Biography | Stacey Snider — The Law Building Where She Took a JD She Did Not Practice

People treat a Hollywood lawyer as someone who stays in the counsel's office.

Snider took a Juris Doctor at UCLA School of Law in 1985 and did not practice.

The Law Building sits at 385 Charles E. Young Drive East on the Westwood campus, a three-story brick pile with a library tower that rises two floors higher.

UCLA Law opened in 1949.

By the mid-1980s the school was already one of the University of California's professional schools on this site.

She used the degree as a way into the storytelling business, not as a ticket to a firm.

Contemporary profiles record that she wrote coverage for about fifty dollars a script while she was still in law school, then took a mailroom job at Triad Artists after the JD.

Triad's Los Angeles office in those years was listed at 10100 Santa Monica Boulevard.

From the mailroom she moved to an assistant's desk at Simpson/Bruckheimer Productions.

In December 1986, at twenty-five or twenty-six, she was named director of development at the Guber-Peters Company on the Warner Bros. lot.

The law school is the public pin for that turn.

The mailroom and the first assistant desks were ordinary office floors, not destinations a visitor can read as hers.

This building still trains lawyers.

The south entrance on Charles E. Young Drive East is the face a visitor meets.

The JD year is 1985.

The exact commencement day is not needed for the pin.

What matters is that the professional paper she earned here is the last academic credential before the studio years that followed.

Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons