June 21, 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 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, too, may 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 lock clerk who works daily
(00:27):
to help relieve student debt for people who have 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 reached lines of work for me is any job
(00:49):
in the field of law. I'm recording, um, you're recording
on your voice memo? 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 Borrowers 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 I T. 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
(02:15):
shot 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 um, a lot
(02:36):
of people are don't have English as the first language.
That'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, i'd say 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 received
their certificate, they don't have the high paying jobs to
pay them off, and they file claims with Leonette at
(03:20):
the Department of Justice. We adjudicate these cases to give
them some relief. On your 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 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 approved 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, is it worth?
I mean, there's just so many there's so many arguments
to be had when you're talking about student debt and
(05:11):
people's ability to pay, and you have doctors and lawyers
who haven't paid their student debt, and you you kind
of come to terms with 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. It's a lot,
(05:33):
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, great pizza. Leonette was really
(05:55):
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, Like I was
a little cooler than most of my friends, you know,
(06:18):
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 never an option
college for in My family. Was like thirteenth grade, like,
(06:39):
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. Um, 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 into in her
all girls high school. She was one of four black
girls that graduated in a class of over a hundred.
(07:02):
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 ever.
Like sitting down my first day in class, my professor
her name was Dr Hamilton's and she wrote that on
the board, Dr Hamilton's not Miss Hamilton's, not Mrs Hamilton.
(07:23):
I have Dr 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.
After graduating, she came back home to New Haven and
started to figure out what she wanted to do. She
(07:43):
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. Eventually,
I was supposed to learn how to like do breo,
but I didn't stay long enough. I was like, wait,
(08:06):
what was your degree in biology? Okay, no, it still
doesn't make sense. I'm trying to make the connection. Um,
I mean I have a sculpture degree. Here we are
right right, listen, stranger, things have evan right. She got engaged,
called off the engagement, and realized she'd always wanted to
(08:27):
live in New York City, so she moved there. She
hired a head hunter. 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, you get a job. Her head hunter
(08:49):
eventually got her an interview for a financial endless 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. I'm 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 and eight financial crisis hit and no
(09:11):
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 funds. 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 there
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, um, 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 l A. And I'm like,
I was just ready to go all the time. I'm
(10:15):
just ready to go, 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, uh, 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 m b A.
(10:36):
This is when she really started to zoom 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
(10:57):
you know, my daughter included, but also 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
(11:21):
only represent two percent of all 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.
(11:42):
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(12:05):
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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 really set me up
(12:28):
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 with Leonette is
(12:48):
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 learned 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 what you want, Like to
(13:09):
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, but
(13:31):
you can just always have a job. 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,
(13:52):
I found out that I'm not actually a workaholic. I
thought I was, but you know, I am not a
live aholic, right. But I love a kations. I like
enjoying my kids. I like, you know, putting food on
the grill and just sitting out. I enjoy my life.
In Late Howard University's Career Services Center of posting for
this job that she is now at the d o
(14:12):
J with the Borrower's Defense Fund, helping people 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 at you know, what
what's required, and then you look at this application and
(14:32):
see if you can plug these things in. Does it
fit or does it not fit? Has it approved or
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
(14:53):
law mean when it says misrepresentation, and what was on
the mind of the framers when they wrote this law
that that's off 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
(15:15):
feel when you're simply at your desk saying yes or
no based on a law 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,
(15:39):
and for all cases at her job, there are two
other people called seers, who are basically quality control. So
after Leona 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, um,
one of my cases I approved and the person who
(16:00):
sent in the claim was I would say that maybe
English 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 a hundred k,
(16:23):
writing the school told me I would not get a
job making a hundred k. And I think you and
I could both agree that that person probably meant the
schools told me, right, we we I mean, you use
basic common sense, and you imply you use it. You
just make a basic inference. It's not that you understood
this and you gave it your stamp of approval. Of course,
(16:45):
Lena identified a lot with 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 um as a denial, like now the person absolutely
didn't say that, and I'm like, this is problematic, Like no,
(17:10):
they did say it, and this is how I know,
and so you know and I so of course I
went to bat for it and then it ended up
being fine. It was approved, and um, 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 it should have been.
(17:34):
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 this person who's claiming
(17:57):
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, Like that's one person, Yes,
(18:18):
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,
that's like that's that's really scary. It's scary. It's really
(18:41):
really scary. 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 at firsthand and I'm like no, like no, like
(19:05):
this is this is wrong. This is why black women
and like minorities and other people like, this is why
we need to make up more than two 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
(19:26):
be someone there who can say, maybe we need to
take a closer look 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
(19:47):
whose files were on her desk, And meanwhile, she says
that she'd hear people around her 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,
(20:09):
like you cannot stand here as you and say, who
would be crazy enough to do this? A lot of
people would. It's not crazy, it's something that it's it's
logical as 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
(20:34):
person who is adjudicating those cases, 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 waters, without a question. Leon
And says a big reason why there's such a small
(20:56):
percentage of minorities in the legal system 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 I have a couple of 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 them in the same
(21:19):
even when um, you know, I 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 keeps a ton of
people who should be doing what you do from even starting.
(21:40):
A ton of people, a 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,
(22:02):
Like that's for I have 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 for 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
(22:25):
girl should have someone that they can ask, like right
at arms reach, you know, that they can ask about
anything that they want to do, and that should be
someone that looks like them like that. 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
(22:46):
does every day. A college education, even 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 it is kind of just as crazy. Um,
(23:07):
these loans are a regular thing that we've all just accepted. Um,
So it's 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're going to work, like
you're obviously doing something that needs to be done. Um,
but does does it ever get to you that Wow,
(23:30):
Like I wish I didn't have 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.
(23:52):
That doesn't get you 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,
(24:13):
try to give my children the best of me that
I can every day. And that requires like some level
of of shutting that down, because otherwise it would it
would just be too heavy, like too much, it's too much.
(24:35):
As we end the 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
(24:57):
lives of 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
(25:18):
field and over time helped 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 like Leona 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 fear 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 Modus 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 I Heart
Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard,
please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts
(26:45):
or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For
more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work, audition
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 lock clerk who works daily
(00:27):
to help relieve student debt for people who have 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 reached lines of work for me is any job
(00:49):
in the field of law. I'm recording, um, you're recording
on your voice memo? 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 Borrowers 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 I T. 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
(02:15):
shot 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 um, a lot
(02:36):
of people are don't have English as the first language.
That'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, i'd say 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 received
their certificate, they don't have the high paying jobs to
pay them off, and they file claims with Leonette at
(03:20):
the Department of Justice. We adjudicate these cases to give
them some relief. On your 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 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 approved 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, is it worth?
I mean, there's just so many there's so many arguments
to be had when you're talking about student debt and
(05:11):
people's ability to pay, and you have doctors and lawyers
who haven't paid their student debt, and you you kind
of come to terms with 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. It's a lot,
(05:33):
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, great pizza. Leonette was really
(05:55):
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, Like I was
a little cooler than most of my friends, you know,
(06:18):
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 never an option
college for in My family. Was like thirteenth grade, like,
(06:39):
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. Um, 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 into in her
all girls high school. She was one of four black
girls that graduated in a class of over a hundred.
(07:02):
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 ever.
Like sitting down my first day in class, my professor
her name was Dr Hamilton's and she wrote that on
the board, Dr Hamilton's not Miss Hamilton's, not Mrs Hamilton.
(07:23):
I have Dr 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.
After graduating, she came back home to New Haven and
started to figure out what she wanted to do. She
(07:43):
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. Eventually,
I was supposed to learn how to like do breo,
but I didn't stay long enough. I was like, wait,
(08:06):
what was your degree in biology? Okay, no, it still
doesn't make sense. I'm trying to make the connection. Um,
I mean I have a sculpture degree. Here we are
right right, listen, stranger, things have evan right. She got engaged,
called off the engagement, and realized she'd always wanted to
(08:27):
live in New York City, so she moved there. She
hired a head hunter. 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, you get a job. Her head hunter
(08:49):
eventually got her an interview for a financial endless 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. I'm 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 and eight financial crisis hit and no
(09:11):
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 funds. 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 there
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, um, 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 l A. And I'm like,
I was just ready to go all the time. I'm
(10:15):
just ready to go, 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, uh, 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 m b A.
(10:36):
This is when she really started to zoom 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
(10:57):
you know, my daughter included, but also 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
(11:21):
only represent two percent of all 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.
(11:42):
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(12:05):
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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 really set me up
(12:28):
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 with Leonette is
(12:48):
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 learned 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 what you want, Like to
(13:09):
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, but
(13:31):
you can just always have a job. 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,
(13:52):
I found out that I'm not actually a workaholic. I
thought I was, but you know, I am not a
live aholic, right. But I love a kations. I like
enjoying my kids. I like, you know, putting food on
the grill and just sitting out. I enjoy my life.
In Late Howard University's Career Services Center of posting for
this job that she is now at the d o
(14:12):
J with the Borrower's Defense Fund, helping people 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 at you know, what
what's required, and then you look at this application and
(14:32):
see if you can plug these things in. Does it
fit or does it not fit? Has it approved or
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
(14:53):
law mean when it says misrepresentation, and what was on
the mind of the framers when they wrote this law
that that's off 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
(15:15):
feel when you're simply at your desk saying yes or
no based on a law 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,
(15:39):
and for all cases at her job, there are two
other people called seers, who are basically quality control. So
after Leona 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, um,
one of my cases I approved and the person who
(16:00):
sent in the claim was I would say that maybe
English 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 a hundred k,
(16:23):
writing the school told me I would not get a
job making a hundred k. And I think you and
I could both agree that that person probably meant the
schools told me, right, we we I mean, you use
basic common sense, and you imply you use it. You
just make a basic inference. It's not that you understood
this and you gave it your stamp of approval. Of course,
(16:45):
Lena identified a lot with 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 um as a denial, like now the person absolutely
didn't say that, and I'm like, this is problematic, Like no,
(17:10):
they did say it, and this is how I know,
and so you know and I so of course I
went to bat for it and then it ended up
being fine. It was approved, and um, 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 it should have been.
(17:34):
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 this person who's claiming
(17:57):
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, Like that's one person, Yes,
(18:18):
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,
that's like that's that's really scary. It's scary. It's really
(18:41):
really scary. 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 at firsthand and I'm like no, like no, like
(19:05):
this is this is wrong. This is why black women
and like minorities and other people like, this is why
we need to make up more than two 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
(19:26):
be someone there who can say, maybe we need to
take a closer look 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
(19:47):
whose files were on her desk, And meanwhile, she says
that she'd hear people around her 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,
(20:09):
like you cannot stand here as you and say, who
would be crazy enough to do this? A lot of
people would. It's not crazy, it's something that it's it's
logical as 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
(20:34):
person who is adjudicating those cases, 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 waters, without a question. Leon
And says a big reason why there's such a small
(20:56):
percentage of minorities in the legal system 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 I have a couple of 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 them in the same
(21:19):
even when um, you know, I 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 keeps a ton of
people who should be doing what you do from even starting.
(21:40):
A ton of people, a 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,
(22:02):
Like that's for I have 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 for 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
(22:25):
girl should have someone that they can ask, like right
at arms reach, you know, that they can ask about
anything that they want to do, and that should be
someone that looks like them like that. 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
(22:46):
does every day. A college education, even 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 it is kind of just as crazy. Um,
(23:07):
these loans are a regular thing that we've all just accepted. Um,
So it's 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're going to work, like
you're obviously doing something that needs to be done. Um,
but does does it ever get to you that Wow,
(23:30):
Like I wish I didn't have 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.
(23:52):
That doesn't get you 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,
(24:13):
try to give my children the best of me that
I can every day. And that requires like some level
of of shutting that down, because otherwise it would it
would just be too heavy, like too much, it's too much.
(24:35):
As we end the 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
(24:57):
lives of 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
(25:18):
field and over time helped 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 like Leona 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 fear 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 Modus 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 I Heart
Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard,
please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts
(26:45):
or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For
more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work, audition
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