Personal Jurisdiction S3E45: Let’s Get Personal with the Mock Trial Coaches from the Class Action Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
And you get to use that to help people in
their twenties who are going through some of the most
confusing times in their life when the whole world of
streaming of them that they should be an indult and
know how to do all of this while they're deferately
trying to figure out how they balance all of the
daily tasks of repetition that come with adulthood. You get
to stand there and help them across that bridge and
also placing them a seat to make sure that they

(00:24):
carry on the things that you're teaching them. That that
was why it spoke to me, because the ripple effect
that you can have in this job is unlike anything else. Hi,
I'm Hallie rit Sue and I'm Alison Friedman. And this
is Personal Jurisdiction, a podcast or get personal with lawyers
about their journeys before, during, and after law school. Join
us for season three as our guests share there behind

(00:45):
the scenes reflections on the highs and lows of how
they got to where they are today. On today's episode
of Personal Jurisdiction, we welcome Adric Embro, Laura Rose, and
A J. B. Though they Luna, they are several of
the trial team coaches from the podcast class Action with

(01:07):
Katie Fang. Class Action is an immersive, twelve part documentary
podcast series about the next generation of lawyers, heard through
the voices of law students competing in mock trial tournaments
around the country. We first learned about class Action through
a conversation with producers Lisa Gray and Kevin Hoffman and
thought it would be fun and wonderful to hear from

(01:27):
a few of the trial team coaches featured on class
Action to learn more about their career journeys, why they've
dedicated their time to coaching trial teams, and the advice
they have for aspiring lawyers. Adria Kimbro is the student
recruiting manager in the Marshall Motley Scholars Program at the
n double a CP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Previously,
Adria was a pre law advisor at Dillard University in

(01:48):
New Orleans and served as one of the university's mock
trial team coaches. Adria is a graduate of Talladega College
and the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Laura Rose
is an Associate Professor of Law Band the Hide to
Prime Trial Advocacy Fellow at the University of South Dakota
nuts In School of Law. Laura is a graduate of
Stetson University and Stetson University College of Law. A J.

(02:10):
B Tho They Luna is the Assistant Dean for Advocacy
Programs and the Hardy Service Professor of Law at St.
Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. He
teaches trial advocacy and arbitration and directs the Law Schools
Advocacy Program National Team. A J. Is a graduate of
Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland School of Law.

(02:30):
Please enjoy this conversation with our friends from Class Action.
Welcome back to Personal Jurisdiction. We are here for our
last episode of season three and we're so excited that
we have the opportunity to talk to several of the
trial team coaches that were featured in the Class Action podcast. Laura,

(02:53):
Adria and a J. Thank you so much for joining
us today. We're so happy to see you. It's awesome.
Thanks for having us, really excited. Yes, thanks for having us.
Thank you so much for asking us to come hang out.
I think this is the most people we've had on
a recording at once, so that's great too. And We're
just going to jump right in and we're gonna ask
some questions that are similar to what we chat about

(03:14):
on a normal episode of our podcast. And our listeners
are at several stages of their careers. Some are thinking
about law school, some are current law students, and some
are practicing attorneys. And one of the things that we
really enjoy hearing about from our guests is why they
decided to go to law school. So I would love

(03:36):
to start our conversation with asking each of you why
you went to law school. And Adrian, would you be
willing to start us off today? How did I know
you were going to say? It's like, well, alpha order,
so maybe it's going to be me first. So I
felt ready I'd offered sort of too two part answer
to your question. I was the proverbial kid who you know,

(03:59):
top a lot and like to argue, and somebody says, oh,
you want to go to law school, which is a
terrible reason to go to law school, So let me
say that, But um, that was part of it. I
think there were people my family, people in my community
perhaps who did not have a lot of exposure to law,
but knew that lawyers um use their voices to advocate

(04:20):
for themselves or for other people, and they thought based
upon I guess some sort of natural attributes, that I
might be a good candidate for that. I think the
other piece has a lot to do with my own
personal origin story. UM. So, I am originally from Mobile, Alabama,
born and raised, and I was raised by civil rights parents, UH,

(04:41):
civil rights air parents, and UM, I grew up having
an understanding a sense of history, especially of Black Americans
in this country and the ways in which the law
was able to help advance the cause for racial justice
in this country. Fast forward to the eighties. Believe it
or not, Mobile Alabama wonderful place, but also has the

(05:04):
unfortunate distinction of being the last reported location of a
clan lynching, which happened in the eighties and my lifetime
about i'd say two miles away from the house where
I grew up. And Um, there was a man by
the name of Michael Donald who was lynched by the clan.
UM fast forward, Um, the individuals who lynched Michael Donald

(05:26):
were held They were convicted criminally, but there's also a
lawsuit against the clan. There may be some folks who've
heard of this story. Was featured on CNN and a documentary.
But Morris D's in the Southern Poverty Law Center, along
with some other local lawyers, sue the clan and they won,
and as a result of that lawsuit, that judgment bankrupted

(05:48):
the clan, at least the organized clan as we know
it today. And I just remember thinking, oh, you can
do that, Like something happens so tragic, and of course
none of those things bring the life of the loved
one back, but to realize, like, things can happen, and
there is a mechanism and a tool to be able

(06:08):
to address those kinds of issues, And I just remember
being so completely taken aback by that and thinking what
a powerful tool to have and something that I wanted
to be able to learn about more and to be
able to use as a vehicle to advance issues of
justice that I saw income a community. So that was probably,
as time went on, a big part of my reason

(06:31):
for wanting to go to law school. Laura, what about you?
So law school was the plan from a very young age.
The timing wasn't necessarily what I had hoped that it
would be. I graduated from college in two thousand nine,
and it was at the very beginning of the housing crisis,
when everything kind of turned up lay down, and prior
to starting the fall semester at law school, I had

(06:53):
been intending to go out to New York and give
myself five years and just pursue acting and passions in
that direction. And when I saw what was coming with
the housing market, my political science made your brain took
over and went, no, we're going to be practical and
we're gonna make sure that we can pay bills and
feed ourselves and do things rather than go live a
serving artist life for a little bit. But the start

(07:14):
of wanting to go to law school really started because
when I started school, my dad started law school. So
we would get up in the morning and we would
pack up our stuffs to go to school, and it
would be daddy and daughter go to school. He would
drop me off at kindergarten and he'd go off down
the road to Notre Dame to go to law school
for the day. And I grew up around it, and
I grew up around it, knowing the impact that the
law could have and the impact that advocacy could have,

(07:35):
and the changes that it could reak in people's lives,
and the ability that it gave people to speak truths
to power and and look at people and say, you're
going to take this seriously and you're gonna treat everybody
equally under the law, because that's how this work. That's
that very very well with me and my inner child,
who very similar to Adria. I was always told, oh, yeah,
you're you're gonna end up a lawyer because I couldn't

(07:56):
listen to people be wrong and not pointed out for them. Um,
I I don't see where that's a character flaw to
this day, but I think that it was a It
was a calling. And I think a lot of people
who get involved in this, and the people that you
hear about on the podcast in particular, everybody in this room,
you're called to it. There is something about that service
and that leadership that comes from it, of wanting to
stand up for your fellow human being. And I think

(08:17):
it spoke to me from a young age, and I
pursued it and I ended up in the best job
in the best place that I possibly could have. Well,
I'm hearing a thread here which is both of you saying,
you know, essentially that can see piece of things and
speaking truth to power are two important pieces which obviously
there's no question as to how you ended up then
going into a coaching but AJM expecting you to follow

(08:38):
this threat exactly. So please tell us why was that
you into law school? Well, I'm going to concede to
my two counterparts here. Uh, they could have the point.
I'm out. Those are great. I am a complete accident.
Law school student can't have to go back. My parents
were immigrants to this country. They were fled Fidel Castro
and Communist Cuba with the clothes on their back. That

(09:01):
was it. I had a brother and a sister born
in Cuba, and my mother was eight months pregnant with
my next sister. We were okay for the first couple
of years, and then there was this big earthquake in
California and we lost everything and we went from being
okay living a good life too. We were dirt port
and I mean dirt port, Evicted from homes, going to
kitchen soup kitchens for meals, going without eating, going without

(09:24):
heat in Boston in the wintertime. It was bad. It
really was. And I remember a childhood thinking that I
was going to amount to nothing. To be quite honest
with you, and my parents. My mother didn't speak English,
my father spoke some English. They were brown and my
father was brown skinned. My mother's white skin. Her family
is more from Spain than Cuba. So I went to

(09:44):
the Marine Corps when I turned eighteen years old because
that's the only way that I saw how to get
out of the cycle that I was in. My older
sister had gone to community college, didn't succeed. My next
sister went to Georgia on a music scholars She lasted
a year, she didn't succeed, And I went and joined
the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps was a complete

(10:06):
lifeserver for me. I will I will always be indebted
to the Corps for giving me a lot of things
like discipline and uh and believing in myself that I
never really had growing up. So I became a police officer.
After I left the Marine Corps and I started going
to community college. It took me thirteen years to get
my A A degree, and then Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

(10:28):
It had a program for aspiring leaders in law. It
was to finish out your your bachelor's degree. So I
went to Hopkins and when I was finishing up at Hopkins.
A friend of mine by the name of lie Maattic.
She was the first sergeant with the state Police, maybe
she was a lieutenant by then. She said, what are
you gonna do after Hopkins? And I said, I don't know,
Maybe I'll go get a master's And she said, you
should go to law school. And I said, okay. And

(10:50):
that's how I ended up in law school. I never
dreamed about it. I never thought that was in my history.
There's no way that anyone that knew me when I
was a kid wouldever eve that I would want to
be or even aspire to be an attorney in anyway.
It was just good things happened to me, and there
were good people along the way who made good recommendations
to me, and I'm thankful to all of them. Thank

(11:11):
you all for sharing the really intensely personal things that
contributed towards your path to the law. That's one of
the things that we love the most about this podcast
is seeing so many examples of how there is no
one path to law school, and that for many people,

(11:32):
I think more than we realize, that path is not linear,
It is not straight from college. It is not necessarily
someone who knows Okay, well, I'm a really argumentative child,
and so I'm going to go be a litigator. It's
a discovery process and it's a process that you know
takes a lot of help in sometimes more than three years.

(11:57):
So I can see in working with you how trial
team coaching has fit into your career. But I would
love to hear from you, including how you know that
may relate to the types of jobs that you were
doing at the time or when you started trial team coaching.
How did you get there, Why did you decide to

(12:19):
start coaching trial teams and a j I will start
with you this time. That's a really great question. So
for me, I think it goes back to even when
I was a kid. I was never really good at sports.
I was a smart kid, but never really good at sports.
But I understood tactics really well. And even as a kid,
I started coaching. I remember I was I was thirteen

(12:39):
years old and I got a summer job teaching um
elementary school kids. Pe for a summer job. Right, poor
kids can get jobs and get paid for the summer.
I think I got paid five dollars a day to
go do this, and I started teaching kids how to
play softball. I couldn't hit a baseball. I could teach
anybody how to hit a baseball, though, even as as

(13:00):
as a twelve thirteen year old, I was able to
teach somebody else how to do it. I understood the
mechanics of it. The same was true when I went
to the Marine Corps. I remember I was a good marine,
but I wasn't a great marine. I certainly wasn't an
average marine. I was better than average marine. Believe it
or not, there are classes of marine. But I remember
one day and somebody had said to me, you know,

(13:20):
a college boy, come over here. I had never been
to college, but there was something in the way that
I could explain something to others that they would have
me come over and help people understand stuff. And then
that that just kept progressing all the way through my
law enforcement career, and then I got to law school.
I remember one day I got to law school and
gentleman by the name of Jerome D's I was still
a police officer. I was working shift work. Sometimes I'd

(13:41):
have to pay people to work part of my shift
a couple of hours, so I would go to the
edge of the county wait for somebody to call in
service for me, and then I would rush into law
school and right at six o'clock, parking was free on
the street, so I would go right in front of
the building at six o'clock, run of the door in
uniform with my gun on, and run the class so
I could be in class, you know, five minutes late,

(14:02):
but you know, to me, that was on time. And
I remember Jerome d stopped me at the door and
he said why are you here? And I said, I
I need to go to class. He goes, no, no,
why why are you here? And we played this cat
and mouse game of why I was here, and he
was offended that I was wearing a gun inside of
the law school building. He was offended by that. But
I'm not going to leave a gun in Baltimore City

(14:23):
in a police car. I'm just not going to do that, right,
So he and I got into a bit of an argument,
and then I got this notice a couple of days
later that I was to be in his office the
next day at four o'clock or something like that. And
I normally don't get to school until six, but it
was my day off. Well. Jerry Ds was the director
of the trial program at Maryland and he saw something

(14:45):
in me, and so I came to his office. We
had a discussion. We talked about the gun thing. He
got over it very quickly once he understood what my
situation was, and then he asked me if I would
come in on Saturday. There was a Supreme Court clerk
that was coming in to judge a team for a competition,
and he wanted to have a real police officer play

(15:06):
the character in one of these mock trial competitions. So
I said sure, and it was an all day affair
and I kept playing the cop different ways, good cop,
bad cop, mean cop, soft cop. I mean. He would
just say do it this way, do it this way,
do it this way. And it was the same case,
but a different kind of police officer to help train

(15:27):
those students, and I just thought, wow, that's really cool. Um,
So Jerry and I became friends. Again. I'm a little
older than the average law student. I think I was
in my thirties, and Jerry and I became friends, and
then I made the team. And then when I made
the team, he had me as the first student coach
of the team. So I started coaching right away out

(15:50):
of the box. I want my first competition out of
fantastic team, we want our first competition, the Daniels competition,
and then after that, I basically became a student coach,
except I think compete a couple more times. But after
I graduated, Jerry d said, hey, you need to come
on and just help me keep coaching. So it was Jerry.
Jerry saw something in me. He was a great mentor
of mine and he's the one that put the bug

(16:13):
in me to coach, and that's how it all started
for me. I can tell you that it's continued because
of people like Laura Rose's dad, Charlie Rose, And I'm
in this job now because of Charlie Rose. Well some
of it has to do with me, but it's Charlie
Rose why I give credit for me being here, because
I wouldn't have gotten this job without him. He was
looking out for me and he helped me secure this job.

(16:35):
So it's because of others that I ended up doing
this kind of work. Yeah, that's one of the other
big things that we talked about often on the podcast
is just the idea of mentorship and how important that
can be, and also sort of networking or connections to
people and maintaining sort of, you know, a connections to
other other individuals who might be able to help you

(16:56):
or put you on a path that maybe you didn't
even know about or know that you you wanted to pursue.
So I love to hear that. And that's a perfect
segue to Laura us And you just referenced her dad
and and his his helpfulness in terms of your career.
So Laura, will you give us a sense of, you know,
how you made your way to being a trial team coach.

(17:17):
When I started law school, I was vehemently against doing
anything with criminal law, and vehemently against doing anything to
do with litigation, and vehemently against anything to do with
military law because it would put me square in my
father's shadow. I had this idea, this wonderful dream, that
I was going to become a contract lawyer and I
was going to help negotiate the right to the oil

(17:37):
wells that exists in the North Sea off the northern
coast of Scotland. And then I took contracts and I
wanted to just absolutely scoop my own eyeballs out with
the rusty soon. And when we were talking about what
offer acceptance in consideration and all of this stuff was
and I realized that was not my calling. And unfortunately,
as I have to say often in life, my dad
ended up being right right and it was litigation. And

(17:58):
I will tell you right here, right now, that trial
saved my life and made me a better person. And
it made be a better person because I didn't get
it when I wanted it. The first time I tried
out for steps in his trial team as a second
year law student and there was a very strict eight
minute time limit that was said. I went five words
over the eight minute time limit. Dad is the director
of the program at the time, and they kept me

(18:19):
instantaneously like there's no there's no discussion, there's no anything,
there's no stacy that or anything. You're just done right.
And I'm mortified because I have let down the family
name and all this other stuff. But my coach, Professor Topics,
lives at me and said, you can do shadow teams
and you can figure this out and you can learn.
And I made a decision that I was going to
fwallow my pride and recognize that I had more things
to learn than I realized and that I needed to

(18:41):
grow from that. And it made me a better human
being because I got to grow from that. And I
did six competitions that year as a shadow team member,
where I was just I was taking every opportunity that
I could get to get into the courtroom and do
this because it made law school come back to life
for me. It saved the idea of getting my j D.
It ate it worthwhile because it showed me an active

(19:02):
way in which I could make it difference right, and
that that got strengthened and heightened when I took We
had a class club constitutional on the Civil Rights movement
that Professor Bickle Toot and we would go and we
would study the decisions of the war in court for
six weeks. And after we studied the decisions of the
War in Court, we went on the Freedom read and
we got to go with an actual freedom writer. We
met up in Nashville and we went to different locations,

(19:24):
and I can remember standing in Nashville and him talking
about how he and his friends had to go outside
into the alleyways to use the restroom because they weren't
allowed to use the restroom in the buildings there were
no colored restrooms, and thinking about how I had struggled
when we were reading the court's decisions because it was
so common sense to me, right, like, how how could
we be arguing about this needing to be an equivalency? Right?
Why was this every debate? To stand in that place

(19:45):
with that man and recognize what he had gone through
and see what people who had gone through law school
were able to effectuate change wise in life, it changed
everything for me. So after I graduated, I had a
absess in shadow team for a year with my friend
Eric the Storm. She and I ran that thing together
because the wouldn't let us coach right away. And then
after we had a year out, we started coaching, and

(20:07):
I was working as a white collar crime prosecutor, had
been my dream job. I was working through the Florida
Office of the Attorney General of the white collar crime
prosecutor doing Ponzi scheme security fraud cases that we weren't
quite big enough for the FEDS don't want to deal with,
but we're too complicated or touched on multi jurisdiction. So
I was I was doing my dream work, and I
was coaching on the weekends, and I realized I was
more excited to get up on the weekend and go

(20:28):
work with law students and make them understand what hearsay
was and how they could take this job on. Then
I was to go in and do my work in
the office, and I got so pivot point where career
wise something was going to change. I had an offer
to go join private practice. Uh my former trial team coach,
I call him the big brother that I never wanted,
Lee Perlman in his private practice. He he had a

(20:49):
slot open for me. Or I could go to u
m k C and work for Ray Foreman as a
grad student and start a path towards making this the
academic pursuit that I wanted it to be. And so
I took the risk, and seven months after I started
the job in U m k C, I was at
USC with a tenure track law professor position, running a
trial team and building something up here on the legacy

(21:09):
of the people's game before me. And I got to
do that because of all the wonderful people that I'm
connected to. A J talked about paying it forward. A
J is on my list of people who are why
I am where I am today, right. Liz Lippy from
Temple is on my list. Joel. That's scene from Temple
there for they go acrostination, and I have been so
blessed to work with so many of these legal minds
that it is my great privilege to now start another

(21:32):
at another institution, in another place, making sure that these
lessons get carried forwards to areas of the country that
needs them desperately. Not because there's anything wrong, but because
everybody should have the same kind of access that I
got to have. And so that's that's why I do
what I do, and that's why I pushed Trout in
the way that I do, because it's a single grade
as simulated experiential learning experience that any law student can
participate in. Parna Laura, you mentioned that for you this

(21:55):
job at being a trial team coach and a professor
is a calling, and I'm just curious. I mean, I
can hear the passion in your voice, so you know,
it's no secret that that you love doing what you do.
But I'm curious how you sort of knew that it
was a calling. Was it just you know, this feeling
that on the weekends you actually wanted to get up
and and do that, and that's sort of like what

(22:15):
pushed you in that direction, or you know, is there
something else where you kind of knew, like, Okay, this
is my place. It's because it allows me to combine
equally the whimsical and practical parts of my soul. Is
what I like to tell people. My mom is an
interior designer by trade. My dad is you know, a
former trial or former military man now lobbying. He's very rational,
very black and white, very things are in order. And

(22:36):
then you've got mom who calls me up and said,
what creative thing are you doing to make sure that
you don't lose your mind? Trial team is that for
me because it's the place where I get to be
fully myself. I get to be all of the strategic
moments and looking at it from a rational perspective indication
analysis mode, but also have my theatricality and my big
moment of of embracing those pieces of my personality. And

(22:57):
you get to use that to help people in their
twenties who are going through some of the most confusing
times in their life when the whole world was screaming
at them that they should be an adult and know
how to do all of this well. They're definitely trying
to figure out how they balance all of the daily
tasks of repetition that come with adulthood. You get to
stand there and help them across that bridge and also
placing them a seed to make sure that they carry

(23:19):
on the things that you're teaching them. That that was
why it spoke to me, because the ripple effect that
you can have in this job is unlike anything else.
I love that, all right, So, Adria Europe, how did
you make your way to becoming a trial to youth coach? Well?
I just love the sort of cosmic way that this
is flowing because I'm super excited to follow Laura. So

(23:41):
much of what she said resonated with me. So first
I'll start by saying, this is all very crazy sort
of you know, ended up in this this role because
I am the daughter of a teacher, UM, and I've
come from a family of educators, and I swore that
I would not do anything remotely close to teaching, like

(24:03):
never ever, ever, ever, ever ever, UM. So it's always
funny to me to sort of see the ways in
which life unfolds. UM. But you know what really resonated
with me about what Laura shared was sort of this
leak from sort of the thing that you thought you
were going to do into this new thing that feels
like a calling, and I think that certainly was my experience.

(24:27):
So before getting into coaching, I did quite a bit
of pre law advising and working with students who wanted
to go to law school. And I think back now,
I can connect the dots to the ways in which
I was doing that as a law student. So I
find people or people would find me, particularly students from

(24:47):
underrepresented backgrounds, because it was just very painfully clear to
me the lack of diversity in the profession, first as
a law student and then entering the profession. In all
of the spaces and places that I worked, for the
most part, I was either the only attorney of color,
or if there was one, maybe one more. And so

(25:07):
I didn't have any lawyers in my family. I really
think it's the grace of God. I didn't have any
exposure to the law at all. So that was always
something that was very much a personal passion for me.
Anybody who needed help, I would do that. Fast forward
to about two thousand and twelve, living in New Orleans,
practicing law, practicing with the firm, and started, you know,

(25:27):
sort of it as an extension of that, just helping
at at Dillard University in New Orleans with students who
had that interest and kind of like Laura, over time,
you know, so I would go on campus periodically to volunteer,
and that was the thing that got me excited. I
really enjoyed the other lawyers that I was practicing with

(25:48):
no complaints, you know, from that perspective, but there was
something that was pulling in this other direction, this this
joy and just there's the impact of being able to
connect with young people college students and in my situation,
very young eighteen nineteen twenty year olds who were just
beginning life and figuring things out. And so I took

(26:12):
the leap similar to Laura, I left um, you know,
the full time practice of law and started working with
undergraduate students. People thought I was insane. I had a
number of people in colleagues, in fact, after I started
a couple of years, guys like, so are you done
with that? Like that thing you're doing like and sort
of you know, like with those kids, like when are
you gonna come back and get a real job. This

(26:35):
is not but I digress. But so get to Dillard.
Before my arrival, there had already been a creation of
a mock trial room. It was named after and dedicated
for Justice Revious Ortique, who was a Dillard, a lum
and the first African American on Louisiana Supreme Court. And
the room was created and it's set no activity lights off,

(26:59):
I mean, beautiful space. So I get there. That's the
first thing on my jim. I'm like, we gotta get
something going in this mock trial room, because what a
what a gift to have a room like this on
an undergraduate campus for students to learn and to develop.
And so we we got it started. I had the
good fortune, really blessing to have a conversation with Judge

(27:23):
kern Rees, who was at that time the chief judge
of the Civil District Court here in the city, and
he's like, hey, Adrian, hear you over there at Dillard.
You know, if you ever think about trying to do
a trial team, just let me know. I'm happy to help.
And it was like the stars aligned and Judge Reyes
and I got the ball rolling and the rest is history,

(27:44):
so to speak. It has been a tremendous joy, not
one that I was necessarily looking for, but the path
I think once a friend of mine says leap and
the net will appear. Um, it seems sort of like
that's such a like non lawyer thing to say, we
go to school to sort of manage risk. Why would
you leap in there's no net, Like that's foolish, That's

(28:06):
but I think I feel like, essentially that's what I did.
I leaked, and then all of these other things start
to move and happen. And you know, before I even
thought about leaping, there was a mock trial room already
there waiting, just waiting for a team. I love that,
so as you guys, I think I'll know. I was
on the trial team in law school, and I definitely

(28:27):
leapt without a nut beneath me in in taking the
risk to to try out for the trial team. You know,
it wasn't the most like outgoing or the most argumentative
or any of that, And it was one of the
best experiences I had, or not one of It was
the best experience that I had in law school. And
I owe so much to my trial team coach. But
I'm curious from your perspective, you know, I think for me,

(28:48):
it gave me a ton of confidence and the kind
of you know, pushed me out of the nest in
a way that I needed to be pushed. But from
your perspective, what is your favorite part about teaching or
coaching law students? And see you all smiling, so I hope,
I hope this is a welcome question. So Laura, can
we pop back to you over this one the moment
that they stopped thinking of themselves as a student and

(29:11):
start thinking of themselves as what I call a pseudo
colleague because they never quite get brave enough at this point,
I'm old enough now that they feel distant enough that
they're like, I'm not quite there, but I'm right here, coach,
and I'm speaking up behind you. And when that when
that moment dropped, where the student teacher relationship changes from
just being where I have been teaching you this whole time,

(29:31):
now you feel like you can play the game. And
the best way that I have to explain that is
a story. So y'all have to forgive me. I'll try
to keep it short. I'm in Professor Topics Trial Advocacy
class and this is the semester that I haven't made
a team, and I am intimate on on campus for
always having my sunglasses on. And this particular day, I
had a pair of bright pink Parkley Cati sunglasses on
my head, and it's my turn to get up and

(29:52):
go give a cross examination. Now, before Lee Topic became
the amazing attorney that he was, he was a Southern
Baptist school football coach who took no nonsense for anybody.
And I knew that I could not go in front
of the bar with my sparkly pink sunglasses on my
head or I was not here. So I reached over
and I set them behind the bar without looking at them,
go through do to cross examination, and turned to get

(30:13):
my critique, and the Topic is wearing my fern glasses
and he proceeds to critique me and do the rest
of the class while wearing bright pink, sparkly rhyin stone
covered cat I sunglasses. And I thought, okay, if that's
how we're gonna play, that's how we're gonna play. And
I went to party City that night and I went
to the kid's birthday party section and the kids sunglasses
that they have that are hard eye shaped, right. I

(30:34):
bought enough of those for everybody in my class, and
I got there early the next day and I handed
him out to everybody, and I said, look when he
gets in here, he turned When he turns around after
he's given critique, somebody, we're all gonna put him on
at once. So he turned around. He's gonna see all
of this. And I don't know how I got my
classmates to agree to my nonsense, but they did. And
when PC turned around to give critique, he was greeted

(30:54):
by a see of twelve last students, all with hard
eye sunglasses on. He lost it and for the rest
his class, I mean, he literally dismissed class afterwards because
he was he was so happy about the game that
had gone forward. That happens with law students on trial
team because they learned to trust themselves. This process teaches
them that they can do the analysis, they can make

(31:15):
the argument. They can understand how to leave the rules
of evidence with the particular fact, with the particular portion
of procedure, and where we are in the trial to
make a persuasive point. They understand and begin to see
themselves and develop their professional identity through this in a
way that law school doesn't leave a lot of room for.
In other places, it's real hard to feel confident that

(31:36):
you understand a case while your professor is cold calling
you and drilling you on a detail of a case
that was want to succeed that you had to read
while you were doing all the other various things that
law students do, right, But the discrete exercise of here
is a fact pattern with for witnesses, with a story
that must be told and a charge that must be
proven or disproven, makes them shed the rest of the

(31:58):
worry for a minute and they get to grow and
become those versions of themselves. And when that starts to happen,
I get real excited because it means that we have
hit a satisfactory level of base knowledge for you to
feel confident. Now we can start growing you into real
excellence because you're willing to play the game and you've
seen that you're a part of it too. That's my
favorite part. A j. You are in the unique position

(32:21):
of having coached pre law students, so college students. What
was your favorite part of doing that and working with
that particular group of students. Yeah, so, you know, similar
to Laura, I think that whole transition of starting our
fearful and moving past that fear, I think it's always

(32:43):
really powerful to see to move past that place of
insecurity because they all start off very scared, they all
start off shaking like a leaf, and then they're able
to move through. That is always a tremendous sense of
joy because it happens for every single individual student. I
think that's especially true in working with undergraduate students, and

(33:05):
so my hope is that the experience that they have
as undergraduate students helps them to be able to be
ready for a j and Laura when they get to
law school. I think that that's the that's the joy
in it, and I think that's especially true for students.
So I have not said this specifically, but Dillard University

(33:27):
is a historically black university. All of the teams that
I've coached at Dillard have been all black teams, and
I think there is something. I guess two things I'll
mention with that. One is the students who are part
of our team often have a lot of passion around
issues of justice, things that they see in the community,

(33:48):
very similar to the experiences that I shared, But through
mock trial, they now have the language to be able
to articulate their feelings in a way at empowers them
and and prepares them for law school. But what I
think it also does I think sometimes when you're you're
at a smaller school and perhaps you think those teams

(34:11):
over there have more resources, or they must be smarter,
or they must be better, or they must have some
sort of thing you're experiencing, you know, sort of this
concentrated imposter syndrome, not just as an individual, but a
collective team of people to then be able to go
and compete and win, and it just removes the scales off,

(34:34):
like it just instantly, like when they stand and they're
able to argue and they win that round and they
figure out, oh, they're from where, and to have the
confidence of knowing. So you take that that piece and
then you carry that into law school. I was texting
with some of our students from the team who are
now one else who are all in exams, just like

(34:56):
Lauren aj students. So I was texting them, I'm like,
remember what happened last year, Remember what happened with the
championship team, and all of the amazing things that you did.
You did the impossible. So you've already done the impossible.
So there's nothing that's going to happen over the course
of this exam period that you have not already confronted,
and so that to me is that's like, that's that's

(35:18):
the money, that's that's the goal. That's the very, very
best thing about it, because it puts them on a
different playing field, so to speak, once they get to
law school, I think, and of course as they enter
the profession, because they'll learn the substance of the material.
But the confidence that comes from this is just this
priceless j what about you, Yeah, you know. For me
it's it's I'm a little older now than doing us

(35:40):
for a little while. I think the thing that keeps
motivating me is that that aha moment when you realize
that you have changed the student, when you change your
life from being a student and becoming a lawyer. And
you can see it, you can hear it, you can
feel it, and just like Allison said, it was the
best experience of her law school career, there's no one
that goes through this process and at the end of

(36:00):
the day says that's the dumbest thing I ever did.
There is a single soul that's going to say that.
Every single person that goes through these programs, whether it's
Adria's or Laura's or mine or anybody else's it's like
it everyone's gonna say the same exact thing. It's the
best experience I've ever went through. And the reason why
is that we started to teach you how to act

(36:21):
like a lawyer, not just think like a lawyer. This
past week, Laura and I were in Atlanta for the
Daniels competition. I had won that competition twenty years ago
as a law student, so I was I really wanted
to win this year. So we got there a couple
of days early, and we had all two l team

(36:42):
never competed before, and they had the basics all right,
They got the basics right there. We all teach I
don't care where you go. Everyone teaches you how to
do an opening essentially the same way everyone teaches you
how to direct, how to cross. It isn't magic, it's
it's it's to teach them how to do it, and
then you try to get the other parts out. And

(37:03):
we had this one student who was just having really
a difficult time delivering an opening statement. The words were right,
but the way it was coming out it had no emotion.
It was a mock trial, right. So I spent three
hours with her working on her opening statement to getting
her to believe that she actually represented the family of
a dead kid and what it meant to them, And

(37:25):
I ended up playing a song. Uh just came to me.
These things just come to us, right. I'm sitting there
and I'm trying to get her to understand about storytelling
in an opening and trying to get her to understand
that you just can't spew the information. You have to
deliver the information. You have to make people understand and
be in the shoes of the person that was affected.

(37:47):
So I played Joe Jackson's Slow Song. I don't know
if you have that song. I don't know if you
have licensing agreements. You might want to go out on
this on this podcast on Joe jackson Slow Song. It's
about it's all the the seven minute song, right. I
don't know if you have either of you heard it,
If any any of you heard the song Joe Jackson's,
it's a phenomenal song right where he tells the story

(38:09):
and he reaches a crescendo and we're done with that
part of the story, so now I need to tell
you another part of the story. And then that builds
to a crescendo and then he starts the story again
building to this just phenomenal crescendo and then one key
on the piano and when we played that for her
and I gave her opening in the song. So while

(38:30):
the song is playing in the background, I am giving
her opening and it's so it's being delivered in a
different way, and I start seeing the tears begin to
well in her eyes. So then I called the rest
of the team back into the room and I said,
go give your opening. And it was truly amazing and

(38:50):
that her entire body and her entire team felt the
opening and it was just an incredible experience, not just
for her but for all of us because she had
an AHA moment and throughout the tournament, her best part
of the entire tournament was in fact her opening, because
she stopped being a student and she started being an advocate.

(39:15):
And to me, that's what drives me. That's what gets
me to get up every day and want to come
in and do this. And Adrian, I hear you when
you say, you know people are wondering if you're ever
going to grow up and do something for a living.
I get that all the time, I really do. But
it's what drives me, and I really enjoy it. I
just also want to highlight the amount of dedication and
time also that it takes to be a trial team coach.

(39:38):
I mean just hearing the stories that you all are telling.
You know, it's not just like Okay, we're gonna spend
an hour and go through your opening and like we're
good to go. I mean, that will never never get
you to where you need to be. Um, Laura, I
remember when we were chatting, um, you know, a few
weeks ago, and you said that you know, there's no
necessarily secret sauce, but it's really who goes for it
and who's willing to sort of spend their whole weekend

(40:00):
and putting in the time and putting in the effort.
And that's both on the students part and on your part.
I mean just hearing you know, the cats sunglasses story
and the song story and all of those like really creative, um,
you know, techniques that you're helping your law students to
be able to become better advocates through like really creative means.
And so it's it's a lot of work and dedication.

(40:22):
So when when you say you know, oh my gosh,
you're gonna grow up and have a real job someday.
I just want to highlight for folks that it is
as real as it gets. So real. I was just
gonna say, it doesn't feel like work to us because
it's it's it's just joy. It is it is watching
being a military kid. For me, what it comes down
to is, I'm I'm passing down the keys to protecting
American democracy, to ensuring that people understand you have the

(40:45):
right to to bring people in under the six and
seventh Amendment, speak truth to power, and have your voice heard,
regardless of where you fall on any of the variety
of spectrums in this country, and you have that right.
You have that ability to go out and protect these
people with it right that meed suels me the way
that with with what AJ talking about about watching them
become that lawyer is I'm making sure that something's going

(41:06):
to exist after me, that the things that I've been
taught and that I've been gifted are there. So the
twenty four hours of practice that happened on a weekend
where you're looking at a kid and you want to
jump up and down and the scream that if you
don't stop doing the baby advocate box step where you
shuffle back and forth in this little awkward box, and
I'm gonna grab your feet and hold them and I'm
going you are a tree and you are planted right.

(41:28):
That doesn't feel like work, and all of that frustration
stays away when you have those moments like a j
is talking about, where all of a sudden you start
to see the lawyer that was there all along because
they stopped thinking of it as and now I have
put on my suit, and now I am standing up
and making my opening statement. And now I'm doing this,
they get up and go, I have a point. Group.
You're gonna hear me because I have a voice, and
my voice should be heard just as much as anybody

(41:49):
else's in this room. It's it's the best job ever.
That's why it doesn't feel like a job. It sounds
like so many of the anecdotes that you all have
shared highlight the relationships that you have with your students,
and I loved hearing Adria that you know you're still
texting with your students and they are now in law
school and just continuing to maintain those relationships with them.

(42:10):
You all have called out so many different professors and
trial team coaches who were important to you during your careers,
and so I know you have so much wisdom to
share with our listeners, and we want to get as
much of it as possible, and so I wonder if
you could share what advice you might have for aspiring
law students. And it can be really about anything, it

(42:33):
doesn't have to be related to trial team. But if
we think about our listeners out there who are thinking,
you know, about going to law school or maybe are
in the one L experience right now, what would you
want them to know? And I'll ask you first, Adria,
if that's okay. I'm not picking on you, I swear no,
I know I don't feel picked on. I'm just really

(42:54):
I'm sort of sitting here thinking about it because I
have so many thoughts. I guess to sort of piggyback
off of sort of your last point about the relationships,
I think that's one of the wonderful things that students
who do mock trial to do trial advocacy they get
from their peers and from their coaches. And so I

(43:15):
think you know, whether you do mock trial or trial
at or not, to be intentional about putting yourself in
proximity to people who can expose you to the profession
and to to be able to sort of pour into
your life and to be also open to receiving it.
I mean, I've often talked to our team about having
a teachable spirit. Um, you know, some people, somebody can

(43:38):
be pouring, but if if if the cap is closed,
then none of that wisdom or information is going to
be able to flow through. So I think just being
open to receiving that kind of guidance and investing in relationships,
which I think sometimes it's hard to do these days.
I don't know. Blame some of that on the pandemic perhaps,
but just being open to that. I'm would also say

(44:01):
not being discouraged or frustrated if the first thing is
not the thing. I think certainly I felt that way
as a law student because I had all of these,
you know, grand notions of what the law was going
to be, and I got to my first semest of
law school and I was like, well, what the heck
is this like, this is this is not what I

(44:23):
signed up for. Give me my money back, not what
I signed up for. But then by the next year
I was able to find classes that I really enjoyed,
and I'm like Okay, I'm getting a little bit closer.
The same is true with you know, some of those
first jobs right after law school and maybe thinking like
oh my gosh, is this it? And then you just

(44:44):
continue to move closer and closer. I think what A
J and Laura talked about, that place where it doesn't
feel like work or you're you're you're finding um, sort
of that synergy between the passions that you have and
the work that you do each day. I think the
closer and closer that you can get to that um,
you can find joy and peace and meaning in life,

(45:08):
but know that it doesn't necessarily all come at once
in like Okay, I've gone to law school. Now all
of the things are going to be right with the world.
Or now I've passed the bar and I got this
first job, like now this is it. No, it's a
it's a process. And I think maybe, Helly, it was
you that said it earlier. It's not linear. It's just
it's not linear. So um, if you had asked me

(45:30):
last I would have had my points enumerated. So that
was somewhat circular answer, but hopefully I was helpful. E J.
What about you? Yeah, I'm gonna be a broken record
on on this one. It's something that I tell I
go to every single orientation. I'm kind of the guy
after lunch that goes in trying to wake keep people away,

(45:52):
keep them going. The two o'clock guy, that's me. One
of the things that I talked about is that we
see more students come I'm to school now thinking that
school is a part of their day instead of school
being their job. And I think you have three years
to get it right. That's it. You have three years
to learn, you have three years to understand. You have

(46:14):
three years to engage, fail, start again, learn again. You know.
It's just it's an opportunity that no other job has
where you have a three year period of just get
in there and learn it fully. Engage yourself. Get involved
with clubs, get involved with I don't care if it's moot,
court or journal. Do do everything if you possibly can,

(46:37):
but immerse yourself in law school. Go to school at
eight am, go home at eight p m. Make it
your every day for three years, because the more you
expose yourself to the more you're going to realize there's
a lot more down on the horizon for you. A
lot of people come to school thinking that they want

(46:57):
to be X, and then they get here and they
realize no want to do that. But then they spent
so much time away from school that they don't know
what else to do, and so they almost get stuck
right away. You've never done anything in environmental law. Go
take an environmental law class, see if maybe there's a
passion there. And we never know where we end up.

(47:17):
I mean, we truly never know where. There's no way,
in any way, anyway that anyone would have said, a
j You're gonna end up teaching at St. Mary's University
in San Antonio, Texas. Born in California, raised in Florida,
lived in Maryland. You've never been in the middle part
of the United States. You've never been in Texas. There's
no way you're gonna end up down there in San Antonio. Yeah, here,

(47:40):
I am. Relationships matter, and some of my closest friends
still today are people that I met in law school.
They're they're all becoming I mean, I had one that
I can't say his name because he's been nominated for
a federal judge ship and he's being he's being um,
he's going through the background for that. So we have
people well that you're just they're gonna be doing these incredible,

(48:02):
fantastic things. One of my students is a congressman. Now,
you just don't know where your paths are going to cross.
And the more you can get involved with when you're
in school, the more that you could stick it out
and just do that, the more connections you can make,
and the more opportunities are going to be available for
you down the road. Definitely more than anything else. Never

(48:24):
burn a bridge. Never ever burn a bridge, because less
than one percent of our I think it's point zero
one of our society, our lawyers. It's very very small club.
And if you burn a bridge, everyone's going to know
about it. So get involved, stay involved, and we are
the people that can make a difference. So go out
and make a difference. That's all the things that I

(48:45):
think are important for people that want to go to
law school. If you can't, if you don't have to work,
don't work, stay in law school. Make it a job,
all right, Laura, lest but not least, any advice you'd
like to say, you will spend a lifetime building your
professional computation, and every word that you do, every case
that you take, every document that you file, every appearance

(49:06):
that you make, you will spend your lifetime building your
professional reputation. And you start building that professional reputation the
moment you sign on the dotted line to sit for
a class at a law school, and you need to
embrace that and embrace the reality shift that that that is,
professionals don't put everything that exists in their entire world

