June 22, 2021 • 27 mins
On the season five finale of "On The Job," we meet Leonette. Her path to her career - she's a Law Clerk at the US Department of Education - had more than a few twists and turns. In fact, she started law school in her 30s, after realizing that she could help to address the yawning gap in African-American and female representation in the legal field. Now, she's using her degree to advocate for others who lack a voice: victims of predatory for-profit colleges. She's part of the DOE's Borrower's Defense Group, and is responsible for processing claims against these unscrupulous schools. Turns out that Leonette found her niche after all, and her work is helping others - many of them new to the country and to the English language - regain their footing so that they may, too, find their niches.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
This is On the Job, a podcast about finding your
life's work. On the job is brought to you by
Express Employment Professionals. This season, we're bringing you stories of
folks following their passion to carve their own career path.
For this season finale of On the Job, we talked
to Leonette, a second career lack clerk who works daily
(00:27):
to help or leave student debt for people who've been
misled by bogus colleges. We talked to her about the
surprising accessibility of the profession itself and the importance of
new voices being represented within it. As a radio producer,
I feel like one of the most confusing and out
of reach lines of work for me is any job
(00:49):
in the field of law. I'm recording, you're recording on
your voice memo. Yeah, okay, awesome. Luckily I got to
demystify that world a little bit by talking with Leonette.
My name is Leonette Rainy Hammett. I am forty two
years old. I keep having to think about that. It's COVID.
(01:10):
Leonette is a lawyer, technically a law clerk for the
Department of Education Barrowers Defense Group. If you're like me
and do you hear someone's a lawyer, you immediately think
they're duking it out in a courtroom and working directly
with clients. But what we do is we actually are
more administrative. We take and we process claims. The Borrowers
(01:32):
Defense Group where Leonette works, is part of the Department
of Justice, a government job, and the claims that they
process are from people who say they've been tricked into
taking on massive amounts of student loan debt, so it's
off fraudulent debt. Basically, these people have gone to for
profit school they've been charged an exorbitant amount of money,
like predatory colleges. Yes they were predatory. Most of them
(01:55):
are for profit and they made misrepresentations. So these are
those sketchy schools you might have heard about in the news.
Some of the more well known ones are the Corinthian
Schools and it T Tech, both now shut down, but
there's a lot more out there, and they market themselves
hard to people who might not have had a shot
(02:15):
getting into more reputable schools. So these schools where telling
people like, I am going to give you this amazing
opportunity to go to this wonderful school. We have all
of these great businesses and companies that we work for,
and they will give you a job and you're going
to get paid and you're going to have a wonderful
life after this. And they're talking to people who are
sometimes first generation high school graduates, and a lot of
(02:36):
people don't have English as a first language. That it's
really predatory, like they are going after a certain demographic.
Needless to say, these promises the predatory colleges make are
often not true, but people enroll because these colleges offer
a better future opportunity. And if you're someone who hasn't
gotten a lot of opportunities, you take the chance and
(02:58):
you sign on the dotted line, hoping you don't think
about the money though, as you know, out of sight,
out of mind until six months after you graduate. And
then wait a minute, they knock on your door. Yes,
when these enormous amounts of debt come knocking after students
receive their certificate, they don't have the high paying jobs
to pay them off, and they file claims with Leonette
(03:20):
at the Department of Justice. We adjudicate these cases to
give them some relief. On our day to day what
that looks like is Leonette and a team of law
clerks going through all these claims, so we look at
whatever they've claimed the school has done wrong. We look
at all of the cases, we look at them together,
and we see if there's any uniformity, like as everyone
(03:43):
saying the same thing, is the school misrepresenting on this
one point. So if you went to a regular college
and you claim that you left with crazy student loans
like many people do, and you just didn't get the
job that you wanted to afterward, your case would probably
be denied by Leonette. They are looking for trends and
usually find them when ten or more similar claims are
(04:04):
made about a singular school. Now, for most schools, we
have thousands of cases. Some of these schools have been
shut down, some of them have been sued, a lot
of them have been fined by the government. They've had
to pay back into the government. But Leonette isn't actually
involved with what happens to these schools, and she isn't
involved with the people claiming that got defrauded, never meets them.
(04:26):
It's her job to be unbiased and either approve the
claim or deny the claim. We just adjudicate the case
on the merits. You know, it's just the law, the case,
what we found, that's it. Even though she's impartial behind
the desk, she is personally motivated to do the job
and help when she can because of the staggering amount
(04:48):
of debt that has come to define recent generations of Americans.
She's fired up by how huge this problem is. Even
for people who went to non predatory schools, it's still
so heavy. Like the amount of debt to go to
school is rediculous, it doesn't even make sense. But is
it worth? I mean, there's just so many there's so
many arguments to be had when you're talking about student
(05:10):
debt and people's ability to pay. I mean, you have
doctors and lawyers who haven't paid their student debt, and
you kind of come to terms of that. You can't
fix everything, but you can fix what you can fix.
And that's what I work on. That's what that is
what I have to focus on, because it gets heavy.
(05:31):
It's a lot, it's a lot. Working in law is
actually Leonette's second career, and her trajectory to get there
isn't as clear cut as you might think. But talking
with her a little bit about her upbringing, it starts
to make sense how she ended up there. So I
am originally from New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven pretty small city,
(05:53):
great pizza. Leonette was really active in sports. She was popular.
Her parents were hard working churchgoers, so they made sure
that she was on the straight and narrow. So I
won't say I didn't do much, but I wasn't able to, like,
you know, like hang out with my friends. That wasn't
really a thing. My parents were like, no, you can
stay in the house and read a book. So you
were forced to be a nerd. I was forced to
be a nerd. I was still a little cool though,
(06:14):
Like I was still a little cooler than most of
my friends, you know, in school. Anyway, Leonette was really
inspired growing up by her parents being entrepreneurs. Her mom
ran a hair salon her dad owned an exterminating company.
Neither of them went to college, but for a few reasons,
Leonette never questioned that she was going. No, there was
(06:35):
never an option college for in my family. Was like
thirteenth grade, like, you just have to keep going. There's
not an option. You're going to college. So I was
also very excited about leaving home. I knew I was
going away to school, so I was excited about that.
The other thing she knew is that she wanted to
go to Howard, a historically black university, which she got
(06:55):
into in her all girls high school. She was one
of four black girls that graduated in a class of
over one hundred. She had grown up in a black family,
went to a black church, but in her whole life
up until college, she had never once had a black teacher. Never. Wow. Ever,
Like sitting down my first day in class, my professor
(07:16):
her name was doctor Hamilton, and she wrote that on
the board doctor Hamilton, not miss Hamilton, not missus Hamilton.
I am doctor Hamilton. And I was like wow, like
this is this is it? Like I made the right decision.
I'm so happy I'm here, Like it just felt like home.
(07:38):
After graduating, she came back home to New Haven and
started to figure out what she wanted to do. She
had a few jobs, started testing the waters. My parents
wanted me to be a doctor. I knew I did
not want to be a doctor. I was not going
to medical school, Like I was like no. She ended
up substitute teaching and became a vision specialist, basically helping
blind kids in school developed curriculum that worked for them.
(08:00):
Eventually I was supposed to learn how to like do breal,
but I didn't stay long enough. I was like, wait,
what was your degree in biology? Okay, no, it still
doesn't make sense. I'm trying to make the connection. I
mean I have a sculpture degree. Here we are right right, listen,
stranger things have happen, right. She got engaged, called off
(08:24):
the engagement, and realized she'd always wanted to live in
New York City, so she moved there. She hired a headhunter.
Initially wanted to go into pharmaceutical sales, and she couldn't
find anything in that realm, so she just started applying
to anything at all, like any kind of job, Like
I just want a job. I want an office job.
I have a degree. Someone should hire me because that's
what I was taught. You know, you get a degree,
(08:46):
you get a job. Her head hunter eventually got her
an interview for a financial analyst job at Bloomberg. And
I did that. I studied for the broker license and
I was like, I can do this. I can do finance.
Like this is great. I love it. It's interesting. Sign
me up. She liked it, but she wanted to use
it as a stepping stone and get hired out by
other companies Bloomberg worked with. But then the two thousand
(09:09):
and eight financial crisis hit and no one was hiring.
And it was at that time, you know, people were
like walking in Time Square with their boxes in their
hands from like Lehman Brothers and like, you know, all
these other fings. I was like, I have to figure
something else out. She pivoted again, moved to North Carolina,
trying her hand at being an entrepreneur like mom, opening
a hair salon. The only difference is Leonette salon lasted
(09:31):
about eight months. This was right after the crisis, right
after the crisis, and we were selling like a we
were trying to do like this upscale salon and durm
North Carolina no less like right after the mortgage crisis.
It was just like ridiculous. She ended up back home
in New Haven, got back into the educational system, facilitating
tutoring systems for kids, just constantly going and constantly switching
(09:55):
up her work. And that's when when I decided to
have my daughter. I was like, Okay, now you're like
a real adult, like you have a whole another person here,
and like prior to that, I was like I'm probably
gonna move to LA and I'm like, I was just
ready to go all the time. I'm just ready to go,
(10:16):
just enjoy life, Like I'm like, we only get one
shot here. I'm going to do everything I want to do.
But then I had another person, and so I was like,
do I want to go back to school? Leonette was
thirty three. She knew she was done with finance and business,
so she wasn't going to go back to school for
an MBA. This is when she really started to zoom
(10:38):
out and think about what her life would look like
from then on. Done hopping around, the next move being
the one that she was going to stick with for
a while. And I wrote down the things that I
wanted to do. I wanted to help people. I wanted
to be an asset to my community. I wanted to
be a role model for the other little girls in
my family, like you know, my daughter included, but also
(10:59):
my little cousins and you know now my niece and
just everyone else. The moment she figured it out, she
was on an Amtrak train after visiting her mom with
her infant baby in her arm, and she asked herself
a pretty big question, what don't we have in our
family who has a professional degree. Well, went on one
attorney and black women only represent two percent of all
(11:23):
attorneys in the United States. That's it. I thought about
how the I could help my community with that, and
that was my reason. I'm like, I'm gonna do it.
I have to be an attorney. We'll be right back
to Leonette's story after the break. Navigating the professional job
(11:44):
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news is you don't have to go it alone. You
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(12:06):
for free support and get on the right course. Now
back to on the job. So, at thirty three years old,
Leonette had a daughter and started going to law school.
She thrived in all the work that she'd done before that,
and she says things always did come easy tour. That
(12:27):
really set me up for law school because that's where
it ended, like nothing comes easy to you in law school,
Like that's a totally different game. You were a big
fish growing up and then oh I turned into an
amiba maybe, Like I guess what really shocked me talking
(12:48):
with Leonette is that once you go through three years
of law school like she did, there are so many
different opportunities after that, so many opportunities. You learn everything,
Like you don't specialize in anything in law school. You
learn the ends from you know, beginning to end, soup
to nuts. You learn everything, and you can basically the
world is your oyster. You can do it with that
(13:08):
what you want, Like to the point where someone will
call you because they just know you're a lawyer and say,
I got hurt on the job. Do you know anything
about personal injury? Yeah, I can tell you about personal injury.
And I can tell you something about estates, and yeah
I know a little bit about like antitrust. So you know,
we have to learn the gamut. So so not only
is getting your law degree more accessible than you might think,
(13:31):
but you can just always have a job. Right after
having her second baby, a little boy, Leonett graduated and
took the bar. She started looking for work to line
up after spending time with her new baby, and thought
that a government job might be perfect because of the
reasonable hours. You know, I found out that I'm not
(13:53):
actually a workaholic. I thought I was, but you know
I am not. I have a liveoholic, right. I love aktions.
I like enjoying my kids. I like, you know, putting
food on the grill and just sitting out. I enjoy
my life. In late twenty nineteen, Howard University's Career Services
Center of posting for this job that she is now
at the DOJ with the Borrower's Defense Fund, helping people
(14:15):
who were defrauded by predatory colleges get their money back.
She got the job and they threw her right into
the deep end working on cases. Immediately. They teach you
how to judicate these cases, and you just start doing it,
you know, based on the merits. It's just like law school.
You look at the law, you look out, you know
what's required, and then you look at this application and
see if you can plug these things in. Does it
fit or does it not fit? Has it approved or
(14:37):
is it denied? That's it. She initially liked it. It
was a job, but the more she got into the
gravity of her work and how big the problem of
these schools really was, she became way more invested what
schools you know have misrepresentations, and what exactly does the
law mean when it says misrepresentation, and what was on
the mind of the framers when they wrote this law.
(14:59):
That's started making me, you know, I was way more interested.
So for the last couple of years she's been adjudicating
as a clerk, doing your job and doing it right. Still,
she really wanted to be personally helping people who needed it,
which can be hard to feel when you're simply at
your desk saying yes or no based on a law
(15:19):
that just exists, a law that is meant to do
some real good in the world. But Leonette wanted to
feel that she was doing something good. I think the
day that that actually happened, it was probably about maybe
three months ago. Leonette was adjudicating a case, and for
all cases at her job, there are two other people
(15:42):
called seers, who are basically quality control. So after leonet
approves or denies a case, it still has to go
through another set of eyes before it just passes through. Yeah,
which is a good that's a good thing. So one
of my cases I approved, and the person who sent
in the claim was I would say that maybe English
(16:04):
wasn't their first language, so some of the language and
the claim actually went against what we would approve. By this,
she means very basic language barrier stuff using negatives instead
of positives, like instead of saying the school told me
I would get a job making one hundred k, writing
the school told me I would not get a job
(16:26):
making a hundred k. And I think you and I
could both agree that that person probably meant the schools
told me, right, I mean, you use basic common sense
and you imply you just make a basic inference. It's
not that you understood this and you gave it your
stamp of approval. Of course, Lena identified a lot with
(16:47):
the claim and story understood the perspective. She wrote it.
The report explained, this is what they meant by this,
this is what they're trying to say, and she approved
it and she passed it along to her sears. Well.
It was sent back to me as a denial, like no,
the person absolutely didn't say that, and I'm like, this
(17:07):
is problematic, Like no, they did say it, and this
is how I know, and so I you know, and
I so of course I went to bat for it
and it ended up being fine. It was approved and
that's good work, like, and that's something that you know,
I'm proud of. I'm proud that I was able to
be that voice in the room because otherwise it would
have absolutely been denied, and you know, I don't think
(17:30):
it should have been. When you first started telling the story,
I was like, I thought you were going to say
that they you know, you went to bed for it
and it was still denied, and you know, and that
made you be like, you want to keep fighting and
doing what you do. But they approved it, which means
that you speaking up and being there fundamentally changed whoever
(17:56):
this person who's claiming this you that changed their lives
just you being there, It changed their life And if
I wasn't here, there's a possibility. I mean, that's huge.
And it's like, I mean it's I don't feel like
I'm huge because I did that, but that that representation.
It when people say representation matters, no, it really matters,
(18:16):
Like that's one person, yes, but that's a it's a
big deal. It's a big deal for someone, not a
big deal for me. It's a really big deal for
that person though, because the people who denied it, you
you made your case again and they thought, Oh, I
didn't think of it like that. Okay, right, that's like
a that's that's really scary. It's scary. It's really really scary.
(18:42):
And I was like really, I was like really like
upset about it. Like I was like fired up because
I'm like, I know because this is the stuff that
we hear about all the time, you know, and I
mean I know that it happens, but I saw it firsthand,
and I'm like, no, like no, like this this is wrong.
(19:07):
This is why black women and like minorities and other
people like this is why we need to make up
more than two percent of any field. Like there always
needs to be someone in the room, you know what
I mean, Like that represents everyone, Like everyone should be represented.
This is this is what we look like. Everyone doesn't
have the same vernacular. There should be someone there who
can say, maybe we need to take a closer look
(19:30):
at this. That's that's probably when I just really felt like, okay,
like I'm here for a reason. It's not just me
passing through. In her workspace, Leonette brought the perspective of
someone from a family of entrepreneurs in a minority community.
She empathized with the people whose files were on her desk.
And meanwhile, she says that she'd hear people around her
(19:52):
basically say how can someone fall for this? Like who
would be crazy enough to go to a school that's
saying blah blah blah. And I'm like a lot of
people and it's not that they're crazy, but you have
to look through their eyes, like you cannot stand here
as you and say, who would be crazy enough to
(20:14):
do this? A lot of people would. It's not crazy,
it's something that it's logical. It's people actually trying to
make a better way for their family and this is
the only opportunity that's presented to them. That's it, and
it sounds better than all the other opportunities. It's not
that crazy. And the person who is adjudicating those cases,
(20:36):
if they don't have the ability to see through that
lens or have the empathy to even try, then that
could completely change someone's life for better or for orders
without a question. Leonel says. A big reason why there's
such a small percentage of minorities in the legal system
(20:59):
is because of its reputation. The word lawyer itself has
an elitist air to it that makes people think that
they could never do it. Even I have a couple
friends who are lawyers, or if I meet someone who's
who's like, oh, yeah, I went to law school, I'm
a lawyer, and be like oh, because it just has
that in the same even when um, you know I
(21:21):
was I read just your title and what you do
to me just fundamentally felt like, Wow, that's something I
couldn't do. That's fundamentally not accessible. And I think that
gets a ton of people who should be doing what
you do from even starting. A ton of people, a
(21:42):
ton who would be so good at it, would be
so good at it, and would bring an empathy to
the job that is so desperately needed. It's just I
can't even put into words how desperately needed it is.
A lot of people just don't think that they qualify,
like I couldn't do that, Like that's for I have
(22:04):
no way you could. You absolutely could, and you're needed today,
at least in her workplace. Leonette fills that need and
her family they're no longer missing an attorney or her daughter,
for her cousins, her niece, They've all now got someone
to look to and say she does that, I could
do that. Every little black girl should have someone that
(22:27):
they can ask, like right at arm's reach, you know
that they can ask about anything that they want to do,
and that should be someone that looks like them, Like,
this should not be an anomaly, Like, there's absolutely no
reason it should be an anomaly. In the same vein,
Leonette also recognizes there's no reason she should have to
do what she does every day. A college education, even
(22:49):
a non fraudulent one, should not put people in debilitating
death for the rest of their lives. And it really
shouldn't be that easy for a school operating illegally to
look like the real deal. The reason that they can
do it is because the legal way is kind of
just as crazy. Um, these loans are a regular thing
(23:09):
that we've all just accepted. Um, so like not that different.
I mean it is, but it's not, you know, it's semantics.
It feels like that's it. So just you philosophically when
you go into work, like you're obviously doing something that
needs to be done. But does it ever like get
to you that wow, like I wish I didn't have
(23:32):
to do this. Yeah, but you shouldn't have to, right,
there should be no need, Yeah, or it should never
have happened, but here we are. That doesn't get you
(23:53):
down every day though, No, no, I can't let it
because I have so many I have so many issues
that I care deeply about and none of them should exist,
and yet they do. And so, you know, like it's
like I'm going to live and I'm going to be happy,
and I'm going to, you know, try to give my
(24:13):
children the best of me that I can every day.
And that requires like some level of shutting that down,
because otherwise it would it would just be too heavy,
like too much, it's too much. As we end the
(24:35):
season of On the Job, I think it's important to
note what this show is about in the first place,
jobs and the people who work them, because oftentimes the
right person working the right job means so much more
than that person having a stable income, having a place
to go every day clocking in and out. The right
person in the right job can change the lives of
(24:57):
the people that they deal with every day, saving them
from a lifetime of debt. By simply being in the
room to share their own perspective, It can change the
lives of the generations that come after them. When they
look up and see someone is doing a job. They
were made to believe that they could never do. The
right people in the right jobs level the playing field
(25:18):
and over time, help to fix the enormous problems of
wealth disparity, gender, pay gaps, and representation in the workplace.
They aren't problems that should exist, and if you think
about them too much in the grand scheme, you'll probably
go crazy. But if you're like Leone and you genuinely
want to be part of the solution, what you can
(25:39):
do is put your head down and get to work.
It's chunking it. It's taking a little chunk and trying
to fix this far because the system as a whole,
it desperately needs to be revamped and it's a lot.
Do you feel optimistic that you're affecting that? Yes, I do.
