Law by Day, TikTok by Night — The Real Batman?

For those of you who are unaware of a common theme among superheroes, it is not uncommon for them to be living double lives. Superheroes will spend their days in an office, working like average Joes, and as soon as the sun sets, they put on their capes and set out to save the world. In today’s day and age, superheroes come in all shapes and sizes, but the common theme of living a double life has remained constant. Jonathan Roger Arnold, today’s feature, is certainly some sort of superhero. Is he The Real Batman?

Arnold, from Dallas, Texas is a rising second year at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law. During his years at Allen High School, he played backup quarterback to current Arizona Cardinals QB Kyler Murray. After graduation, Arnold decided to attend Southern Methodist University for his undergraduate years, and upon receiving his Bachelor’s in Philosophy, he planned to follow in the footsteps of both of his parents and pursue a career in law.

The legal profession, one of the most highly sought after and intellectually challenging roles, is Arnold’s end-pursuit. However, creativity is an intrinsic quality that Arnold has had his whole life. Over the past year, that creativity has shown immensely as he garnered a following of impressed and inspired high school and college kids on TikTok. With his lifestyle, law-school-focused TikTok account, Jonathan has been able to channel his inner-creativity and explore the realm of social media.

NBR was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to delve deeply into his life, career and interests…The following is a profile of Northwestern’s Batman:

With both of his parents as attorneys (mother having attended SMU Law School and father having attended the University of Texas Law), Arnold had always thought about law school becoming his own path as well. Through his constant exposure to the particular ways that lawyers think and speak, Arnold was raised to pick up these characteristics himself throughout his whole life.

Before college, Arnold had always loosely said that he was going to go to law school, just based on an admiration for his parents. Once arriving at undergrad, he learned that SMU was a well-to-do kind of school. The students there generally knew what’s going on and what they were going to pursue, and in following the status quo, Arnold felt the need to choose between finance and law quickly. With a knack for argumentation, Arnold’s decision was made with law as his path.

He decided to major in philosophy, gaining a broad knowledge base and earning a strong GPA to set himself up to apply to law school. There was this aspect of philosophy in which he could simply argue his points and argue for argumentation, and he enjoyed that. This was his passion.

Arnold discovered his passion for argumentation early within philosophical thinking, but as he progressed towards his pursuit of law, there were other skills he wanted to acquire that he had learned from his parents.

The biggest quality was the idea of being proactive — thinking about all the various and potential contingencies in any situation, and given those contingencies, what the best decision would be on the front-end to avoid future problems. Additionally, the quality of prudence — not making decisions where there are still questions, where the full story isn’t clear, so there is no chance of being surprised by the outcome of your decision. Lastly, the Type A mentality — always seeking to guide the flow of interaction and to be a leader rather than a follower.

Through his time growing up with parents that encouraged these qualities, Arnold had been fortunate enough to acquire some of these transferable skills. The passion, intellect and genuine flow of his thoughts were mind-boggling. He spoke with such fluidity and already embodied the qualities that are important for a lawyer to strive for.

Shifting gears to the tangible learning that goes into becoming a lawyer, Arnold dissects Law School life as it differs from the normal undergraduate experience.

One thing Jonathan appreciates about law school that distinguishes it from undergrad is that in undergrad, you specialize through choosing a major, and you generally focus solely on that for your knowledge base. In law school, you focus on all varieties of law — thereby learning the art of law. As time goes on and law students discover what they want to pursue, they can pursue more specialized courses. At the same time, this is a double-edged sword in that for those who have an idea of what they’re interested in at the onset of law school, they must still take courses that are in completely different aspects in order to learn all varieties of the law. Jonathan, who doesn’t necessarily foresee himself pursuing criminal law, has to take classes in this discipline regardless.

Furthermore, when looking at the breadth of knowledge you gain via law school, I asked Jonathan what the most important skill was for a lawyer to acquire. His response: “fundamental logic.” The ability to maneuver and manipulate arguments to fulfill a certain goal that has been established is probably the most useful skill, and that has a lot of manifestations. It’s similar to reading a certain piece of text and interpreting it in a way that promotes your agenda. This all has to do with information synthesis and framing arguments, which all go back to logic, as Jonathan believes.

As he slowly starts to narrow his focus, Arnold is still discovering his professional path in Law, and there are certainly a lot of options.

Initially, similar to many people, he envisioned law being synonymous with the courtroom. However, there is a large portion of the law that does not take place in the courtroom, and throughout all of the law, there is a very argumentative aspect. There is a desire to romanticize the argumentation and persuasion, and throughout his undergrad experiences, that was what spoke to Jonathan.

Looking now at what law is beyond the courtroom, there are two broad buckets that legal practice is split into: Public Interest and Private Sector. Within Public Interest, you can be working for the government, employed on projects where there is a need. Essentially, everything else including the legal work that goes into any economically productive industry falls in the Private Sector. Wherever there is money moving, there is law underneath it. The Private Sector could be considered the bedrock of business, handling transactions and movements internally.

