Episode 101: Jamie Beck
Founder, President, and Managing Attorney of Free to Thrive
00:50:02
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Show Notes
As Founder of the legal nonprofit Free to Thrive, Jamie Beck advocates for and represents human-trafficking survivors. Today, MC Sungaila talks to her about her non-profit organization and how she got so passionate about solving the issue of human trafficking.
This episode is powered by Trellis.
Relevant episode links:
Free to Thrive, Family Violence Appellate Project, Justice Judith McConnell - Past Episode, Lawyers Club, National Association of Women Judges, The Joseph Project, Rasa, Goodwill of San Diego
About Jamie Beck:
Jami Beck
Jamie Beck is the Founder, President and Managing Attorney of Free to Thrive, a Southern California-based nonprofit organization that advances justice and transforms the legal system for human trafficking survivors through legal services, policy advocacy, community outreach and stakeholder education.
Jamie is also an Adjunct Lecturer in Law at USC Gould School of Law teaching a course on “Trauma-Informed Legal Skills” and serves on the Dean’s Board of Advisors for the University of San Diego Kroc School of Peace Studies. She has trained thousands of attorneys, students, stakeholders and community members on human trafficking and trauma-informed practices.
Prior to starting Free to Thrive, Jamie practiced civil litigation at Procopio, Cory, Hargeaves & Savitch LLP. Before joining Procopio, Jamie served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Michael M. Anello, Federal District Court Judge for the Southern District of California. Jamie graduated from the University of San Diego School of Law.
Transcript
I'm very pleased to have join us on the show, Jamie Beck. She is the Founder, President, and Managing Attorney of Free to Thrive, which is a groundbreaking nonprofit addressing human trafficking issues at both policy levels and individually. I'm proud to have Jamie here and talk about her work and how she started. There's something interesting in your story. You are engaged in important work and working with a nonprofit but also founded that nonprofit. You are a little bit of an entrepreneur as well.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here on this show. Something here and dear to my heart is inspiring women to go to law school and become attorneys and judges. I definitely consider myself a nonprofit entrepreneur, something that I did not set out to do when I went to law school but I certainly found my way to this work.
I want to talk about that journey. There are some people in law school who start out knowing that they want to do something like the founders of the Family Violence Appellate Project. They had a particular interest in women, sexual violence, and things like that before they came to law school and had an idea that was the area they wanted to work in. Was that like that for you or was it more that you discovered the work as you went along in practice?
It was a little bit of both. When I went to law school, I was a bleeding heart public interest lawyer who knew that I wanted to go to law school to do something to help people, as many of us do not know exactly what that would look like for me, firstly. I was passionate and still am about Housing Law and discrimination in housing. I went to law school during the 2008 housing crisis, did pro bono work in law school for distressed homeowners, and became very passionate about that. I went to law school knowing I wanted to have an impact and was feeling out what areas I felt like I could have an impact on. I graduated from law school. I was fortunate to get a clerkship right out of law school, which was an incredible learning opportunity.
That clerkship led me to an opportunity in private practice to work at a large law firm in San Diego. Knowing that I wanted to go into public interest work, I also knew that my student loans would be debilitating once I had a public interest salary. I decided to go into private practice for the financial security of that, with the goal of paying down my student loans as quickly as I could and finding my path back to private practice.
It’s something I talk to a lot of Law students about that decision because I have many Law students who come to me and say, “I want to go into public interest. I want to help people but I don't know how to do that with student loans.” What I always say is, “There are many different ways to give back, and you can give back in private practice.”
There are many ways to give back and help people in private practice.
Many lawyers dedicate so much time to volunteer work and pro bono work. That's certainly what I did to fill my cup while in private practice. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of opportunity at large firms to do a lot of impactful work. That's what I did. I dove as soon as I could. I started taking pro bono cases. I got very involved with our feminist bar association called Lawyers Club of San Diego.
That was what put me on the path to this work. As Lawyers Club made a strategic initiative around human trafficking, I started learning more about it. We did educational programs around human trafficking. I ended up founding our human trafficking collaborative as a tool to engage the legal community around this issue.
What I discovered was that there was not a non-profit in San Diego providing direct legal representation to human trafficking survivors. After doing both, taking pro bono cases, training lawyers on how to do this work, and doing policy work and advocacy around the issue of human trafficking, I found that I was incredibly passionate about this. I felt like there was a gap that I could fill.
I had no idea what I was doing, starting a nonprofit. They don't teach you anything about running a business or a nonprofit in law school. There was a very steep learning curve. I ended up leaving the private practice after five years and starting Free to Thrive, doing this work full-time. It has been many years since I have been doing it full-time. It has been an incredible journey. That's how I found my way to this work.
It's interesting in terms of you investigated the need and started working within the structure of the bar association. That something certainly firms our support of pro bono work but there's a lot of opportunity for community service outside strictly bar service but community service through various bars. On the show we had when one of the Founders of the Lawyers Club, Justice Judith McConnell.
She was our very first President and Founder, not only of the Lawyers Club but of the National Association of Women Judges. She's a superstar in my world.
You are in good company, and it all fits together in the story of all the fabric of different lives and careers, even within the show. Did the founding of it also coincide with the changes in the law with regard to new opportunities for expungement or did those converge?
That was a huge catalyst for starting Free to Thrive. The timing was that I had taken several cases pro bono myself. In the process of that, I saw firsthand how having a criminal record holds survivors back from being able to pursue their dreams, get jobs, housing, and all the things that you can't do once you have a criminal record. Through the education work that Lawyers Club was doing, we learned that other states had these laws called Vacatur Law, that California did not have them.
We set out to change that and convened a legislative round table where we brought in local elected officials. It basically shared that there are these laws and other states that help survivors of human trafficking clear their criminal records. We would like to pass that law in California. One of our local State Senators, Marty Block, took us on. He said, “I want to do it. I want to bring the Vacatur Law Bill.” That was in December. We intentionally timed it right before the next legislative session when elected officials were looking for new bill ideas.
That was December. January comes, and Marty Block brings a bill. It flew through the legislature. I got a distorted view of what legislative advocacy looked like because it was such a smooth process with very little opposition. You can understand how it's hard to oppose survivors of human trafficking clearing their records. There was some opposition, and we still face some in our advocacy. We did push through, and we managed to pass that law. It went into effect in January of 2017.
At that time, I went back to the client who had inspired me to advocate for this law. I said, “You are going to be my first case. I don't have any idea how this law works or how to use it but we are going to learn together. If you are patient with me, then I want to help you clear your record.” I took her case, and very quickly, my phone was ringing with lots of other survivors who he did help learn their records. I saw how great the need was. In the State of California, because this was brand new, we didn't have lawyers who knew how to use this law. We didn't have public defender's offices.
We are aware of it. It's a possibility.
One of the great things was that the San Diego Public Defender's Office was on top of it, and they started doing this work right away but were among the few offices in the state who were doing that work. That was right around the time that I started Free to Thrive. A lot of things converged at once. We changed the law. I was at a point at the law firm where I worked where I was ready to make that transition into public interest.
It was not a coincidence that I paid off my student loans and quit my job months later. I achieved my goal of paying off my loans and aggressively doing that. I also advised Law students to do that, “If you get a job in private practice and make a good salary, don't just pay the minimum. Pay as much as you possibly can afford to because you are going to pay less now than you pay it over the entire term of the loans to call the interest.”
If you get a job in private practice and are making a good salary, don’t just pay the minimum [on your student loans]. Pay as much as you possibly can.
The other thing that converged at the same time was that there was a grant application. It was a contract application from the County of San Diego for pro bono legal services for human trafficking survivors. That was not a coincidence. It was the County of San Diego recognizing that there was this gap and that these services were needed. I applied for that funding. The application came out in March 2017. It was right after the law went into effect.
There are no lawyers doing this work, and there's this opportunity for funding. I applied for it. I got the funding. It was at that point that I had enough funding where I could at least have a salary for a year. It was a year's worth of funding to pay my salary and cover some of our startup costs. That's when I quit my job. It needed funding to have the law in place and a huge need for services. It all came together at that moment.
That hits all of the different things that you would need to have the perfect storm to be able to find something, all of the different pressure points that come into play. You could find something but you need funding to accomplish certain things. Coming into a whole new practice area, essentially, with regard to expungement under the law, there's no competition because nobody knows how to do that anyway. Everybody is at that same level, except that you, in helping survivors by passing the law, also were in the vanguard of that.
The other thing that's interesting to me about all of that is the different stakeholders. It exemplifies all the different stakeholders that must be in place to create change at that level. Also, how it's a microcosm of that within San Diego, having your advocacy through the bar association and then the local representatives taking it to Sacramento. It’s because the ethos and people are talking about it, then there's funding at the county level as well. It's an interesting story about how important local initiatives can be in pressing, larger initiatives within the state.
One other piece, in addition to everything you mentioned, that was important and a catalyst at that moment was academic research. The University of San Diego conducted an incredible study on human trafficking that was published in 2016. That study was a catalyst for so much of the progress that we've seen, not just in San Diego but I would say statewide and nationally because it put numbers on things that we already know. That was another huge piece of the puzzle. It led to increased funding and increased awareness.
There's a lot of media attention around human trafficking. There was this time for 2016, 2019 into 2020, and then the pandemic threw everything to the wind. This is the time when there was a lot of attention around the issue of human trafficking, being this need in our community and understanding that even though we don't see it when we walk down the street, it's happening behind the scenes and below the surface.
That consciousness-raising can happen in a number of different ways. Patricia Hunt Holmes, who is an author or writer after her time in practice, wrote a book about trafficking that raised awareness in Houston, which has quite a bit and activated the community using her book. It is based on actual facts and circumstances, actual cases to raise the profile amongst people who could help fund things and make a difference in Houston. There are a lot of different ways to do that and to see different parts of the problem and galvanize people around those issues. On another note, Amanda Paletz, who we talked about at The Joseph Project in Michigan, is their Legal Director. They are also engaged in expungement.
That's a situation where Michigan was ahead in terms of having those laws. One of the pathbreaking states in having that and their efforts also to expand the law beyond the expungement in Michigan. We will have interest in you if you don't know, Noella Sudbury in Utah is one of the first Founders of a legal tech company called Rasa but it's a public benefit corporation.
It democratizes expungement. In other words, it allows people to quickly search and find out whether they qualify for expungement and helps expedite that process for them. That's another tie-in to your work from folks who have been on the show and how all of this stuff fits together. You need all of these different parts of the ecosystem to address pretty large problems.
They are doing incredible work, and certainly, it is all needed.
Thank you for explaining how all those things fit together because I had seen some of them. First of all, it's hard to create a nonprofit now in an area where truly it's not being served. There isn't some segment of already an existing legal nonprofit that handles that. The circumstance you had with a brand new law is one in a million circumstances where that would happen. It is a good case study of how that works. Basically, looking and saying there's a huge unserved market under this new law. If we have a law and we don't use it, then what is the point of having the law?
You see that nationally with these Vacatur Laws. There are states who passed these laws and were never used, which is heartbreaking. Indiana was one example that they had their law in the books for years before anyone brought the first case. As far as I understand from talking to the folks in Indiana doing this work, they still only had a handful of cases. It's tragic because there are many survivors out there that need that help, that I'm sure have records in that state.
It's about having lawyers there who know about this and who are willing to help. It doesn't matter if it's a nonprofit lawyer or a private practice lawyer in case pro bono or government lawyers, it's having somebody trained who understands us and then training other people. They now have this effort underway in Indiana, which is amazing. That is working on exactly that but that's relatively recent compared to how long they've had their law on the books.
You need all of that. You need to press to move it forward. Especially if no one has done that work, then that's a lot of hard work to figure out how to do it. It's a law that people haven't used. What's the template for doing that? That can lead to some inertia as well. Making sure that people who qualify for this are using it is important. How has the journey been in the last few years? Has it grown in ways you haven't expected? Within the state geographically, where the organization has gone that may have surprised you?
It has definitely been quite the journey, and it certainly feels like I'm very much in the throes of our growth and development as an organization. When I started, it was me. We had a staff of one. I can say that every single job at Free to Thrive I have done because I was the person answering the phones and doing the client intakes. Everything that we do at Free to Thrive, I've done that job in some way. Little by little, we are able to expand our funding and bring on more people. We've grown from a staff of just me to now fourteen team members, including myself, which is amazing. We had a budget when I started of $100,000, and we now have $1.3 million.
We've significantly increased the funds that we have and our fundraising capabilities. We've also increased staff to help with fundraising. We now have development staff and a grant writer, all things that happened little by little over time. There are so many things about the journey that I never, ever could have expected. Geographically, we've expanded from San Diego focused to now all of Southern California.
In my dream world, we would expand much faster and be covering the entire state and beyond. We don't have the capacity now to serve that many people but the need is certainly there. We still get tons of calls from other places that don't have the services that we offer. In the process, I've had to learn so many different things.
There's the learning curve of learning the leaf. There's no practice guide for what we do because this is brand new and we are very often teaching the courts, prosecutors, and even the court clerks what this is and how it works because they've never seen these cases before. They don't know how they work. We are charting a path in a legal profession but then I've also had to learn nonprofit management at managing people.
I've had to learn nonprofit finance, which finance is complicated for any small business but it's even more complicated for a nonprofit, where we have to track every single dollar that comes into the organization and make sure that we are using our donors’ funds for a mission but very often they are restricted. We have to track exactly what we use that for. It’s a very complex accounting.
For any small business, finances can be complicated. It's even more complicated for a nonprofit.
Luckily, I have a lot of brilliant and amazing people who are better at all these things than me and who have taught and helped me on this learning journey. Nonprofit governance is a whole other area of building a board and making sure we are complying with all the State Corporation Laws and all of the rules that we have to follow as a nonprofit corporation.
There are many things to learn, and it's incredible to be able to grow as a leader in all these different ways and grow my skills. Finance is one area that I'd never in my wildest dreams thought that I would grow my skills in terms of being able to read and create financial statements, create an annual budget, manage expenses and oversee complicated grants.
That's one example but there are many things that I had not set out to do. There are things that came along with the job. I set out to do the legal work, and then all these other pieces go along, having a nonprofit. When I was setting out to do this, I was focused on human trafficking, “Survivors need lawyers. I'm a lawyer. I can do this.” All the rest came along with it. Oftentimes, people are wanting to start a nonprofit. It was advice that was given to me that I totally did not listen to but I told them, “Look for an organization to see who all is out there doing this first. Don't go start a nonprofit if there's somebody else doing it.”
I did that part of making sure that there wasn't anybody in San Diego doing this, but the other piece of understanding is that there's a whole lot to your nonprofit outside of the mission itself. Most people start nonprofits because of the mission, not because they want to be a business owner and do all the things that you need to do as a business owner. That's the part that I don't think I comprehended, and I've had to learn as I go.
That's also why generally, people don't tend to find legal nonprofits because there are many other things involved. Often in life, it's good that you don't know all of those things are involved because you might not do it.
Especially as women, we have Imposter syndrome. We don't think we have the skills or qualifications to do a job in general. That’s measured and studied. We know that about women. I definitely feel Imposter syndrome all the time. I do think that I would've corrected in, if I had known all these things that would be a part of my job, I would've said, “I'm not qualified.”
“I can't do that. I've never done anything like that.” It was good to be focused on the mission, what you wanted to do, and the gap you wanted to fill in legal services, and all the rest became necessary to do that. You grow and learn the skills that are necessary as you go but not focusing on those in the beginning probably was a saving grace in terms of starting the nonprofit.
It could have been immobilized thinking about all the other things that were involved but that's incredible growth. That's why to say from the standpoint, you are unique in terms of not only doing significant, legal, nonprofit work but being that entrepreneur from starting from the ground up and growing an organization are a unique set of skills. There are a lot of grants available for your area. That's good.
The pandemic has made fundraising a lot more challenging than it was before. We had this momentum of everybody wanting to fund human trafficking, including local foundations and state, national, and government agencies. This was the hot thing that everybody was talking about and focused on. When the pandemic hit, there were many different areas of need.
All of a sudden, the attention was focused on human trafficking as a critical area of the community that needs to be dissipated to focus on basic needs, food and security, and housing. We have seen a huge uptick in domestic violence. There’s a huge need for a sponsor. Our kids, schools, education and mental health, on and on, and homelessness, there are many different needs impacting our community that are all important and need our attention.
Donors and funders, whether it's an individual, a corporation, a foundation or a government agency, they all have a certain amount of funds. Whether it's, I give $100 a year to a charity of my choice or government agencies that have a certain budget of funds to give out no matter what, they have to make difficult choices. There are many needs out there, and it becomes harder. I kept thinking 2020 was rough, and 2022 has been the opposite because, at least in 2020 and 2021, there was a lot of funding for emergency services.
It's because of the work we were doing that we were able to get some of those funding. We got a PPP loan and grant for emergency response work that we were doing to help our clients through the pandemic but all that funding went away and there hasn't been anything to replace it. A lot of the funds that were there from 2017 to 2019 aren't there anymore but all the emergency funds that were there in 2020 and 2021 are also not there. It created a lot of challenges.
For a range of nonprofits, the arts organizations as well are suffering from that. It was nice to have the bridge of the various funds, the emergency funds but those are going away too. New challenges each of these years, and each time, we all were hoping like, “This will be it. We can all go back to whatever,” but it doesn't seem like it's going in that direction. You also do your work through a lot of partnerships, and pro bono work with private law firms, both small and large, as well as government offices and public defenders. Can you talk about how that works and how people, if they are inclined, can donate their time and skills to work with you?
A huge part of our model is working collaboratively with the community and with different stakeholders. There are other organizations that serve non-legal needs, whether they are human trafficking focused or broader than that but we work closely with other organizations to ensure that our clients have their non-legal needs met. We work with both of our local family justice centers in San Diego. We work with countless other anti-trafficking organizations around the State of California.
Goodwill of San Diego is one of our partners that does know much more than anti-trafficking work but is a great partner of ours. They have job centers and all different types of career counseling, and we are able to connect our clients to their services. Our collaborative model works with all these organizations where we train them on human trafficking so that they can identify people within the clients that they serve and send them to us. We refer our clients to them for the services that they offer.
One of the things I learned from Amanda was that it was holistic. This is a legal barrier that you are lifting for someone with the expungement but there is so many other wraps around and things that are necessary to help someone move out of their past and the trafficking experiences that are not legal at all of these other things.
Oftentimes, if our clients aren't at a point where they have stable housing, mental health support, their basic needs met or they are unemployed and looking for a job, they can't focus on their legal needs. They are not at a point where they are able to do the difficult work of getting their records cleared because this is a very invasive process.
Unfortunately, the way the law is written is that our clients have to tell their entire trauma history to get this relief. That means recounting some of the perfect moments in their lives to a stranger. We want to make sure that they have all the support they need and that they are stable enough to go through that really difficult process.
That’s where those partners come in to make sure that they have their needs met. The reality is that we can't meet all the needs of the folks that come to us. There's so much more need than there are services. Sometimes we struggle with getting our clients the help they need but we do everything we can to help them get that support. We work closely with government agencies.
We get a lot of client referrals from law enforcement, prosecutors, and public defenders. They may send people to us for the services that we offer but we may work with law enforcement to report if our client wants to report their traffic or reach out to law enforcement proactively and say we are working with a survivor who wants to make a report and we will help them through that process.
We may be working with prosecutors who are prosecuting our clients, perpetrators, and defense attorneys who are working with the trafficking victim who is being prosecuted for a crime. They reach out to us saying, “My client is a victim of human trafficking. Can we work together?” Oftentimes, I educate them about the laws that they can use to help their clients or connect the clients that they are serving to other services.
There's a lot of working collaboratively with our government agencies. We also work with people who want to get involved. We work with law firms as they provide significant pro bono services tasks specifically in the area of criminal Vacatur, which most civil lawyers hear the word criminal are like, “I can't do that. I'm not a criminal lawyer.” Here is some news, I'm not a criminal lawyer either.
I learned how to do this work because as we talked about why I learned how to do this, the reality is that this is one area that is an amazing pro bono opportunity because it is a very discreet, legal pace. You have this incredible ability to change somebody's life through this one discreet case. We can train you on how to do it. We train lawyers throughout the State of California on criminal Vacatur and help them learn how to do this. Once we have those lawyers in place, we are able to send them pro bono clients.
That's a good point about it. It's a good fit for work with law firms who, as a business matter, understandably prefer to know, “It's a discreet amount. It's not going to be this endless commitment over many years.” You, as a pro bono attorney, have the great sense of like, “I've done something significant with this one proceeding.”
The other key partner in this work with us is Law students. The one important part of our model is to train the next generation of lawyers to go out, do this work, and be trauma-informed lawyers, a term that you don't often hear in the legal profession is trauma-informed lawyer or trauma-informed legal skills. It's not something we are taught in law school. It's something that I learned through practice because I had never been taught in law school what that meant and how to do that. It's something that has been incredible to bring Law students to our work.
Trauma-informed legal skills aren’t taught in law school.
Many of our former interns have graduated and gone on to become public defenders, prosecutors, and private practice lawyers. We have these amazing people who've learned these skills and who are now in the trenches doing this work, and they brought those skills with them. That's something that I take great pride in, and I love seeing how their journeys and their careers.
That enhances and draws out the impact that your organization has over the long-term by paying that forward to the next group of folks who will be doing the work. I had a question about trauma-informed. Maybe people don't know what that means. What does that encompass when you say that?