(26:03):
I definitely feel aptimistic about that. For On the Job,
I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job,
brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season of
On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were
(26:24):
written and produced by me Otis Gray. Our executive producer
is Sandy Smallens. The show is mixed by Matt Noble
for Audiation Studios at the Loft and Bronxville, New York.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on iHeartRadio and
Apple podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider
rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever
(26:45):
you listen. We'll see you next time. For more inspiring
stories about discovering your life's work. Audiation
This is On the Job, a podcast about finding your
life's work. On the job is brought to you by
Express Employment Professionals. This season, we're bringing you stories of
folks following their passion to carve their own career path.
For this season finale of On the Job, we talked
to Leonette, a second career lack clerk who works daily
(00:27):
to help or leave student debt for people who've been
misled by bogus colleges. We talked to her about the
surprising accessibility of the profession itself and the importance of
new voices being represented within it. As a radio producer,
I feel like one of the most confusing and out
of reach lines of work for me is any job
(00:49):
in the field of law. I'm recording, you're recording on
your voice memo. Yeah, okay, awesome. Luckily I got to
demystify that world a little bit by talking with Leonette.
My name is Leonette Rainy Hammett. I am forty two
years old. I keep having to think about that. It's COVID.
(01:10):
Leonette is a lawyer, technically a law clerk for the
Department of Education Barrowers Defense Group. If you're like me
and do you hear someone's a lawyer, you immediately think
they're duking it out in a courtroom and working directly
with clients. But what we do is we actually are
more administrative. We take and we process claims. The Borrowers
(01:32):
Defense Group where Leonette works, is part of the Department
of Justice, a government job, and the claims that they
process are from people who say they've been tricked into
taking on massive amounts of student loan debt, so it's
off fraudulent debt. Basically, these people have gone to for
profit school they've been charged an exorbitant amount of money,
like predatory colleges. Yes they were predatory. Most of them
(01:55):
are for profit and they made misrepresentations. So these are
those sketchy schools you might have heard about in the news.
Some of the more well known ones are the Corinthian
Schools and it T Tech, both now shut down, but
there's a lot more out there, and they market themselves
hard to people who might not have had a shot
(02:15):
getting into more reputable schools. So these schools where telling
people like, I am going to give you this amazing
opportunity to go to this wonderful school. We have all
of these great businesses and companies that we work for,
and they will give you a job and you're going
to get paid and you're going to have a wonderful
life after this. And they're talking to people who are
sometimes first generation high school graduates, and a lot of
(02:36):
people don't have English as a first language. That it's
really predatory, like they are going after a certain demographic.
Needless to say, these promises the predatory colleges make are
often not true, but people enroll because these colleges offer
a better future opportunity. And if you're someone who hasn't
gotten a lot of opportunities, you take the chance and
(02:58):
you sign on the dotted line, hoping you don't think
about the money though, as you know, out of sight,
out of mind until six months after you graduate. And
then wait a minute, they knock on your door. Yes,
when these enormous amounts of debt come knocking after students
receive their certificate, they don't have the high paying jobs
to pay them off, and they file claims with Leonette
(03:20):
at the Department of Justice. We adjudicate these cases to
give them some relief. On our day to day what
that looks like is Leonette and a team of law
clerks going through all these claims, so we look at
whatever they've claimed the school has done wrong. We look
at all of the cases, we look at them together,
and we see if there's any uniformity, like as everyone
(03:43):
saying the same thing, is the school misrepresenting on this
one point. So if you went to a regular college
and you claim that you left with crazy student loans
like many people do, and you just didn't get the
job that you wanted to afterward, your case would probably
be denied by Leonette. They are looking for trends and
usually find them when ten or more similar claims are
(04:04):
made about a singular school. Now, for most schools, we
have thousands of cases. Some of these schools have been
shut down, some of them have been sued, a lot
of them have been fined by the government. They've had
to pay back into the government. But Leonette isn't actually
involved with what happens to these schools, and she isn't
involved with the people claiming that got defrauded, never meets them.
(04:26):
It's her job to be unbiased and either approve the
claim or deny the claim. We just adjudicate the case
on the merits. You know, it's just the law, the case,
what we found, that's it. Even though she's impartial behind
the desk, she is personally motivated to do the job
and help when she can because of the staggering amount
(04:48):
of debt that has come to define recent generations of Americans.
She's fired up by how huge this problem is. Even
for people who went to non predatory schools, it's still
so heavy. Like the amount of debt to go to
school is rediculous, it doesn't even make sense. But is
it worth? I mean, there's just so many there's so
many arguments to be had when you're talking about student
(05:10):
debt and people's ability to pay. I mean, you have
doctors and lawyers who haven't paid their student debt, and
you kind of come to terms of that. You can't
fix everything, but you can fix what you can fix.
And that's what I work on. That's what that is
what I have to focus on, because it gets heavy.
(05:31):
It's a lot, it's a lot. Working in law is
actually Leonette's second career, and her trajectory to get there
isn't as clear cut as you might think. But talking
with her a little bit about her upbringing, it starts
to make sense how she ended up there. So I
am originally from New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven pretty small city,
(05:53):
great pizza. Leonette was really active in sports. She was popular.
