What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career? It’s a question that ABA Journal podcast host Stephanie Francis Ward loves to ask, one that can prompt incredible stories. It’s the question that inspired her to create a special series of her Asked and Answered podcast, titled Asked and Answered: Lived and Learned. In this episode, Ward speaks with Andrés Gallegos.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
It’s a question that ABA Journal podcast host Stephanie Francis Ward loves to ask, one that can prompt incredible stories. It’s the question that inspired her to create a special series of her Asked and Answered podcast, titled Asked and Answered: Lived and Learned. Ward spoke with six experienced lawyers from around the country to find out what lessons they’ve learned while practicing law, and what those lessons have meant for them both personally and professionally.
Mia Yamamoto, who was born in a Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona during World War II, says her life lesson was the importance of living as her true self—a lesson she put into practice after 20 years as a trial lawyer by transitioning genders. Andrés Gallegos, whose spinal cord was injured after a car accident, learned that he was the only one with the power to decide what expectations he should have for his life and career, and he went on to become a disability rights advocate with a full-time law practice. Former Justice Cruz Reynoso spent his early years working alongside Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez to protect the rights of migrant laborers and the rural poor, and became the first Latino to sit on the California Supreme Court. His lesson came from his father, a farmworker, who insisted that every job is worth doing to the fullest of your abilities. All of the guests on Asked and Answered: Lived and Learned have wisdom to share with attorneys at any age or stage of their career.
Below you’ll find excerpts from each interview. To listen to full episodes of Asked and Answered: Lived and Learned, go to abajournal.com/livedandlearned or look for Asked and Answered via your favorite podcast listening service.
Photograph courtesy of Michele Coleman Mayes.
Vice president and general counsel for the New York Public Library
Life lesson: Difficult conversations can save relationships.
“You need to go in, again, with this mindset of ‘This is something that I’m doing because I want to improve a situation.’ And likewise, be open-minded. Don’t go in assuming you know the answer or what the person is going to say to you.”
“You have to work harder to listen to someone you’d rather not hear talk.”
“Simply keeping your head down and accepting your fate is not what we’re advocating. ... Indeed, you owe it to yourself—and potentially your career—to figure out what’s really going on here.”
Photograph courtesy of Andrés Gallegos.
Partner with Robbins, Salomon & Patt in Chicago
Life lesson: Set your own expectations, rather than letting others decide for you.
“My best clients ... want me for my mind and for my advice, and that’s what I give them.”
“When I became a double-hyphened attorney—that is, a Hispanic, disabled attorney—I knew I had to work even more harder. Again, to show individuals—and myself—that I could do what I’ve always dreamed of doing, and that was becoming a lawyer.”
“The only limiting factor to someone with a disability achieving their dreams are the environmental barriers that exist. But if you’re determined to pursue your dreams and live your life to the fullest, the way that you define it, you can achieve that.”
In more than 20 years of talking to well-known attorneys who love their work, I’ve learned that some have great advice on matters both in and outside of the law, and are happy to share what they’ve learned when they think it might help others.
You may be confident of your ability to act with courtesy and professionalism in your home country. But with the array of cultural differences, social mores and business traditions you may encounter while traveling, how can you be sure you’re not offending clients and alienating foreign judges and arbiters?
Lisa Scottoline, C.E. Tobisman and Scott Turow have at least three things in common: They’re all novelists, attorneys and nominees for this year’s Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. In this special episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with all three authors about their nominated books, their creative processes, and the role they believe lawyers play in society.
Since the late 1990s, Joyce Raby has spent a career bringing technology to legal aid. While a booster and believer in technology's potential to improve America's legal system, her experience is tempering.
"We've been saying for a very long time that technology was going to be the saving grace for the justice ecosystem," she says. "I don't think it is."
This August, lawyers from around the country will come to Chicago for the ABA Annual Meeting. Wondering whether to make the trip yourself?
In this special bonus episode of Asked and Answered, we’re joined by ABA President Hilarie Bass and Marty Balogh of the ABA meetings and travel department.
From 1873 until his death in 1915, Anthony Comstock was the most powerful shaper of American censorship and obscenity laws. Although he was neither an attorney nor an elected official, Comstock used an appointed position as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office Department and legislation known as the Comstock Laws to order the arrests and prosecutions of hundreds of artists, publishers, doctors and anyone else he felt was promoting vice.
Lawyers’ time is extremely valuable. So why would a busy attorney devote nonbillable hours to a podcast?
