (08:23)
do. I think it made the experience more well-rounded. It made it more interesting because law school is the type of thing where unlike undergrad, at least in my experience as a history major, it's like a marathon, not a sprint. You're studying basically all semester in order to ace or do well on one exam, so you have to face yourself. It breaks up the monotony, frankly.

to be able to get involved in the Seen Bar Association or do moot court where you're preparing arguments and learning about the craft of preparing briefs, emotions, and the like. And again, I think the part-time work experience for me really made it a much more immersive and fun three years. I think if I hadn't had that opportunity, I would have felt like it was more dry.

Jonah Perlin (09:08)
Hmm, yeah, having that balance is so important. So let's go to the beginning of your career and we'll get to your government service soon. But before that, you spent a big chunk of time, meaningful chunk of time at a private law firm here in Washington. Talk to me a little bit about how that job came about and what kind of work you were doing and what that experience was like.

Mike Silver (09:25)
So I was on the track, the proverbial track. I did the fall interviewing program before my 2L year. I believe I submitted applications or resumes for 25 firms. That was the maximum number permitted in the system at the time in 2002. Had a few interviews, a few callbacks. Ultimately, I am not ashamed to admit this. I think it's maybe a mentoring point for your listeners. I had one offer and that was with Shaw Pitman.

It was a legacy DC firm dating back to the 1940s. It was very heavy in the energy sector and government and the like. And I did my summer associate position there in 2003. I was lucky to have an offer to go back and I went back and it took a lot of pressure off from my, my three L year. It allowed me to take some courses that were more just for edification rather than feeling like I needed to take them.

It also allowed me to, again, immerse myself more in things like moot cord and law review and working at the DOJ, which I did in my third year. So I started there and I think the wrinkle, which affects me to this day is that I originally wanted to do litigation because I think most, again, maybe this is a mindset that's changed. I'm curious for your view, Jonah. You know, my view at the time was like you learn the law through reading cases and it's all from this lens of litigation.

And I was just, my brain was anchored around the idea of being a litigator. And most of my projects that summer were with litigators. And most of the partners I asked to go to lunch or hope that they would ask me were litigators. And lo and behold, when I started, they didn't have a spot, but they had a spot in the real estate group. And I was like, what's real estate? I have no idea what this is. I tried it and was there for seven years. You know, I had the full.

associate, junior associate to senior associate experience. I learned how to draft real estate contracts, commercial leases, retail leases, purchase and sale agreements. We had one client that in 2009, it was completely countercyclical. The financial crisis, I know your last episode you had or two episodes ago, had Adrienne, who I think we actually overlapped at Hillsbury for a couple of years. You know, she talked about what the experience was like in 2009.

That was my busiest year of the seven years. I got the top bonus for hours that year. It was completely counterintuitive, but we had a client who basically blew up for lack of a better phrase. You know, he owns some gas stations and someone I worked with knew a guy who worked with this other guy and they ended up buying hundreds of gas stations in three different markets. And we did all the legal work, title review, survey review, financing.

environmental, you name it, corporate, setting up LLCs. And it became a juggernaut. And the person I worked with may partner off of that account. And for me, as I was basically the number two person in all these projects, and there was a path there for me to ride that and then to start to develop clients in the same space and become the go-to person for gas station real estate transactions. And at some point,

It was coinciding, again, I'll be fully transparent, it was coinciding with President Obama being elected and all the excitement around that. I started to think, did I come to DC when I was 22, work at the religious action center like you did Jonah, to eventually become a lawyer who focuses on gas station real estate deals? It was just that moment when I said, I think I would rather be doing something else. And everybody was great. I had a very positive experience at Pillsbury.

I made good relationships. got good training. The hours didn't crush me. It was up and down. was kind of similar to the real estate boom and busts of that time period. It was not the firm experience that drove me away. It was the fact that I never really was doing what I think I set out to do when I came to DC. And so it was that inflection point when I started to really self-evaluate. And it took a while. And this is something I really want, particularly your...

your younger listeners who just starting out or in law school to appreciate. It's easy to pigeonhole yourself when you're working in a law firm where you're dependent on senior partners to feed you work and you basically become an expert in whatever they're an expert in and you one day wake up two, three years later and you're an expert on gas station purchase and sale agreements. And you're like, how did that happen?