(49:26):
on whatever thing of social media that I don't understand
because I am an elder millennial and too cranky to
learn these things are currently obsessed with. Right, we don't
need to have our whole lives on TikTok or Instagram
or Snapchat, And in fact, we monitor what it output
there and understand that our digital imprint is a product
and a part of our brand as much as anything else.
We understand that we we are a self regulating profession

(49:48):
because we abide by a code of ethics. So don't
burn a bridge, but don't be afraid to take a
stand when you see the wrong thing happening, and be
brave enough to know that you're going to have to
do that. One of the things that I tell my
students all the time, tim is I am teaching you
to disagree with somebody who was wearing a big, scary
black robe and holds a lot of power, particularly in
our jurisdiction. Right, the judges that are here, they've been

(50:11):
on the bench for a hot minute, and we are
a small bar. So yeah, if you burn a bridge,
it can go down poorly. But if that judge is
making a decision that you know is wrong, you have
an obligation as the attorney to stand up against injustice
and stand up against unfairness, and do the thing that
you know is the right thing to do. Stay in
touch with your morals, keep time to yourself. That has

(50:33):
nothing to do with law school. Right. I agree with
are that you should take it seriously, but you must
inject into your life time that it's selfishly guarded and
just yours. I had a professor and law school professor,
and Eddie used to say, the law is a jealous
mistress and she will take every ounce of your time
that you do not ration away from her. And I
teach my students that you have to balance your mental

(50:53):
health because burnout is really real in this profession. It's
a real easy thing to push for, it's a real
easy thing to say. I can take another case. I
can take another thing, I can do one more thing.
But you have to learn what that balances, and you
have to make the right decision, and you have to
stay in touch with the reason that you walked into
the building in the first place. When I when I
talk to orientate and I always say, there's a reason

(51:14):
each one of you came in here. Maybe one of
you was treated unfairly by law enforcement, Maybe one of
you had a family member that experienced the horrific medical
malpractice issue. There's some there's some reason why you came
here right. Maybe it's because you're trying to figure out
what to do while the economy does whatever the economy
is doing. There's a reason. Get in touch with that
and and get connected to who you are. I'm a

(51:35):
big believer in JOSEPHS. Campbell's theory of following your bliss.
When you follow the things that make your heart thing
and make you know that you're in the right place
and doing the right thing. Greatness flows from that. Opportunity
flows from that. You get to do the things that
are the most impactful from that. So be connected to
you and don't let them take that from you. I
I am a fierce defender of the fact that in

(51:55):
my office there are Harry Potter Lego mini figurines, and
they will be there for ever because I enjoy those things.
I keep the parts of my personality that are still Laura,
even though I'm Professor Rose now and I have a
whole lot of other responsibilities. You must learn to embrace
all pieces of you, not just sheltered, compartmentalized genre. Thank
you all so much for sharing that advice. That was

(52:17):
so great, and honestly, I think some of the best
advice we have heard from people on the podcast, So
thank you. I'm sorry. Can I just add one other
small thing to that point, of course? Okay, so very
very practical, Um, do your best to minimize your debt.
I just wanted to add that point, um, because when
you're debt is lower, you have the freedom to be

(52:40):
able to pursue the things that make your hearts saying,
and to follow your morals, and to speak truth to power,
and to do all of those high minded things that
we talked about. When you have borrowed it's seen amount
of money, it's a lot harder to do that. One
of the reasons that I think I was able to
sort of do the lead and the net will appear.

(53:01):
Is because I had a scholarship. I had a full
scholarship to go to law school. I had the opportunity
to pursue pursue whatever prestige means schools that people said,
oh my god, you're not gonna go to fill in
the blank. Well I didn't get any money to that.
And my father, who had no college degree but a
lot of common sense, said, these people are gonna pay

(53:22):
you for the degree, and these people are going to
charge you for the same degree. Make it makes sense.
You didn't think make it makes sense because nobody said
that then. But you know what I mean. It's just like,
I'm not suggesting that that's the path for everyone, but
what I am saying is, and I think A j
made the point, you can start law school thinking you're
gonna do one thing, and as time goes on, you'll

(53:42):
be pulled in other directions and that debt will be
an albatross around your neck, strangling that freedom to be
able to do the things that you want to pursue.
So I just wanted to mention that just as a
practical point. Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Because
we haven't talked as much about that on the podcast,
and it is just a stark reality that I think

(54:02):
needs to be said and addressed, and as you said,
can kind of dictate your career path afterwards, you know,
if you don't have, you know, the financial freedom to
be able to pursue the career path that maybe you
want to. And I'll just stay on the flip side.
You know, if you are in a position where you
know you need to pay off loans and have to
take a particular job, that doesn't mean that you'll always

(54:23):
be in that position. And so you can still you know,
switch careers and and maneuver into a place where you
might you know, find your voice and that might be
more of your calling, even if you have to sort
of take a job that maybe isn't your first choice
right out of law school too. So with that, we
will move to our last question, and we like to
end on this question with all of our guests. So

(54:45):
the question is what a success mean to you? And
I'm going to ask you, in the spirit of child Team,
to try to keep this. You're closing arguments to two
minutes or less if you will. As we kind of
wrap up here, so a j I will kick it
over to you. Yeah. I mean for me, it's it's
it's pretty simple. I've had a couple of jobs in
my life where I hated going to work. I couldn't

(55:07):
stand it. And I had a job where I would
the one before I was here. While it was a
great job and I worked for great people, I would
sit in the parking lot sometimes for up to two
hours just to get in the building, just to muster
the strength, the mental strength to get into the building.
And while I was doing a great job, everybody loved me,
the job wasn't loving me. It was killing me. It

(55:28):
really was. So for me, success is very simple. I've
had those jobs where I made a ton of money.
I've had those jobs where I've made very little money.
I'm in a job now where I'm making okay money.
It's not about the money. What is success to me
is that I look forward to tomorrow, that I can't
wait to come in, I can't wait to do what
I do to see the students. I can't wait to

(55:49):
look at my phone and see what text I got
from a current student or a former student while we
were sitting here. I have three students who texted me saying, Hey,
do you have a minute, I'd like to come by
and just talk to you before finals. That means everything
to me. That is complete happiness and joy. To me,
I have grown kids, I have a very understanding wife,
maybe to understanding, to be quite honest with you. But

(56:11):
success to me is is not winning in the courtroom,
although I really really love winning. Success to me is
being happy at what I'm doing on a day and
day ot basis, and I guess the day that I
stopped being happy is is the day I stopped doing
what I'm doing, Laura, what about you? Success for me
is knowing at the end of the day that I've
done my best with the opportunity that represent into me,

(56:32):
with the materials and resources that I had at that day.
And in a long term sense, it is did I
leave people with a more positive impression than a negative impression?
And did I positively impact their life more than I
negatively impacted it? Did I did I make sure that
I saw each person every single day. We just recently
lost a titan up here at USC, professor Tom Horton,

(56:53):
who was the trials and coach before I got the job,
and one of the things that has come out as
we been grieving him as a community is how much
he saw every single student that went through his office
and went through his classes and went through our law school.
And that, to me is success to to be after
a career of sacrifice and leadership and intense brilliant to