“It’s a very efficient way to receive information that’s targeted to a specific topic,” says Elisa Poteat, a host of National Security Law Today, a podcast produced by the ABA Standing Committee on Law & National Security. “You can pick up books and spend hours trying to read through them or spend 35 minutes hearing from one of the nation’s foremost practitioners.”
National Security Law Today, which launched in September, is one of several podcasts produced by ABA entities. Poteat co-hosts the podcast with fellow national security attorney Yvette Bourcicot, an adviser to the standing committee.
Poteat says she advocated for the committee to create a podcast for two main reasons: to make the topic of national security law more accessible to the uninitiated and to promote the expert discussions that take place at the committee’s public events.
“It’s one of the few podcasts in this space that features lawyers with experience as opposed to pure opiners,” Poteat says. As an example, she points to a November episode with Mark S. Zaid, a Washington, D.C., attorney who has a practice focused on national security law.
“Whistleblowing and leaks were all over the news, and we were able to interview one of the world’s leading practitioners,” Poteat says. “People tend to throw around the term whistleblower, but whistleblower is a legal definition, and it was incredibly helpful to have Mark on to explain it.”
Lawyers' mental health has been a topic of increasing discussion and awareness, combined with efforts to help lawyers deal with anxiety, depression and addiction issues. But an aspect of mental health that is sometimes overlooked is body image, and the consequences of body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
After losing both the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California governor’s race, Richard Milhous Nixon vowed at a press conference: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” and seemed to have written the epitaph to his political career. He left for New York and became a partner in a white shoe law firm. Yet six years later, he would win the White House, in no small part because of that firm.
For litigators accustomed to conducting discovery inside large warehouses surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of cardboard file boxes, combing through several forests' worth of paper to find the few relevant documents was like trying to find the needle in the haystack.
Studies have shown that implicit bias is something that affects everyone to some degree. So what steps can legal professionals at all ranks take to make the justice system fairer and more equitable?
In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with Judge Bernice Donald of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and professor Sarah E. Redfield of the University of New Hampshire School of Law about Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias, a book published by the ABA.
Newly minted law grads will soon be entering the job market, but where are they most likely to find employment? In this episode of Asked and Answered, the ABA Journal's Stephanie Francis Ward speaks with Valerie Fontaine, founding partner of the legal search firm SeltzerFontaine, about which in-demand areas of law have open job positions—and how law grads can secure them.
In the 45 years since Roe v. Wade was decided, it has been a focal point for both anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights groups. But the opinion in the 1973 case has also been used by activists of liberal, libertarian and conservative ideologies to develop privacy arguments for issues ranging from access to experimental drugs to euthanasia to personal data security to sex worker rights.
Mike Dillon has seen a lot change over his career as general counsel to some of the nation’s largest technology companies.
Wellness is not just about eating health food and exercising, Jolene Park tells the ABA Journal's Stephanie Francis Ward in this episode of Asked and Answered. It’s also about getting enough time to relax, getting enough sleep and not being stressed out about your job or finances — and employers can play a big role in all of those things.
When we think of civil rights movements, the first to spring to mind might be the battles against African-American segregation or for women's suffrage. But one of the longest, most successful–and least-known–of these movements in America has been made on behalf of corporations. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, professor Adam Winkler, author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, shares what he learned from his investigation into how corporations have achieved constitutional protections ranging from the right to sue and be sued, to individual rights like religious liberty protections and free speech.
ABA Journal
• Asked and Answered
Apple | Stitcher | Google Play
• Legal Rebels
Apple | Stitcher | Google Play
• The Modern Law Library
Apple | Stitcher | Google Play
Commission on Domestic & Sexual Violence
On the Ground
Apple | Soundcloud
Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs
• The Path to Law Student Well-Being
Family Law Section
Government and Public Sector Lawyers Division
Compelling Conversations with Colleagues
Apple | PlayerFM | Soundcloud
Health Law Section
Law Student Division
ABA Law Student Podcast
Apple | Stitcher | Google Play
Legal Career Center
ABA Legal Career Insights
Apple | PlayerFM
Section of Environment, Energy and Resources
ABA Section of Environment, Energy and Resources
Apple | Google Play
Section on Litigation
Standing Committee on Law and National Security
National Security Law Today
Apple | Soundcloud
Tort, Trial and Insurance Practice Section
Initiative on Disaster Preparedness and Response
Apple | Podchaser