How do I get myself out of this? How do I extricate myself? And you have to take ownership and you start to doubt your own ability to pivot to another subject area. But then you forget that you're still only four or five years out of law school and you know, there's plasticity in your brain. So I kind of had to work through that and I actually engaged with a career coach at the time who really helped me get some brainstorming and trying to work through that, but also just helping me with some.

mechanical nuts and bolts things about job searching and resume rewriting and things like that. And all of that said, I was completely lucky that at the very moment I was really wanting to leave and I wanted to pivot, the CFPB was created and it became a place that was hiring hundreds of people in 2011. So the circumstances just worked out and I consider myself really lucky.

Jonah Perlin (14:55)
Yeah, I love that. And what I love about it, I mean, there's a lot of different pieces like the job market, as you sort of referenced early in that answer, it is definitely changing. It has moved earlier in the year. The sort of traditional OCI process has changed a lot, especially in the last couple of years, and it's going to continue to change. But sort of high level zoom out. What I think is so amazing about your story in many ways is

You can plan and you can find the thing you're interested in and you can find the firm. And, you know, it's a good reminder. And I tell my students this all the time that getting more than one offer may feel like a luxury, but at the end of the day, you can only work at one place at a time. And so you only need one. And so it's really a binary. Did you get that offer? But also that so much of it happens to you.

And you have to be ready and excited and curious to have where the client based business and so you know what clients you happen to have at any given moment is a huge part of what your legal career looks like. And look I think there are some people who say you know I want this kind of client I want to do just this kind of work and I get that and I'm sympathetic to it but at the same time you can learn how to be a lawyer working for lots of different clients.

And if you had jumped ship even earlier, you wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time when the CFPB was opening. And so if any of my listeners are listening to this and thinking, I need to have this perfect plan from day one, like I'm gonna start law school and here's what I'm do 10 years later, the world happens to you just as much as you happen to the world. So I think that's really, really cool.

Mike Silver (16:25)
I think all of that is spot on. I I am a big fan of the Bill Simmons podcast and he always talks about in sports analogies, sliding doors, moments with teams and feel like are exactly what you said. mean, our careers are really a series of sliding door moments. As you said, a lot of it is just about positioning and being curious and being opportunistic. And again, you can have the best laid plans of mice and men, but you have to also be reading and reacting to whatever

the situation is in your own personal situation, but in the market as well. So the fact that I did all that coaching in sort of a slow mindset changing in the late 2000s, I only had that one, and again, one interview that went well with CFPB. I applied to some other government jobs and I didn't even get an interview. And then I had that one interview at the right time, but I was well positioned because of the work I put in the couple of years before that to just grab that opportunity when it came.

Jonah Perlin (17:23)
You know, want to talk a little bit about your experience at the CFPB. I want to make sure I get your take. mean, we are having this interview right after some big sort of loud political announcements about that particular agency. So I want your take on that. But before we get there, talk to me a little bit about what it was like to be on the ground floor, both what kinds of work were you doing, but what was it like being in an agency that was sort of created for a very particular reason, a very particular way at that sort of almost founding moment? What was that like?

Mike Silver (17:51)
I want to say it was exhilarating, that sounds probably a little overdone. It was energizing. It was a place that I've never worked at a Silicon Valley startup or anything equivalent to that. But people who have often made that analogy to working at that type of organization, but within the federal government, it's almost like an oxymoron having this exciting, invigorating, ragtag sort of operation within the federal government, you know, which is kind of

typically associated with bureaucracy and with stodgyness and with process. And just the people aspect of it was just really, really fun. I I started literally seven weeks after the agency was officially up and running. So September 12th of 2011. And every two weeks they were onboarding 10, 20 people. And I made a bunch of new friends and good acquaintances very quickly.

It was a very different environment from a law firm where your relationships over time, they mainly become with the partners you work with or with a close group of people because, there's a lot of attrition over time. And, you know, after seven years, there were probably two or three people left from my summer class of 25 people. It was very different at the CFPB. It was very social environment, very freewheeling. But what made it so much fun was we were able to be really creative and because we were essentially inventing processes and

deliverables in our work. worked on, just for example, I worked on the first, it was called the Small Business Review Panel. Now it's a technical thing, the CFPB, only two other agencies have to follow this process like the CFPB does where they have to do a consultation meeting and process with small business owners to basically vet how any proposed rule would have impacts on small businesses.