Specifically, when I say being a trauma-informed lawyer, it means understanding what trauma is and the brain science around trauma, and there are a lot of things that I am not. I am not a clinician, psychologist, or medical doctor but I've learned enough about the brain science of trauma to understand what happens to the brain during a traumatic experience. After the experience, how that impacts people's behavior and interactions because that impacts our clients? The reality is that the vast majority of lawyers work with trauma victims, and yet the vast majority of lawyers have no training on trauma.
If we think about it, anybody who's in Criminal Law doesn't matter if their defense or prosecution works with trauma, anybody who's in personal injury, Employment Law, Family Law, bankruptcy, appellate, and Environmental Law, I could go on and name most areas of law that will interact with trauma in some ways. We have to understand what trauma is and how it affects our clients so that we can work with them in a way that doesn't retraumatize them in the process. If we are trying to get a client's story from them and triggering them through the process of asking for their story, that's not trauma-informed. That's the opposite.
The next piece is how we adjust our cases to be trauma-informed. How do we prepare our clients before, during, and after court? How do we educate the court and the legal system about our client's trauma? The last part of being trauma-informed is how we address the impact that working with trauma has on us as attorneys. There's a term called vicarious trauma, which is the emotional residue of this work.
I don't have data on this but I firmly believe that a lot of what we see in the legal profession in terms of substance use and mental health issues that lawyers experience is vicarious trauma. Its negative coping mechanisms or the mental health impacts of vicarious trauma. The mental health impacts of vicarious trauma look like PTSD, depression, and anxiety. It's the same symptoms.
It's like you are having trauma symptoms from your client's trauma. It's certainly compounded by the stress of the legal profession on top of that. In those training that we go to on substance use among lawyers and mental health issues among lawyers, we rarely talk about vicarious trauma and how that contributes to these challenges that we know we all experience as attorneys.
I knew it was multidimensional, that's why I asked. I was also thinking that it could impact your lawyering in a case directly, not just in terms of, “I don't want to revive or overly retraumatize a client who's having to recount things,” because that's certainly something that has been talked about in the literature. The system itself sometimes requires people to relive things that are already difficult the first time.
I'm also wondering whether that includes how you assess credibility or people's stories because I've seen it. I have handled some asylum cases in the immigration context. It's important sometimes to understand the context when you are assessing or recounting what happened or why it is that someone didn't mention some bad circumstance the first time they talked about it and the second time they did. Is that part of this as well?
That's the piece of understanding trauma, how it impacts your clients, your cases and how you present your case in a court known your client is in trauma. Our system is set up to assess credibility based on consistency. This is why you have to understand the brain science around trauma to be a trauma-informed lawyer, is that the brain science tells us that somebody is experiencing trauma at the moment, and their brain is not going to put those memories of that trauma into any organized fashion. Their logical thinking brain is completely shut down, and their survival brain or fight, flight, or freeze is kicked in. What that means is that when somebody tries to remember a traumatic event, they may either not remember certain parts of it or have inconsistencies in how they report it.
Somebody who reports to law enforcement right at the scene of a crime may have a completely different story than one month later when they are not in that trauma-triggered state of fight, flight or freeze. Their rational thinking brain has come back. Yet, the way that our legal system works is that you can see the cross-examination of that person, and you see it in every type of case of, “You said this before, and you are saying this now. It’s either you were lying before or now.”
As a trauma-informed lawyer, your job is to help the jury, and the judge understands that that's a totally normal human response to trauma. What that may mean is bringing in a trauma expert into your case or it may mean walking after that cross-examination or prior to the direct examination of your client, walking them through, “Why is it that you remembered it differently than now?”
As a trauma-informed lawyer, your job is to help the jury and judge understand the normal human response to trauma.
Having them explain what happened in between. “Did you go to a therapist who helped you work through the trauma that you experienced and help you bring recall memories that you didn't remember? Why wouldn't you tell law enforcement that at the moment? Were you scared? Where was your head out when you talked to the police officer after that incident happened?”
You have to help people understand what's going on with them and understand that inconsistencies do not mean that they are lying. It means that they experience trauma, and that corroborates their story. Our legal system isn't set up that way. I talk a lot about being a trauma-informed lawyer in a system that is not trauma-informed. When I say that, this is what I mean is that people are set up in these systems to be discredited because of a normal human response to trauma.
Thanks for explaining that. That's what I was thinking of as well. I was wondering whether that was part of it, and it seemed quite holistic in looking at all different parts of the case through that lens to add some context to what's going on.