Her parents were hard working churchgoers, so they made sure
that she was on the straight and narrow. So I
won't say I didn't do much, but I wasn't able to, like,
you know, like hang out with my friends. That wasn't
really a thing. My parents were like, no, you can
stay in the house and read a book. So you
were forced to be a nerd. I was forced to
be a nerd. I was still a little cool though,
(06:14):
Like I was still a little cooler than most of
my friends, you know, in school. Anyway, Leonette was really
inspired growing up by her parents being entrepreneurs. Her mom
ran a hair salon her dad owned an exterminating company.
Neither of them went to college, but for a few reasons,
Leonette never questioned that she was going. No, there was
(06:35):
never an option college for in my family. Was like
thirteenth grade, like, you just have to keep going. There's
not an option. You're going to college. So I was
also very excited about leaving home. I knew I was
going away to school, so I was excited about that.
The other thing she knew is that she wanted to
go to Howard, a historically black university, which she got
(06:55):
into in her all girls high school. She was one
of four black girls that graduated in a class of
over one hundred. She had grown up in a black family,
went to a black church, but in her whole life
up until college, she had never once had a black teacher. Never. Wow. Ever,
Like sitting down my first day in class, my professor
(07:16):
her name was doctor Hamilton, and she wrote that on
the board doctor Hamilton, not miss Hamilton, not missus Hamilton.
I am doctor Hamilton. And I was like wow, like
this is this is it? Like I made the right decision.
I'm so happy I'm here, Like it just felt like home.
(07:38):
After graduating, she came back home to New Haven and
started to figure out what she wanted to do. She
had a few jobs, started testing the waters. My parents
wanted me to be a doctor. I knew I did
not want to be a doctor. I was not going
to medical school, Like I was like no. She ended
up substitute teaching and became a vision specialist, basically helping
blind kids in school developed curriculum that worked for them.
(08:00):
Eventually I was supposed to learn how to like do breal,
but I didn't stay long enough. I was like, wait,
what was your degree in biology? Okay, no, it still
doesn't make sense. I'm trying to make the connection. I
mean I have a sculpture degree. Here we are right right, listen,
stranger things have happen, right. She got engaged, called off
(08:24):
the engagement, and realized she'd always wanted to live in
New York City, so she moved there. She hired a headhunter.
Initially wanted to go into pharmaceutical sales, and she couldn't
find anything in that realm, so she just started applying
to anything at all, like any kind of job, Like
I just want a job. I want an office job.
I have a degree. Someone should hire me because that's
what I was taught. You know, you get a degree,
(08:46):
you get a job. Her head hunter eventually got her
an interview for a financial analyst job at Bloomberg. And
I did that. I studied for the broker license and
I was like, I can do this. I can do finance.
Like this is great. I love it. It's interesting. Sign
me up. She liked it, but she wanted to use
it as a stepping stone and get hired out by
other companies Bloomberg worked with. But then the two thousand
(09:09):
and eight financial crisis hit and no one was hiring.
And it was at that time, you know, people were
like walking in Time Square with their boxes in their
hands from like Lehman Brothers and like, you know, all
these other fings. I was like, I have to figure
something else out. She pivoted again, moved to North Carolina,
trying her hand at being an entrepreneur like mom, opening
a hair salon. The only difference is Leonette salon lasted
(09:31):
about eight months. This was right after the crisis, right
after the crisis, and we were selling like a we
were trying to do like this upscale salon and durm
North Carolina no less like right after the mortgage crisis.
It was just like ridiculous. She ended up back home
in New Haven, got back into the educational system, facilitating
tutoring systems for kids, just constantly going and constantly switching
(09:55):
up her work. And that's when when I decided to
have my daughter. I was like, Okay, now you're like
a real adult, like you have a whole another person here,
and like prior to that, I was like I'm probably
gonna move to LA and I'm like, I was just
ready to go all the time. I'm just ready to go,
(10:16):
just enjoy life, Like I'm like, we only get one
shot here. I'm going to do everything I want to do.
But then I had another person, and so I was like,
do I want to go back to school? Leonette was
thirty three. She knew she was done with finance and business,
so she wasn't going to go back to school for
an MBA. This is when she really started to zoom
(10:38):
out and think about what her life would look like
from then on. Done hopping around, the next move being
the one that she was going to stick with for
a while. And I wrote down the things that I
wanted to do. I wanted to help people. I wanted
to be an asset to my community. I wanted to
be a role model for the other little girls in
my family, like you know, my daughter included, but also
(10:59):
my little cousins and you know now my niece and
just everyone else. The moment she figured it out, she
was on an Amtrak train after visiting her mom with
her infant baby in her arm, and she asked herself
a pretty big question, what don't we have in our
family who has a professional degree. Well, went on one
attorney and black women only represent two percent of all
(11:23):
attorneys in the United States. That's it. I thought about
how the I could help my community with that, and
that was my reason. I'm like, I'm gonna do it.
I have to be an attorney. We'll be right back
to Leonette's story after the break. Navigating the professional job
(11:44):
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news is you don't have to go it alone. You
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(12:06):
for free support and get on the right course. Now
back to on the job. So, at thirty three years old,
Leonette had a daughter and started going to law school.
