Corporate lawyer achieves escape velocity

Image obtained from EVE Online

Debra Cassens Weiss has an article this morning on ABA Journal Law News Now entitled "Lawyer-turned-galactic overlord leaves BigLaw and achieves online success."

Alex Gianturco had a career defending white-collar crime cases for Washington, D.C.-based megafirm Zuckerman Spaeder LLP. But he was dissatisfied. He craved escape.

When James Thurber wrote "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the careworn Mr. Mitty could only imagine alternate realities. Mr. Gianturco could immerse himself in computer games. In Gianturco's case, the game of choice was something called EVE Online. In the Wall Street Journal article that inspired Ms. Weiss's post this morning, David Román describes EVE Online as a "popular space-combat game," a "rarity among games based on virtual universes" because, a decade after launch, it has a still-growing subscriber base (at a cost of $14.95 a month).

Gianturco's game persona, The Mittani, scratched and clawed his way to the head of the Goonswarm Alliance, leading, Román writes, "the 37,000 players of the larger CFC coalition." His path to the top of the virtual heap apparently involved stealth and espionage, not swashbuckling and weaponry. But he was still practicing law on his way up. Once Gianturco achieved his virtual success, he jettisoned the day job and moved, with his (presumably very understanding) wife, to Madison, Wisconsin, planning to live off his savings and maintain his precarious hold at the top of the EVE Online heap.

An incident at a 2011 gaming conference in Iceland -- Gianturco admits to being inebriated and "berating" another player -- led him to found his own website, TheMittani.com, covering games generally and the EVE Online universe in particular.

I don't pretend to understand any of this. My kids will tell you that I couldn't get the hang of the most basic Playstation controls when they were growing up. They made fun of my attempts to avoid conflicts and build trade routes in various editions of Sid Meier's Civilization. (You're supposed to start wars, they'd tell me.) And, of course, when I want to escape to a different world, I still sometimes read books. With actual pages and bindings and such.

But I understood this much: Mr. Gianturco has built such a successful website that he has attracted the attention of the Wall Street Journal. He admits to making a "comfortable living" from the ads on TheMittani.com. As the proprietor of a couple of websites, that's certainly enough to fire my imagination....