So the first time that we ever did that process, I was kind of tasked with drafting the outline of the proposal. So it was basically a novel type of task. And I had a number of things like that over the years. And again, for just intellectually that made it really fun and engaging and challenging. And it wasn't a road. And going back to both the law firm, mean, as much as I like the people in commercial real estate is sort of interesting from an economic perspective, the day to day.

tasks were very rote. Drafting leases based on form lease contracts and this was the opposite. This was, you know, we could just use our brains and it was really a mix of law and policy, almost like a 50-50 split because I was in the regulations office of the agency. the agency, the CRPB, for those of you who are not as familiar with it, and Jonah mentioned how it's very much in the news at the moment, but if you're not as familiar, it was a new federal agency created in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank Act.

which was Congress's reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. It had a number of important provisions, but one of them was in Title X of the Dutch Rank Act, which created a new agency, the CFPB, which was intended to streamline and consolidate and strengthen consumer protection laws at the federal level. Because prior to the crisis, there were 17 or 18 different consumer protection laws at the federal level that were...

dispersed among many different agencies. So these are things like the FDIC, the Federal Reserve Board Department of Housing and Urban Development. So the theory was that the diffuseness of those authorities kind of led to almost like a collective action problem or a diffusion of responsibility and the crisis was not alleviated early enough. So it was Elizabeth Warren's idea to have this consumer protection agency. So it was stood up in 2011.

But there's an enforcement investigations component. There's a supervision component where people go into large financial institutions like banks and open up their books and records and evaluate their compliance management systems and give them ratings. And then there was a general counsel's office. And then there was a consumer education office that focused more on consumer facing things. So I was in the regulations office. And it was basically the policy making engine of the agency. So again, it was just a fascinating job because

Part of our task was to read research reports and read policy papers and talk to stakeholders across the consumer financial service ecosystem and then make recommendations to leadership and come up with options for proceeding to change the regulations where we felt like there was a consumer protection problem. And then the other part of it was much more of a quote unquote legal job where there would be that policy development process as we called it.

And then once decisions were made by the leadership as to what direction to go in, we would then have a team that would actually write the regulation that would eventually go into the Code of Federal Regulations. And that was a very technical legal drafting exercise. It was all about precision of language. So we would have to pivot within our projects, depending on the project cycle, to go from that policy focus to more of a technical rule writing focus.

It was endlessly interesting and I was just, again, very lucky that I was able in 12 years to cover a lot of different subject areas, some mortgage related regulations, some focused on payday lending, car title lending, and then more recently focused on unfair, deceptive, abusive acts or practices, or UDAAPs as it's called, which sort of affects every part of this ecosystem. And then some work towards the end on bank deposit, overdraft, and NSF fees. So it was just a...

really, really amazing experience. have enormous pride in what we were able to accomplish. I have lot of trepidation about what is happening right now politically based on the CFPB being sort of targeted. You know, I actually wrote a piece in a publication today called Open Banker, which started from the premise of Elon Musk sending out a tweet a couple of months ago saying, delete the CFPB.

And so that was the question, can you delete the CFPB? What would that actually mean? And thesis was absolutely not, don't delete it, but give it a refresh. Cause I had some constructive critiques about how things have went under the last leadership and how the agency can really be strengthened for the longterm.

Jonah Perlin (24:03)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's great also because I think sometimes people think they know what government lawyering looks like. And the government lawyering you describe is both on the one hand unique, but also can happen in a lot of areas. Right. And, you know, as you said, we in law school and like as a legal practice professor, I'm guilty just as guilty as anybody else. Take a very sort of like litigation heavy. We take the law as it lies and we argue. How can we convince?

courts to apply facts differently to an established law or alternatively, how can we get courts to change law? But a big piece of it is also how can we change statutes and regulations? And that's the kind of work you were doing, which sounds really interesting. You know, I don't want to keep putting it off. You said you have some suggestions about where the CFPB either could go or where it will go. Obviously, you don't have a crystal ball, but what do you think is next for your former employer and where would you like it to be?

Mike Silver (24:56)
It's a great question. Part of this is a bit of a legal history lesson for the last 15 years. The CFPB in its short life, it's only 13 years old, has already gone to the Supreme Court twice because there were two challenges to its constitutionality and both were really existential threats to the agency. And the first one was a case in 2020 called Celia Law. And that was a challenge to the fact that under the original structure,

the CFPB director could be fired by the president only for cause. It was a way of protecting the independence of the agency and the director. And it's a similar removal provision as it's called to other independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission or the EFDIC. The Supreme Court found five to four, but that was a violation of separation of powers and basically didn't allow the president to hold the CFPB director properly accountable.