The next two segments that law is bucketed into within Public vs. Private Sectors are Litigation and Transactional Law. As many people envision, a courtroom lawyer would generally fall into the bucket of litigation — which is a very niche group based on specific environments and contexts. On the other side of the coin, Transactional law includes drafting contracts and talking between two entities when making exchanges to determine what their concerns are within an agreement. While there are both litigators and transactional attorneys in the Private Sector, Public Interest consists almost entirely of litigators who argue cases on behalf of the government and individuals who cannot afford a criminal defense attorney.

These are the broad paths a lawyer can take once commencing law school with the pursuit of a career in law. However, when we think about taking a corporate job, we think of working at PepsiCo, Walmart, and Apple. From there, the next question would be, is there a generic mold Private Sector lawyers fall into while Public Lawyers go to work for the government? The answer is yes: Big Law.

The normal trajectory for lawyers who are going into Private practice is to work at a law firm. A law firm is a legal practice where lawyers work for clients. Companies, institutions and individuals use law firms for their legal needs. The term Big Law refers to any firm that has 500 or more attorneys. This means that the firm has a lot of attorney power so they can take on big deals and projects, and it means that they pay their attorneys quite a substantial amount.

Due to the demand for fresh law school graduates, Big Law firms are pushed to pay a pretty penny to attract the best talent. From the beginning of your time as a first-year associate, if you work hard and are successful within the firm, you can be on the track to ‘partner’ in around 8–10 years. At that point, you take on a greater responsibility at the firm and receive greater compensation, which is often tied to the overall revenue that the firm brings in.

Building off this, it’s always important to have goals, strive to achieve them and work hard to ensure you do all you can to accomplish them. For Jonathan, while Big Law may be in his future, his long-term plan is different. As of right now, Jonathan has the broad goal of pursuing corporate law in the hopes of being able to leverage his experience into a more niche sector within the corporate world in the future. Everything is a step in a certain direction, and he is constantly building to his goal, which is Private Equity. Private equity is essentially the business of investing and acquiring equity in young companies and then growing them to maturity. This is achieved via restructuring those companies, introducing new management and leadership and making strategic investments.

Jonathan will be spending the Spring semester of next year in the Bay Area as part of Northwestern Law School’s San Francisco Immersion Program. He will work in the legal departments of Private Equity and Venture Capital firms, as well as growth-stage and high-tech companies.

Furthermore, already in his journey, he has been able to utilize the tremendous career resources that Northwestern Pritzker offers. The immense resources for students, such as mentorship, connections, services, and a diverse assortment of student organizations, play an integral role in helping students progress on their professional journey.

Beyond the scope of the law, Jonathan is quite well known on arguably the hottest social media platform of today: TikTok. How did Arnold get involved in TikTok?

As the oldest of six siblings, with four of them being teenage girls, downloading TikTok was almost inevitable for Arnold. As his siblings would frequently send funny videos to the family, Arnold decided to download the platform for efficient viewing of these comedic reliefs in his day. However, getting involved as a creator on the platform was a bit more of an unexpected decision by Arnold. On a family trip down to Florida, as he was soaking up the sun, relaxing and enjoying some quality time with his family, his younger sisters vigorously encouraged him to start an account himself. Jonathan, with nothing more in mind, decided to appease his siblings’ desires. Interestingly enough, TikTok has transcended age barriers within social media and has users ranging from teenage years to people older than Jonathan sharing their career journeys.

With 200,000 dedicated followers on his account and nearly 5,000,000 likes on his videos combined, Arnold has not only people who are genuinely intrigued by his videos, but he has built a network of people who listen to him, trust him and seek to collaborate with him. looks at TikTok as a way to connect with driven, like-minded individuals seeking to express their creativity and share with others.

Arnold describes his channel and the content that he pushes out as ‘law school lifestyle’ based. To be more precise, his content is based on the aesthetic surrounding the ins and outs of his day-to-day pursuit of a JD living in an urban setting, the city of Chicago and his overall healthy habits. Arnold portrays his diligence in everything he pursues to his audience, from studying for finals in a video to running through the city even on the coldest days and always being sure to eat a nutritious breakfast and dinner. As time has gone on since Arnold started his account, the younger audience continually grows. His audience seems to primarily consist of undergrad students and high school students who lookup to Arnold as a motivation for what they strive to accomplish one day.

Arnold is continually doing everything he can to encourage people to pursue their passions, enabling students with advice and always being himself throughout. He receives around 20 private messages on his account every day from students looking for sage words of advice, thoughts on what classes they should take in undergrad, and questions about the law. Arnold looks at these messages, more than his videos, as an outlet to give back to students. He responds individually and shares his thoughts and experiences, which he believes students can benefit immensely from.

To experience his content directly, visit Arnold on TikTok and Instagram @jawnathanroger.