#daniel selby

People sometimes ask whether working in Washington on energy policy has much to do with practicing law. The honest answer is: more than I expected.

Energy is one of the areas where policy, finance, and law are so deeply intertwined that understanding any one of them in isolation leaves you with an incomplete picture. The legislation that defines what qualifies for a tax credit affects how deals get structured, which affects the financial representations companies make to investors, which — when those representations are challenged — creates the cases that white-collar attorneys work on.

I spent time at the Energy Futures Initiatives Foundation and the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions. I wrote about clean energy financing, renewable investment, and the policy frameworks that determine where capital flows. I watched how the distance between a policy intention and a market outcome often lives in the details of the legal and financial structures in between.

At Brooklyn Law School, I've started to map that experience onto the specific practices that interest me most. On the corporate side: tax equity transactions, project finance, the transactional work behind clean energy deals. On the white-collar side: ESG enforcement, greenwashing claims, SEC climate disclosure investigations — all of which are growing areas as institutional capital follows the policy push into clean energy.

My background in Washington and in finance points toward both. The question isn't which track applies to energy law — both do. The question is which angle I'll approach it from first.

The second semester of 1L is almost behind me, and if the first year of law school does one thing, it forces you to be honest about where you're going. For me, that question keeps circling back to corporate law and white-collar criminal defense.

On the surface, they don't look like natural neighbors. Corporate law is about building and structuring transactions, drafting agreements, and closing deals that hold up long after the parties have moved on. White-collar criminal defense is about examining. You are stepping into a completed transaction and asking, under the pressure of a government investigation or a courtroom, what it actually meant and who is responsible for what went wrong.

But the more I study both, the more I believe they're powered by the same underlying engine. Both require you to read a business situation the way a skeptic would. Both require you to understand how deals are actually structured, not just how they look on paper. Both reward the attorney who can hold the details of a complex financial transaction in mind while also seeing the larger picture of risk and intent.

Before I came to law school, I spent time in private equity and private credit. They were two different vantage points on the same question: how are deals built, and where do they break?

In private equity, I analyzed energy transition investments and reviewed operating agreements. The job was to understand how a transaction allocated risk and control before anyone committed capital. That's the foundation of corporate practice. In private credit, I was underwriting loans and reviewing covenants — evaluating whether borrowers were accurately representing themselves. White-collar defense is fundamentally about what a representation meant when someone later disputes it.