So this decision, while it had a nominally narrow impact in the sense that they could have gone in the plaintiffs, I think in that case actually wanted the Title X of the Dodd-Frank Act to be thrown out. They wanted the CFPB to basically be abolished or to send the issue back to Congress to come up with a legislative fix. Supreme Court didn't go for that. They said, well, we're just going to change this one passage in Dodd-Frank to say that the director can be fired for at will.

as a practical matter, it's had a huge impact. And we are seeing that literally in real time the last three days. Because now the CFPB director who normally has a five-year term, this is they're appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, they would normally have a five-year term and that could go across administrations. And that's what happened with the first CFPB director, Richard Cordray. But now after Celia Law, the CFPB director effectively is like a cabinet secretary.

and they will either resign or be fired at the end of a presidential administration. And that's what happened when President Biden came into office, former director Kathy Kranniger resigned on the first day. Now, the latest CFPB director Rohit Chopra did not resign. He made a statement to the effect that if he has a five-year term and he understands the president could fire him, but he was going to stay. And very surprising to a lot of people, he wasn't fired on the first day of the administration. He was not fired until this past Saturday.

on February 1st. And as of yesterday, February 3rd, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, who was just recently confirmed, was appointed to be the acting CAPB director. He's going to have this as like a moonlighting gig. And so there's a lot of lack of clarity about like what's going on because obviously he's got other things on his plate than like running the CAPB day to day. So we don't know who he's going to bring to run the agency. But again, with Elon Musk sort of delete the CAPB.

and all the other stuff that seems to be happening out of OPM with some of the executive orders, other efforts to change civil service protections for government employees, force them to go back to work five days a week. So there are a lot of other things happening across the federal government under the new administration that could have real impacts on the staff, but it's not like specific to the CAPV. But then once the new situation is clarified as far as who's going to run the agency and also by the way,

They haven't nominated a new CFPB director yet to be approved by the Senate. They have a laundry list of final rules that they issued under Director Chopra, proposed rules that are out for comment, all these sort of guidance documents, so to speak, know, clarifying interpretations of consumer finance law, litigation investigations that are ongoing. What is going to happen with all these things? Are they going to be paused? Are they going to be reversed? What process do they have to use to unwind those things?

We went through that exercise in 2017 when Mick Mulvaney, who some of you may remember as a former congressman from South Carolina, he was President Trump's appointment at the Office of Management and Budget under the first Trump administration. He was made the acting CFPB director. So there was like a period of time when he brought on some of his own people. kind of pushed pause on the agency activities and

reevaluated things and then move forward. And we are like right in that moment right now. So it's very fraught. I think from both a like, I have friends that are still there. I'm on text threads where people are really nervous and anxious about is their job at risk? Is the agency at risk? But it's also uncertainty from my clients and for people that I've talked to in the financial services space who are like, what the heck is going on? Like,

there's a rule, for example, that some of them have to comply with on March 30th. And is that rule going to be pushed back? what, know, they've been spending millions of dollars and resources to get in line. So it just creates a lot of uncertainty around those things. But you made a really good point about how being a government lawyer can be like stereotypical, but also not. I just wanted to add to that, just to say like in the course of my 12 years, I mean, I wasn't just drafting rules and offering internal opinions on

how to interpret certain regulations and doing policy research. I was helping draft press releases. I was engaging with outside stakeholders that were lobbying us for different things. I was a project manager on various initiatives. So I had to literally manage teams of people and assemble teams of people in some cases. So again, I think the skills that I developed while I was practicing as a government lawyer were beyond just the specific

subject matter that I was practicing in. there's a story, maybe we talked about this when we first met, but just to share that sort of connects to my past. Jonah mentioned that we both worked at the Religious Action Center. So this is an organization in DC that's the Public Policy Office of the Reform Jewish Movement. And it's this amazing one-year fellowship type goal where it's very immersive and you get involved in lobbying and public policy work. And I earn $19,000 a year, like thanks mom and dad for

subsidizing my Adams Morgan apartment that year. I had this moment, I think in 2014 or 2015, where I was like, my old self and my new self kind of connected because I was working on this payday lending rule that I mentioned earlier and it was very controversial and there were a lot of different stakeholder opinions. really interestingly, a lot of the faith organizations across different denominations, Christian, Jewish, others got really involved in arguing that.

payday lending was a problem because of biblical admonitions on usury. And so we were meeting with different stakeholders and we had a meeting with Jewish faith leaders at one point. And one of the people at that meeting was from the religious action center, where we used to work. And former director Cordray was at the meeting and they asked me to sort of introduce everybody because I had the connection with the rack. And I talked about how that project was sort of this moment of

connecting with the work I did at the RAC and felt like, know, Tikkun Olam, the Jewish value of repairing a broken world. And at some point, Director Cordray, who didn't even need to educate him on anything, because he was a brilliant guy, five-time Jeopardy champ, he turned and he said, Tikkun Olam, what does that mean? How do you pronounce that? And then it was like a Jewish joke where like everyone on the other side of the table started offering their opinion on the right pronunciation.