She thrived in all the work that she'd done before that,
and she says things always did come easy tour. That
(12:27):
really set me up for law school because that's where
it ended, like nothing comes easy to you in law school,
Like that's a totally different game. You were a big
fish growing up and then oh I turned into an
amiba maybe, Like I guess what really shocked me talking
(12:48):
with Leonette is that once you go through three years
of law school like she did, there are so many
different opportunities after that, so many opportunities. You learn everything,
Like you don't specialize in anything in law school. You
learn the ends from you know, beginning to end, soup
to nuts. You learn everything, and you can basically the
world is your oyster. You can do it with that
(13:08):
what you want, Like to the point where someone will
call you because they just know you're a lawyer and say,
I got hurt on the job. Do you know anything
about personal injury? Yeah, I can tell you about personal injury.
And I can tell you something about estates, and yeah
I know a little bit about like antitrust. So you know,
we have to learn the gamut. So so not only
is getting your law degree more accessible than you might think,
(13:31):
but you can just always have a job. Right after
having her second baby, a little boy, Leonett graduated and
took the bar. She started looking for work to line
up after spending time with her new baby, and thought
that a government job might be perfect because of the
reasonable hours. You know, I found out that I'm not
(13:53):
actually a workaholic. I thought I was, but you know
I am not. I have a liveoholic, right. I love aktions.
I like enjoying my kids. I like, you know, putting
food on the grill and just sitting out. I enjoy
my life. In late twenty nineteen, Howard University's Career Services
Center of posting for this job that she is now
at the DOJ with the Borrower's Defense Fund, helping people
(14:15):
who were defrauded by predatory colleges get their money back.
She got the job and they threw her right into
the deep end working on cases. Immediately. They teach you
how to judicate these cases, and you just start doing it,
you know, based on the merits. It's just like law school.
You look at the law, you look out, you know
what's required, and then you look at this application and
see if you can plug these things in. Does it
fit or does it not fit? Has it approved or
(14:37):
is it denied? That's it. She initially liked it. It
was a job, but the more she got into the
gravity of her work and how big the problem of
these schools really was, she became way more invested what
schools you know have misrepresentations, and what exactly does the
law mean when it says misrepresentation, and what was on
the mind of the framers when they wrote this law.
(14:59):
That's started making me, you know, I was way more interested.
So for the last couple of years she's been adjudicating
as a clerk, doing your job and doing it right. Still,
she really wanted to be personally helping people who needed it,
which can be hard to feel when you're simply at
your desk saying yes or no based on a law
(15:19):
that just exists, a law that is meant to do
some real good in the world. But Leonette wanted to
feel that she was doing something good. I think the
day that that actually happened, it was probably about maybe
three months ago. Leonette was adjudicating a case, and for
all cases at her job, there are two other people
(15:42):
called seers, who are basically quality control. So after leonet
approves or denies a case, it still has to go
through another set of eyes before it just passes through. Yeah,
which is a good that's a good thing. So one
of my cases I approved, and the person who sent
in the claim was I would say that maybe English
(16:04):
wasn't their first language, so some of the language and
the claim actually went against what we would approve. By this,
she means very basic language barrier stuff using negatives instead
of positives, like instead of saying the school told me
I would get a job making one hundred k, writing
the school told me I would not get a job
(16:26):
making a hundred k. And I think you and I
could both agree that that person probably meant the schools
told me, right, I mean, you use basic common sense
and you imply you just make a basic inference. It's
not that you understood this and you gave it your
stamp of approval. Of course, Lena identified a lot with
(16:47):
the claim and story understood the perspective. She wrote it.
The report explained, this is what they meant by this,
this is what they're trying to say, and she approved
it and she passed it along to her sears. Well.
It was sent back to me as a denial, like no,
the person absolutely didn't say that, and I'm like, this
(17:07):
is problematic, Like no, they did say it, and this
is how I know, and so I you know, and
I so of course I went to bat for it
and it ended up being fine. It was approved and
that's good work, like, and that's something that you know,
I'm proud of. I'm proud that I was able to
be that voice in the room because otherwise it would
have absolutely been denied, and you know, I don't think
(17:30):
it should have been. When you first started telling the story,
I was like, I thought you were going to say
that they you know, you went to bed for it
and it was still denied, and you know, and that
made you be like, you want to keep fighting and
doing what you do. But they approved it, which means
that you speaking up and being there fundamentally changed whoever
(17:56):
this person who's claiming this you that changed their lives
just you being there, It changed their life And if
I wasn't here, there's a possibility. I mean, that's huge.
And it's like, I mean it's I don't feel like
I'm huge because I did that, but that that representation.
It when people say representation matters, no, it really matters,
(18:16):
Like that's one person, yes, but that's a it's a
big deal. It's a big deal for someone, not a
big deal for me. It's a really big deal for
that person though, because the people who denied it, you
you made your case again and they thought, Oh, I
didn't think of it like that. Okay, right, that's like
a that's that's really scary. It's scary. It's really really scary.
(18:42):
And I was like really, I was like really like
upset about it. Like I was like fired up because
I'm like, I know because this is the stuff that
we hear about all the time, you know, and I
mean I know that it happens, but I saw it firsthand,
and I'm like, no, like no, like this this is wrong.
(19:07):
This is why black women and like minorities and other
people like this is why we need to make up
more than two percent of any field. Like there always
needs to be someone in the room, you know what
I mean, Like that represents everyone, Like everyone should be represented.