As you can probably tell, I'm very passionate about helping people because it's something that I did have to learn outside of law school. I'm going to be teaching a course at USC Law School on Trauma-Informed Legal Skills for that reason because I want Law students to learn this in law school so that they don't have to learn it on the job while practicing law.
I do a lot of different things too but you are amazing in doing all of this in founding and running, Free to Thrive, as well as seeing all these other avenues and ways to build and teach on issues that are related to your nonprofit's work. It's pretty impressive.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
What advice would you give to someone like you who is going to law school and has an interest in public interest work? Maybe looking back, are there things you would've done differently? It sounds like, from a practical standpoint, you did a good, strong financial decision with regard to paying off the loans and enabling you to take this opportunity when it’s once in a million opportunity to jump at starting this nonprofit. In addition to that, what other thoughts or advice would you have for Law students?
I would say a couple of things. One of the very practical pieces of financial advice is to take out as little student loans as you possibly can. A difficult choice that I made throughout law school is I would apply for a job. I applied for the public interest job, the government job, and the law firm job. Each time I would get hired for a law firm position, I took it because it was a paid position, and I didn't want to take out additional loans for my living expenses.
That helped reduce the amount of debt that I had and is part of why I was able to pay off my loans more quickly, and that's something that was hard for me because I got a couple of internships that I wanted. I was sad to have to say no to taking a job that I didn't want and enjoy nearly as much. I know still now that it was the right decision because those loans are very expensive ten years later when they have had an interest on them over the years.
The one-piece is to take out as little as you can and pay them off as quickly as you can. The other is to try everything in law school. We have students who come to us and work with us. At the end of the semester, they were like, “I love Free to Thrive.” I would love to extend another semester but I'm also interested in seeing what it's like to go to the DA’s office, public defenders or go to a law firm. We are always like, “Go try out those other things. You are not going to know until you've tried what you enjoy.”
I saw one of our summer interns. We had an event, and she's at the public defender's office this semester. She lit up when I asked her about how that was going. She's like, “I absolutely love it. It's so great and fun.” If she had stayed with us, she wouldn't have had that experience. Law schools are one of those rare times in life when you get to try everything out. I love free samples. I love getting to try things before I have to buy them nowhere else in your career, I would think other than this, do you get to actually try out different jobs and see if you like them before you get them?
A piece of advice that I received as I was trying to figure out after my clerkship was, “What direction I should go.” Someone said to me, “Take the opportunity where you will get the best possible training as a lawyer.” The reality is that even if that's not your dream job, what's your interaction with clients going to be? What's your casework going to look like? How much responsibility are you getting? Is it a big firm or a small firm? Are you going to be a cog in a wheel or get like, you know, the opportunity to go to court? All these things are important to develop your skills early on as an attorney. If you get into that work and you get this great experience, then you don't like that practice area.
Take the opportunity where you’ll get the best possible training as a lawyer.
It's very easy to jump to a different area of law. Go where you are going to get the best possible training as a lawyer, is what I always tell people. I always tell people too, to think about what you enjoy doing. I had a federal clerkship, and it was the best possible training I could get. By far one of the best experiences you could get as a brand new lawyer. I can't say that I love researching and writing all day long. I like interacting with people and going to court. I am e working with clients, and you don't get to do that as a clerk. For me, it was a great experience that I'm grateful that I had, but I don't see myself as being a career clerk because that type of work isn't what I enjoy doing every day.
“Do you like brief writing? Do you like research? Do you like drafting contracts? I don't like contracts.” For me being a transactional lawyer would not have been a good fit because I find that terribly boring. You have to find what you enjoy doing when you get excited, as that intern got at the public defender's office. She's probably going to court and getting a ton of courtroom experience, which for some people might be like their worst nightmare, people who are meant to do transactional or don't want to go to court. You have to find what you enjoy doing. Even if it's trial and error, that's okay. A cool part of being a lawyer is that you get to do a lot of different things, and they are all under this big umbrella we call practicing law.
There are many different things. There's something you don't like. There's some other facet of the law that you can do that but you might find it very interesting. That's a good point about practically because there are a lot of things in your head, you say, “This sounds like something I would enjoy doing,” but in the real world, it's composed of all these different things that you don't enjoy doing. It's important that you go and get the experience. It's not just a theoretical job. It's something that you know what's involved with it, and you like doing the things that are involved with it. That's a good, pragmatic, bit of advice.