(57:17):
have people stand and recognize what you gaze and to
see the positive ripple effects and contributions from that, building
that legacy, that success, and you get to engage in
that in multiple different levels in life, that in multiple
different stages, and the best part is that it can
grow to fit where you are and what you are
capable of at that time, so it's never an unachievable

(57:39):
thing and it's always something that you can staff to
get to the next moment. Well, Adrian, we started by
picking on you, so we will end with you as well.
What does success mean to you? So my word, my
one word answer to that question would be freedom, at
least individually for myself, the freedom to be able to choose.
In fact, we used to have t shirts at Dillard

(58:01):
for the pre law program that said freedom onto because
that's really what it's all about. But beyond that, I
guess the collective is you know, there's a I think
an old gospel song that says something like, you know,
only what we do for others will last. And I
think both Laura and a J hit on that point,
and I think ultimately that's that's that's what we'll be

(58:24):
here when we are all long and gone. And I'm
hopeful and I think just based upon the podcast episode
and everything that's been shared here today, I think each
one of us has been able to so seed in
a way that will impact the lives of others and
that will last absolutely. And just a reminder to our

(58:44):
listeners that class Action with Kenny Fang is available wherever
you listen to podcasts, and you can hear more from Adria,
Laura and a J and their trial teams and the
wonderful story of their trial team experiences through this podcast.
And you can also find more information about class Action
at class action pod dot com. Class Action is a

(59:06):
production of Sound Argument and I Heart Media and we
are so so thankful that you all had the time
to chat with us today. This has been a really
wonderful way to end our season and we thank you
for your time. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you thanks for having us, Thank you, thank you
for having us. Don't go away. There's more to come
in the Due Diligence portion of our show. Hello, it

(59:36):
is time for Due Diligence on our episode with a
team from Class Action and Um also our last episode
of season three. So Allison, as the trial team veteran
and superstar that you are, I am going to throw
it over to you to ask you your thoughts and

(59:57):
what's stuck with you from this episode with Adria, a
J and the Lura. Well, because I'm a trial team
nerd UM, I just wanted to share sort of how
I came to actually try out for a trial team
at Northwestern because I think a lot of people who
you know, go and try out for the team might
know going in that they want to do trial team

(01:00:19):
or have done some sort of mock trial in you know,
undergrad all uh what Adria you know, was coaching her
students to do. But I had never done any of that.
I wasn't a debater, I wasn't like a mock trial
person in college. And I really decided that I wanted
to do it because I wanted to challenge myself kind
of put myself outside of my comfort zone. So when

(01:00:40):
I tried out for the team, I definitely, you know,
I didn't really expect to make it. I just wanted
to get out there and try to be a better
public speaker. So I knew I wanted to be a litigator,
or at least I thought very strongly that I wanted
to be a litigator, and I understood that that requires
you to be good at public speaking, at least in
some capacity, and I knew that that was not my

(01:01:03):
strong suit. And so I went out for the team,
and you know, quite frankly, I totally thought that I
kind of flopped the tryouts, and I ended up kind
of making it through. And kudos to Rick Levin, who
was my child team coach at Northwestern and all the
other people on the team. But he, I think took
a pretty big chance on me because I don't think

(01:01:24):
I was a good public speaker when I started out,
And you know, to this day, he says like, yeah,
you were a little rough, rough, and when I decided
to kind of take a chance on you, and he
kindly did that, and I learned so much, and like
I said during the episode, it really was the best
experience I had in law school, because of the teammates
that I had, because of the coach that that I had,

(01:01:45):
how much I learned and how much confidence I gained,
and so I just don't think that I would be,
you know, in the space that I am today, including
being able to stand up and teach and do what
I do today without Trial Team. So it was incredibly
impactful for me. And when we were talking with A
J and Laura and Adria, you know, I could just
send sort of their passion in teaching students to be

(01:02:08):
great public speakers, to be great advocates, to as Laura said,
speak truth to power. And I feel like Rick Levin
did that for me. And so I just identified so
much with the journeys that they're taking their students on,
just so impressed with them and kind of the journey
that they shared with us. I was the sole non
trial team person on our conversation with them, but what

(01:02:32):
I they had so many nuggets of wisdom and we
can't make our due diligence as long as the actual episode,
but one thing that I believe it was Adria said
was don't be afraid if the first thing that you
try is not the thing. And I think they were
all examples of that, because they had interesting careers prior

(01:02:52):
to going into teaching or going into advising or child
team coaching, and followed their feelings as far as you know,
realizing something was missing, realizing that they wanted to have
some interaction with students, and and then ending up coaching
these amazing trial teams. So they had a ton of
great advice no matter the stage of life that you're
in or no matter whether you want to be a

(01:03:14):
litigator or not. I think a lot of it was applicable.
But I also wanted to kind of make a programming
note or just an overall observation since this was our
last regular episode of season three, which is very hard
to believe that we're already wrapping up our third season
at Personal Jurisdiction. So when we started this podcast, our

(01:03:35):
goal was to make sure that we were focusing on
interviewing people within the first ten or so years of
their legal practice or their career or whatever that may be,
in order to really stay close to their experience and
be able to connect what they're doing now with their
law school experience. And in season three we've deviated from

(01:03:57):
that a little bit, but that will always me and
our goal and the reason why we had a few
special episodes this season is that we are always looking
for new and interesting things to share with our listeners
and also looking for different ways that we can share
helpful information and helpful experiences. Um. So, in particular with

(01:04:19):
this last episode with the I always want to call
them the cast of of Class Action, but I mean,
they're all real people who did a real thing. Um
with the coaches from Class Action. Was that Allison, like
you just told us your trial team experience was formative
for you. It really is the thing that you remember

(01:04:39):
most from law school, apart from meeting me, you know,
in constitutional criminal procedure um. And so we wanted to
share that with our listeners too, and also deliver some
really interesting background on each of the career paths that Adria,
Laura and a J. Pad. So I just want to
make a note of that since this is our last

(01:05:00):
episode and last episode of the season, and time to
be a little bit reflective about that. So we wish
you all a wonderful end of year holiday season. In
New Year, we are taking a break for the holiday,
but we will be back in three with season four,
and we hope that you follow us on Twitter to

(01:05:23):
the extent it still exists, and also follow us on
linked In for any updates about season four. We're excited
to share what we have in store for you, and
as always, if you have thoughts, suggestions, things that you love,
things that you maybe didn't love, we would really enjoy
hearing from you. So many of our guests this season

(01:05:45):
came from either listeners who asked us to be on
the podcast, or um outreach from people we did not know,
or suggestions from previous guests and friends, so we're always
happy to receive your questions and comments. They thank you
so much for listening and for supporting Personal Jurisdiction. We
are really thankful for your support and we will see

(01:06:07):
you next time. See you next time. Personal Jurisdiction is
powered and distributed by simple cast. You don't have to
wait until next week to hear more. You can find
us online at personal j x pod dot com and
on Twitter at personal j x pod. Don't forget to
subscribe to Personal Jurisdiction on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts,

(01:06:29):
or wherever you like to listen, so that you can
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