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Hurling yourself headfirst down an ice track at 80 miles an hour might not seem like it has much in common with practicing law. But attorney Jared Firestone OLY—aka “The Jewish Jet”—says they overlap a lot more than you might expect. Both reward preparation. Both punish overthinking at the wrong moment. And in both, mistakes tend to be expensive.
—Interview by Emily Kelchen, edited by Bianca Prieto
First of all, I have to know how an attorney from South Florida ends up competing in one of the craziest winter sports?
During my first semester of law school, I suffered a Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA), effectively a “minor stroke”. Coincidentally, my recovery time fell during the 2014 Winter Olympics, and that is when I discovered the sport of Skeleton.
I noticed that if you’re a fast runner, there’s an advantage there, and in college, I was a member of the track & field team at Tulane University. And Skeleton is not one of the sports that people start as little kids and just become experts at. A lot of athletes start in their 20s. So I said, why not give that a shot since my lifelong dream had been to represent Israel at the Olympic Games.
My first year sliding was the same year I sat for the New York bar exam.
In a way, pursuing the Olympics slowed down my legal career. But now that I am able to dedicate my full attention to it, I know how to perform under pressure and manage time and set goals.
I can see how those skills you developed as an Olympian help you in your legal practice. What about the reverse? Did your legal training improve your athletic performance?
I think the skill from practicing law that helped most with my athletic performance was being able to know what the end plan was and then working backwards. Kind of like building a case where you need to get to some sort of argument, so you go find the case law and everything that supports it.
For me, it was knowing I wanted to make the Olympics, so I needed to perform well at qualifying races or world championships or whatever it was. At the beginning of each off-season, I would completely break down what I would need to do on a day-to-day basis to get to that point of performing my best.
Things that nobody on the small budget teams was thinking of doing, like having very, very specific film watching cycles in the off-season, and doing really extended visualizations. So on that note, I would say my legal brain definitely made me more strategic, more efficient.
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From what I understand, you have also earned a reputation as someone who looks for ways to get around certain rules. That sounds very lawyerly.
I like finding loopholes. I thought it was important to be able to keep my head on my sled, instead of dragging on the ice when I was undergoing 5, 6 Gs of force. Breaking down the rules, we were able to come up with a system that involved tying a football chin guard to a yarmulke. That allowed me to keep my head on my sled without basically biting through my tongue, or violating the rule that says you can’t have a chin guard attached to your helmet. I think you are going to see more people doing something similar in the future.
I imagine that extra padding is appreciated when you hit the wall. How else do you prepare for—and overcome—potential mistakes?
You have to be able to let things go quickly. You have to know that you're not gonna have the perfect run, and there's no time to go back and fix things. You're just constantly looking forward to what's next and focusing on that. And honestly, perfect could be slow cause it means you're controlling too much, you're oversteering.
That's a lesson for lawyers too. There is a point where you kinda wanna just let things flow and let your instincts do the work. But to get to that point, you have to know that you did the prep work.
By the time I got to my last run at the Olympics, my coach, who had to deal with my neurosis and overthinking for two years, told me there's nothing left to do, nothing to think about. I didn't even need to remember what happened on this run, just feel the wind and enjoy what it's like to slide 75 miles an hour on ice for the last time. And I had one of the best runs of my career.
Sometimes, it's better just to turn your brain off a little.
If you could import one Olympic habit into every law firm tomorrow, what would it be?
Intense focus. As I move into full-time career mode, that's the thing I'm hoping to take with me.
Raise The Bar’s Take
Lawyers are paid to overthink. To anticipate every angle, stress-test every argument. But Firestone's best Olympic run came when his coach told him he had put in the work, so there was nothing left to analyze. The same is true in the courtroom and at the negotiation table. At some point, oversteering is just slowing you down.
If you want to keep up with Firestone, or potentially catch him on his speaking tour, Instagram’s the best place to do so.
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