I wanted to talk about the clerkship because I agree with you about getting skills and getting the best training is important. I feel that way when I teach in an appellate clinic, and not all of those students are going to become appellate lawyers. In fact, very few of them do but all of them get good research, writing, and oral advocacy skills. All of those are very helpful in whatever kind of law you end up doing. It's great training. Certainly, the clerkship is in that variety. Also, you get a very close relationship with the judge and the fellow clerks, which is very nice.
I saw all types of lawyers, all types of skills of lawyers, and then you get to talk to the judge about it. The judge and the other clerks liked what their observations, the attorneys, and what did they like. What they didn’t like? What frustrates and impresses them? That’s important both to see what they see from brief writing and in the courtroom. Sitting through trials was amazing because as a lawyer, especially a junior attorney, unless you are in criminal court, which I was not a criminal lawyer, you don't get to see a lot of trials. You are lucky in your first five years to go to trial yourself.
I sat through a number of trials and was able to observe and see the good, bad, and ugly with lawyers’ oral advocacy skills. I could see incredibly creative and brilliant lawyers doing these amazing oral arguments, opening statements or closing statements, whatever the case may be, then I would see some that I could barely stay awake in the courtroom. I was so bored to tears. You learn a lot from those observations.
You saw the whole gamut. Thank you so much for joining the show. It has been interesting, and I love learning about the beginnings of your nonprofit. I look forward to seeing where it goes in the future and all the good that I know you are going to do. I usually close with a few lightning-round questions. I'm going to ask you a few of those if you are open to it. The first question is, which talent would you most like to have but do not?
Remember people's names. I'm terrible with names, and it's such an important thing, especially in my role.
Do you remember faces? You remember the person but can't put the name with the person.
I remember names when I could see a list of people and pick out names, people I know or something, and I can see faces and be like, “I know exactly who you are. I know how we met. I remember we first met.”
All the details but the full name, and I have exactly the same issue. It's hard because you were like, “I can tell you all about you.” I remember all of it. I love that answer. That would be great to have that. For what in life do you feel most grateful?
I’m grateful for my wife, who is someone who supports me in doing this and holds me accountable for my own self-care, which is important to be able to do this work to make sure that you prioritize yourself because you can get lost in all of it. It's something I'm not very good at. She's helped teach me that. I'm grateful for the opportunity to do work I truly love with people that I love.
One of the great gifts of being the Head of the organization is that I have been able to build a team around me. I am grateful because I get to work with the most amazing humans and clients and do something meaningful. It's quite a gift, and sometimes, some days are hard. I can lose sight of that. I try to come back to my why. “Why am I doing this, and what am I grateful for?” I'm grateful to be able to do this work and to work with amazing people.
Everybody wants to have meaning in their work and to feel that they are making a difference in the world. You definitely have that in spades with your work and organization. It's a blessing to have that opportunity in an area that is meaningful to you. That's the key. Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you invite as a dinner party guest?
Alive or dead, it would be RBG. I almost had the chance to meet her as opposed to being sworn into the Supreme Court in May 2020. The only reason I was doing it was that I didn't have a case pending or a reason, it was purely because there was an award ceremony with the justices. I was like, “If I get to do this award ceremony, I will get to meet RBG.” It was May 2020. Sadly, that obviously didn't happen. I still am hurt that I didn't get to meet her but I do have my RBG on my desk.
Last question. What is your motto, if you have one?
I have two. 1) “The universe always provides,” which has very much been true in my experience with Free to Thrive, even when I start to doubt anything. I must come back and remember that the universe always provides because it always does. It always gives you what you need, no matter what. That helps me stay positive and grounded. 2) “Fake it until you make it,” which is what I have been doing this entire time. Somehow I'm still here, and it's going well, so I guess I'm doing all right. Oftentimes, I’m going back to that Imposter syndrome. We are scared to do something that we've never done before. The reality is that you would never do anything new if you didn't find a way to overcome that fear.
It's fair to say that, at least at some level, you've made it, and you've done a great job in creating a needed nonprofit that does important work. Congratulations. Thank you so much for sharing your story, journey, and also your organization's journey. I hope that's instructive to people who might want to do that themselves in some area that is not well served. I hope that they will be encouraged to do that because there are a lot of barriers to not doing it and including internal barriers. I’m thinking, “I don’t know how to do all that,” but you've shown me the way. I appreciate you joining the show.
Thank you for having me. It has definitely been an honor to be here, and among you've interviewed so many incredible people. I'm honored to be included among them.
Thank you so much.