But two years later, three years later, when we finalized that project, he sent a note to the team congratulating everyone. And at the end of the note, he signed it to Kuno Wang. And so I knew in that moment that something resonated. And that was just a really cool way that like the connection between early in my career, later in my career, and like sort of the values that you express through your work were connecting in an interesting way.

Jonah Perlin (32:55)
that. I love that so much. And obviously, I love that we share this experience, albeit a few years apart. And it actually comes back to a theme that is one that I keep hearing on the podcast and keep reminding to my listeners and to my students, which is just because you go to law school doesn't mean you should forget everything you did before law school and everything you believed before law school. In many ways, you may not get there right away.

but the value add that you have, the being a lawyer and doing good work, that's table stakes for mid-level lawyers, right? You kind of have to do that. But what differentiates you over time is often the connections and background and experiences that you had before you stepped foot in a law school classroom. So, you know, even if you feel like maybe it's not quite as important or central when you're in law school or in those first couple of years,

Don't lose touch with those things because they can really connect you to what you want to do in ways that you just didn't even know when you were 18, 19, 20 years old. So I love that story. You know, let me ask one quick question, then I want to talk about your current job. And maybe this is quaint and already outdated of a question, but one of the functional ways that we work as an American society is we have civil servants who work in government.

regardless of who the president is. You again, maybe this is changing and this is already outdated as I'm asking it, but at least for many, many years, right? I'm thinking George W. Bush, Barack Obama couldn't be more different. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton couldn't be more different. What was it like being a Fed when your head head boss changed, but you kind of had to keep the ball moving? Like, is that just an anachronism that can't happen in 2025 or is there something valuable there that we should be holding on to?

Mike Silver (34:38)
It's an awesome question. And I think your point about, it an anachronism? The question, we don't know the answer and seeing it clearly in front of our eyes at the CFPB this week. For me, it was really a question of how do I continue to add value? Are there opportunities to seek projects or get to know some of the new people and build trust and build rapport so that I can help them achieve?

their objectives. And in a sense, I think this is like an articulation of the deep state, not as a pejorative, but rather as an actual beneficial thing for society. I think I came to view my role as somebody who, regardless of who is in charge, I'm going to advise them on courses of action and the risks and the rewards. And it's ultimately their decision and likely the, you know, the overton window, so to speak, will shift.

regardless of who's in charge. And so there's going to be a range of options that differs depending on which administration is there. But within that band, my job is to try to tease out nuance and complexity and things that they don't see and advise them on their risks and rewards. Frankly, when Miphamovania was the acting director, was hard. Things really were paused. There was not much information flow. When Kathy Kranger became the director, I think we all found that we had things to do.

And we didn't violently disagree with maybe we can quibble with some of the policy outcomes, but our job as civil servants was to execute the decisions. But I found truly that there were, example, under Dr. Kranger, they stood up an innovation program in the sense of a new tool where the Bureau was having direct one-to-one engagement with fintech startup companies and other companies that were trying to develop using technology to develop new ways of delivering financial services to consumers.

And they were trying to, in some cases, figure out how do I take a consumer credit regulation that was drafted in 1970 or 1968, like the Truth in Lending Act? How do I apply that in 2019 to a product that, you where the regulation is unclear or ambiguous? And, you know, so we would have to put on our thinking cap and try to help them work through it. so I got really engaged in that work just based on some of my subject matter overlap. And for me, that was probably

the most engaging part of those couple of years under the Trump administration. So yeah, I totally agree with you. mean, right now it's like all bets are off with the approach so far under the new administration and really trying to do some really drastic things with disrupting government, for lack of a better phrase. And none of that really felt like it was on the table in 2017, 2018, 2019. It was more like kind of typical things will change under.

know, different philosophies about regulation and we kind of had to roll with that. But now it feels very different.

