We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Thomas Przybylowski. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Thomas below.

Thomas, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

For a long time, I thought of purpose as something you find gradually, through the ordinary accumulation of good work. That changed for me during a pro bono case I took on with a team from Schulte Roth & Zabel through Sanctuary for Families, representing a survivor of domestic violence in a custody matter. Up to that point, I had been doing high-level commercial litigation for hedge funds and public companies — important work, but abstract in a certain way. That case was the opposite. The stakes were immediate and human, and I remember realizing that the same discipline and preparation I brought to a securities fraud class action mattered just as much, if not more, when the client sitting across from me needed it to rebuild her life. That was the moment the work stopped being just a skill set and became something closer to a purpose. It’s shaped every case I’ve taken since, including the shift in my practice toward representing individuals and small business owners directly.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

My practice today is business litigation across New York and New Jersey, with a particular focus on disputes that hit close to home for the people involved — landlord-tenant matters, partnership dissolutions, forced buyouts, and similar conflicts between business owners. What I find most meaningful about this work is that my clients are often navigating litigation for the first time. They’re not general counsel’s office regulars; they’re people whose livelihood or business relationship is on the line, and they need an attorney who can combine real technical skill with genuine care for what they’re going through.

That focus grew out of a career that started in a very different register. I spent years litigating complex commercial disputes and securities fraud class actions at Schulte Roth & Zabel and Pomerantz LLP, representing everyone from institutional investors to publicly traded companies. What I took from that experience wasn’t just subject-matter expertise — it was a rigor and discipline about how to prepare a case that I now apply to matters of every size. I never wanted to be an attorney who could only operate in one register. I’d rather bring the same seriousness to a partnership dispute between two small business owners as I would to a multi-jurisdictional class action, because for the client in front of me, the stakes feel just as high either way.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Thorough preparation, done before you need it. Litigation rewards the people who did their homework before the fight started, not the ones scrambling once it began. I saw this most clearly in securities litigation, where the law effectively forces plaintiffs to build their entire factual case before filing, because there’s no discovery to lean on afterward. My advice to anyone early in their career: build the habit of over-preparing for the moment before you need it, whether that’s a hearing, a negotiation, or a client meeting. It’s much easier to build that discipline early than to try to develop it under pressure later.

2. Clear, persuasive communication. I studied English and Philosophy at Lafayette College before law school, and that background in close reading and analytical writing has mattered as much to my career as anything I learned in a classroom on the law itself. Advocacy is fundamentally an act of communication, and the attorneys I respect most are the ones who can make a complicated situation clear rather than making a simple one sound complicated. For people starting out, I’d say: read and write outside your field, not just within it. The discipline of clear-thinking transfers.

3. Versatility. I’ve never wanted to be the kind of attorney who can only handle one type of matter, and I think that range has made me better at all of it, not worse. Moving between securities fraud class actions, commercial disputes, and now individual business litigation has forced me to translate my instincts across very different contexts, which sharpens judgment in a way that staying in one lane doesn’t. My advice for people early on is to resist over-specializing too quickly. Take the case that’s outside your comfort zone. The discomfort is usually where the growth is.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

If I had to point to one book, it would be Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I first read it during my time studying English and Philosophy at Lafayette College, long before I had any idea I’d end up in litigation, and I’ve returned to it steadily throughout my career rather than treating it as something I read once and set aside.

The idea that has stuck with me most is deceptively simple: sort what’s within your power to affect from what isn’t, and stop spending energy on the latter. Litigation will hand you plenty of both. You can’t control how a judge rules, what the other side decides to do, or how a jury reads a witness. What you can control is how thoroughly you prepared and whether you conducted yourself with integrity along the way. I’ve found that distinction useful in moments that had nothing to do with law, too — it’s a way of thinking about pressure generally, not just courtroom pressure.

The second thing I took from it is less a rule and more a standard I try to hold myself to: that the effort is worth more when it serves something beyond your own advancement. I didn’t need Marcus Aurelius to hand me that idea — it’s something I already gravitated toward — but the book gave me language for it and a reason to keep it in view even when a case is demanding and the incentives point elsewhere.

If there’s a broader lesson in it for other attorneys, it’s this: don’t confine your reading to the law. Some of the best material on judgment, discipline, and how to conduct yourself under pressure isn’t in a legal treatise at all. It’s in philosophy, literature, history — anywhere people have thought seriously about how to act well when the outcome isn’t in your hands.