This is this is what we look like. Everyone doesn't
have the same vernacular. There should be someone there who
can say, maybe we need to take a closer look
(19:30):
at this. That's that's probably when I just really felt like, okay,
like I'm here for a reason. It's not just me
passing through. In her workspace, Leonette brought the perspective of
someone from a family of entrepreneurs in a minority community.
She empathized with the people whose files were on her desk.
And meanwhile, she says that she'd hear people around her
(19:52):
basically say how can someone fall for this? Like who
would be crazy enough to go to a school that's
saying blah blah blah. And I'm like a lot of
people and it's not that they're crazy, but you have
to look through their eyes, like you cannot stand here
as you and say, who would be crazy enough to
(20:14):
do this? A lot of people would. It's not crazy,
it's something that it's logical. It's people actually trying to
make a better way for their family and this is
the only opportunity that's presented to them. That's it, and
it sounds better than all the other opportunities. It's not
that crazy. And the person who is adjudicating those cases,
(20:36):
if they don't have the ability to see through that
lens or have the empathy to even try, then that
could completely change someone's life for better or for orders
without a question. Leonel says. A big reason why there's
such a small percentage of minorities in the legal system
(20:59):
is because of its reputation. The word lawyer itself has
an elitist air to it that makes people think that
they could never do it. Even I have a couple
friends who are lawyers, or if I meet someone who's
who's like, oh, yeah, I went to law school, I'm
a lawyer, and be like oh, because it just has
that in the same even when um, you know I
(21:21):
was I read just your title and what you do
to me just fundamentally felt like, Wow, that's something I
couldn't do. That's fundamentally not accessible. And I think that
gets a ton of people who should be doing what
you do from even starting. A ton of people, a
(21:42):
ton who would be so good at it, would be
so good at it, and would bring an empathy to
the job that is so desperately needed. It's just I
can't even put into words how desperately needed it is.
A lot of people just don't think that they qualify,
like I couldn't do that, Like that's for I have
(22:04):
no way you could. You absolutely could, and you're needed today,
at least in her workplace. Leonette fills that need and
her family they're no longer missing an attorney or her daughter,
for her cousins, her niece, They've all now got someone
to look to and say she does that, I could
do that. Every little black girl should have someone that
(22:27):
they can ask, like right at arm's reach, you know
that they can ask about anything that they want to do,
and that should be someone that looks like them, Like,
this should not be an anomaly, Like, there's absolutely no
reason it should be an anomaly. In the same vein,
Leonette also recognizes there's no reason she should have to
do what she does every day. A college education, even
(22:49):
a non fraudulent one, should not put people in debilitating
death for the rest of their lives. And it really
shouldn't be that easy for a school operating illegally to
look like the real deal. The reason that they can
do it is because the legal way is kind of
just as crazy. Um, these loans are a regular thing
(23:09):
that we've all just accepted. Um, so like not that different.
I mean it is, but it's not, you know, it's semantics.
It feels like that's it. So just you philosophically when
you go into work, like you're obviously doing something that
needs to be done. But does it ever like get
to you that wow, like I wish I didn't have
(23:32):
to do this. Yeah, but you shouldn't have to, right,
there should be no need, Yeah, or it should never
have happened, but here we are. That doesn't get you
(23:53):
down every day though, No, no, I can't let it
because I have so many I have so many issues
that I care deeply about and none of them should exist,
and yet they do. And so, you know, like it's
like I'm going to live and I'm going to be happy,
and I'm going to, you know, try to give my
(24:13):
children the best of me that I can every day.
And that requires like some level of shutting that down,
because otherwise it would it would just be too heavy,
like too much, it's too much. As we end the
(24:35):
season of On the Job, I think it's important to
note what this show is about in the first place,
jobs and the people who work them, because oftentimes the
right person working the right job means so much more
than that person having a stable income, having a place
to go every day clocking in and out. The right
person in the right job can change the lives of
(24:57):
the people that they deal with every day, saving them
from a lifetime of debt. By simply being in the
room to share their own perspective, It can change the
lives of the generations that come after them. When they
look up and see someone is doing a job. They
were made to believe that they could never do. The
right people in the right jobs level the playing field
(25:18):
and over time, help to fix the enormous problems of
wealth disparity, gender, pay gaps, and representation in the workplace.
They aren't problems that should exist, and if you think
about them too much in the grand scheme, you'll probably
go crazy. But if you're like Leone and you genuinely
want to be part of the solution, what you can
(25:39):
do is put your head down and get to work.
It's chunking it. It's taking a little chunk and trying
to fix this far because the system as a whole,
it desperately needs to be revamped and it's a lot.
Do you feel optimistic that you're affecting that? Yes, I do.
(26:03):
I definitely feel aptimistic about that. For On the Job,
I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job,
brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season of
On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were
(26:24):
written and produced by me Otis Gray. Our executive producer
is Sandy Smallens. The show is mixed by Matt Noble
for Audiation Studios at the Loft and Bronxville, New York.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on iHeartRadio and
Apple podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider
rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever
(26:45):
you listen. We'll see you next time. For more inspiring
stories about discovering your life's work. Audiation
Hosts And Creators
Bobby Bones
Amy Brown
Lunchbox
Eddie Garcia
Morgan Huelsman
Raymundo
Mike D
Abby Anderson
Scuba Steve
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