Jonah Perlin (37:37)
Yeah, well, I mean, we'll see. There will probably be changes that happen between recording this episode and when it's published also. But I do think what you're saying implicitly is a reminder that, you know, maybe it's because I grew up in this town, but the institutional nature of at least the federal government has a lot of value, even when an expertise and experience and familiarity, even when the policy preferences change and different people are elected. So I think that's really powerful.

We talked a lot about your past life. I want to hear a little bit about your present life. So you were at the law firm for seven years. You were at CFPB for 12. Recently in the last year, you sort of made that shift to private practice. Talk to me a little bit about that change for you. And then maybe I can ask a follow-up on what you recommend for others who are leaving government. But just for you, what was that change like? And how has that changed your mindset, your day-to-day, all those pieces?

Mike Silver (38:27)
It's been really wonderful coming over to Hush Blackwell. And again, like I think we talked about this in some of the prep, like my resume in terms of the professional experience bullets is short because I've only switched jobs a few times. I mean, I've been lucky to have really great jobs that I've enjoyed. And I think by nature, I'm a pretty, maybe risk averse person and I'm very committed to whatever I'm doing. And I'm not sort of always like seeking the next

opportunity, but that also is dependent on being in an opportunity that turns out well. I'm grateful that that's happened. I think as I told many people when I was leaving the CFPB at the end of 2023, I wasn't leaving because I really wanted to leave. felt like I had to leave. It was just time and you know, private sector, think was just in the cards. And the other thing was again, connecting back to like the stories I was telling earlier, you know, the fact that Pillsbury was a good experience for me was a reason to always keep open the possibility of going back to a law firm. I worked with plenty of people at the CFPB who did their tour of duty, sometimes at firms that were much more intense, big New York firms.

I'm never going back, not in the cards. For me, it was always like, Hey, like this is something that at least I'm open to. It was a process. It wasn't as much of a mindset shift process. Like I talked about earlier, you know, when I went from firm to government, it was much more about positioning and like working with recruiters and trying to survey options and also just trying to get a sense of, okay, how marketable am I as a mid-level

government lawyer, you know, I wasn't like a general counsel of an agency or running vision. I was a line attorney effectively. I did a lot, but I didn't have that sort of cache that like sometimes would be very open to. And again, so much of this is like, and I want to talk a little bit about being a partner at a law firm, especially coming out as a government without a book of business. is like a sales job.

Jonah Perlin (40:49)
Say more about that.

Mike Silver (40:52)
Sometimes I feel like I'm selling aluminum siding. I I'm selling legal services, the strategies, and obviously they're more sophisticated, I think, not to knock aluminum siding salesman, but so much of it is just, it's like multi-level marketing, promotion strategies where, even to the barrier to entry was that I had to write a business plan. And I wrote that and I iterated on it for a while and I worked with a couple of recruiters.

And I shopped it to some firms. And ultimately when I was able to have the opportunity to hear, I actually sent them my business plan and it was reviewed and vetted before they even interviewed me. I guess I had an assumption it was the reverse. Like they interview you to see that you're not crazy and you're presentable to clients. And then they'll want to dig into like your ideas. It was really opposite. So I think from the very start, it was impressed upon me that as you said earlier, being a good lawyer,

is table stakes, being smart and having like the resume credentials is table stakes. It's like, what beyond that are you bringing in terms of value proposition? And there's a handicap again, if you're coming out of government and you don't have the cash and you don't have a single dollar of revenue that you're bringing with you, you have to prove that they should make an investment in you as a hire. And so I a business plan. I felt like it got to a point where it was pretty good and it got me in the door here.

I've probably looked at the business plan maybe three times since I started a year ago. Cause like once doing it, you're just like reading and reacting to whatever's in front. It's more of like an outline. It kind of like sets your expectation. I just feel like I've learned so much and a lot of it is just on the job from like observing my colleagues. Adrienne talked about how she learned how to be a lawyer by being in the room with a senior partner while he was in a conference calls and then like hearing them in the office. like for me, learning how to be an effective marketer.

of legal services is so much about observing my senior colleagues and their approaches and how their tone and their sort of pitch, so to speak. It's also just about recognizing that you need different strategies and different approaches for different people and different companies and different targets. having the patience, and this was hard, especially the first few months for me, having the patience to know that like, sometimes you're literally going to be

exchanging emails, seeing people at conferences multiple times. It'll take you three years before they send you work, but you just have to do it. You just have to stick with it. And, but there are others where it's like you have one shot and it's right in front of you and you have to try to hit the shot and just knowing when to use which approach and which tactic it's like an art, not a science. I'm by no means anywhere close to where I need to be, but I think I've had some decent success so far with that.

piece of it and but it's hard. mean, it's hard to ramp up your billable hours when you're a lateral. you know, I'm just grateful that I have a really, really awesome group of colleagues here and we're trying to build a truly preeminent consumer finance practice across the country. And I'm grateful that they gave me the opportunity.

Jonah Perlin (44:00)
I think it's really great to hear and for the more junior folks listening, like you're going to get there eventually, but it happens a lot faster even though I left the practice of law before I ever had to sell myself. I'm close enough with those people and close enough with this world. Maybe Mike, you've discussed law firm marketing and its importance more than any other guests I've had on How I Lawyer, maybe? I don't know, which is amazing. And I think it's a product of the fact that you came in at the level you did from government after those 12 years.

I think some juniors would be surprised to hear that being a partner is a sales job. But if you talk to enough partners, I don't think that's a controversial view at all.

Mike Silver (44:35)
And for me too, I was out of law firms for 13 years. I mean, you've talked about this on many of your other podcasts with other guests. mean, the practice of law has completely transformed AI, DEI, like everything, you know, the use of technology, the professionalization of the business of law. It's so different. know, Hush Blackwall, I think is pretty entrepreneurial in that sense. Like we actually have a non-lawyer who is our chief executive officer.

think that's still relatively rare for top 100 firms, but it's something that they tout. We also have a program called The Link where we have attorneys, probably hundreds of attorneys who are working full-time remote and sometimes in pretty far-flung locations. And they really embrace telework before even COVID. And that's again, another way that I think they're trying to attract talent in ways that are differentiator. So it may be somewhat of a function of like this particular firm is just like very forward thinking.

on some of these issues and I'm still getting more comfortable with the idea of like, it's okay to like use AI to like do legal research as long as there's like appropriate kind of oversight or quality control or whatever. So it's a combination of being out of this milieu for a while, but then I think I'm at a particularly progressive place in that sense.

Jonah Perlin (45:50)
Yeah, well, look, we're getting close to end of our time, so I just want to ask two more questions. The first one is a little more brass tacks. For someone who saw the title of this episode, consumer protection lawyer, consumer financial services lawyer, what does that actually mean? You told us what it meant in government. I'm curious what it means when you're not selling yourself in private practice.

Mike Silver (46:08)
So consumer financial services lawyer is somebody who is an expert on consumer credit laws. And so these are basically federal and state laws that are aimed at regulating markets where there are personal financial transactions happening with companies. We do some commercial lending, know, it's sort of like an offshoot of some of our work, but basically if you're taking out a loan,

to buy a house, a mortgage, or a car loan. You're opening a deposit account at a bank, or you're taking out a credit card. It's called an alphabet soup of federal laws that govern these transactions, both at the origination of the transaction, but also the servicing of those loans. And so there are various consumer protections. Some of them are substantive, limits on borrowing, and others are about disclosures. And that's one of those things that's sort of a perennial debate between

progressives and conservatives in the sense in this space, know, whether you should rely more on disclosures and assume people can make choices for themselves or conversely, whether people need a little bit more of a paternalistic approach to protect them from themselves. I try not at this point to call myself a consumer protection attorney. I don't know that that's probably a bit of a misnomer considering my clients are, you by and large the companies that are on the other side, but that's kind of in a nutshell how I would characterize

consumer financial services. And again, there's, some law firms kind of organize their practices differently. It's a Venn diagram where you have consumer financial services, but then you have financial services or you have FinTech, which is really consumer financial services where there's a technology component or it's a technology driven product or service. know, bank regulatory, so to speak, is really more kind of traditional things like looking at anti-money laundering.

laws and capital reserves and things like that go to more the safety and soundness of the banking system and individual banks. My practice is much more focused on the consumer to company interactions and transactions and all the rules around that.

Jonah Perlin (48:17)
that because we started our conversation with law and order and that's what we assume all lawyers do. And now we're like, yeah, there's lawyers every time I need to open a new line of credit or take money out of an ATM or transfer money from one bank to another bank. it's a reminder that lawyers are part of all of these pieces of society in our ecosystem. So I always end by asking for a piece of advice for younger or junior lawyers. I'm going to tie that to another question I really wanted to ask you, which was about

pivoting more broadly. the one hand, I think we live in a society now where I see my students sort of jumping from job to job quite quickly. And you've had a slightly different path or a pretty drastically different path, having been at places for a long time and then making a fairly significant jump to a new spot or vertical. And I know that takes a lot of self-reflection. It takes more than a little bit of courage and an ability to draw connections between experiences.

in DC right now, a lot of people are gonna need to make a pivot whether they want to or not. I guess I'm curious if you have advice for more junior lawyers or people sort of newer at this about pivoting and imagining what your legal career looks like.

Mike Silver (49:26)
No, it's such a great question. And the fact that you connected it to the current situation and there's definitely going to be probably an influx of people. Talented lawyers look at different levels, looking for jobs, trying to come out of government. I think it's really, as you described it, it's about being able to self-reflect and have a growth mindset and draw connections in your life, in your skillset, in your experiences that you didn't necessarily know superficially were there.

A tangible example of this was, I think I might've talked a little bit earlier about how part of my job at the CFPB was to do the technical exercise of drafting a section of regulation. When I started, I had this idea that, you know, what I did at Hillsbury was more or less irrelevant to my new job. And I was drafting, you know, those gas station purchase contracts and, commercial leases or shopping mall leases. But then I sort of quickly realized like technical legal drafting is technical legal drafting.

If you really learn that art, sort of when do you strategically use ambiguity in your language versus not? When is that in the client's interest versus not? How do you deal with provisos and contracts and making sure that you're not leaving loopholes? Those are some of the very issues that would come up in regulation drafting. The idea that you want to draft something that we would have these debates sometimes when we were putting together a regulation. Do you want to make it over-inclusive?

so that you're trying to close every possible mousetrap and prevent evasion of the regulation. I worked on some rules that ended up being like that. I'm like slightly embarrassed at the length of them. But then you have other times when it's maybe more appropriate to actually have a lighter touch to have it be more principles based where it's not entirely clear exactly where the line is.

and let people figure the line out as they're complying with it. And again, these were some of the issues that would come up in drafting contracts. And a lot of it was wrote, like I said, where there's a term sheet and you're just sort of executing the business terms and boilerplate. But you you would have to make drafting calls just in private practice, just as I was doing at CPB. So again, that technical legal writing contract drafting was something that it sort of gave me confidence once I figured out that I actually had a skillset that was transferable and I didn't necessarily know that going into it.

It gave me confidence that I could be a better rule writer and that I wasn't, you know, completely out to see. And then I think the other thing, it's just a cliche, having that growth mindset and not letting yourself get pigeonholed, like I said before, being willing to make the pivot. And it's as much of like a mental block as it is like a skillset block, just knowing that you can do it. And I'm thinking of like the old SNL skits with like Hans and Franz, like pump yourself up, you know, you can do it.

But it's really true. mean, I guess another way to put it is you have to kind of take yourself out of the narrow mindset that you're in in a specific professional situation. Like I did, and when it's like right now at this moment, I am mainly supporting these two partners and they do X and Y work and I've become an expert in X and Y. That is your world at that moment. You have to have some way of being able to transcend that, whether it's

And you've said this before, like do CLEs or like spend time when you're not billing, like learning other areas or just reading. Like for me, like I read the book by Aaron Ross Sorkin about the financial crisis, too big to fail. And that was like my introduction into like a lot of the nuances of like the 2008 financial crisis and the big short by Michael Lewis. like, but that wasn't something I was doing in my day job at Pillsbury. it kind of gave me like at least conversational basis to then try to sell myself and say, okay, I can do this job.

at the CFPB and like just take the time and the creativity to like do that so that you kind of have something to then fall back on if you feel like you have to and recognize that being a lawyer, this goes back to early in the conversation, like there's so many different ways to be a lawyer. There are jobs where like you can work on Capitol Hill and it's not a legal job per se, but having a law degree and like having legal training like really can help you execute just being flexible in your perception of the type of job.

that you can do as a lawyer rather than thinking of it narrowly as like, as you said, silos.

Jonah Perlin (53:47)
Yeah, I think that's great. And I think it's such a good reminder for anybody at any stage that often the biggest limiting belief is the limits we put on ourselves. Just because we haven't done something doesn't mean we can't do it. And often, as you highlighted, I think that's a really great point. Sometimes you can't even see how much

experience you have that's going to be relevant. And so it's being open to that. But look, Mike, this has been a great conversation. I know we went a little longer than I normally do, but I had a lot to say and you had a lot to say and the world is chang