Thoughts on litigation, leadership, and life
Summer schedules are full, and finding a few days for a conference can feel like one more thing on the calendar. But the State Bar Convention has become a family tradition, and every year it is a reminder that showing up, reconnecting with old colleagues, and stepping outside your comfort zone is what moves a career and a profession forward.
By June 30, every Arizona lawyer has to report fifteen CLE hours. When the deadline gets close, the tempting question is how to finish them fastest. I used to ask it too, until I realized the more useful question is what I actually want to learn.
One of the most important parts of being a litigator is evaluating cases honestly. Not just when a client first walks through the door, but throughout the life of the case. Like a poker player reading the odds as new cards are revealed, good lawyers know that sometimes the most valuable advice you can give is that it is time to walk away.
After more than twenty years of practicing law, one of the things that has always helped me answer the question of why I do this is volunteering. Law school teaches you how to think. Your job teaches you how to practice. But volunteering teaches you something different.
One of the places professionalism comes up most often is in discovery and requests for extensions of deadlines. The best lawyers manage to advocate hard for their clients while still being someone opposing counsel and judges trust and respect.
A Mother's Day weekend at the ballpark after a hard week at work. On how kids pull you out of your own head without even trying, and what a bobbled play between the pitcher and first baseman has in common with the part of practice that lingers after you go home.
A line from The Devil Wears Prada 2 stayed with me. Society still gets uncomfortable when a woman works long hours because she loves it. Here is why choosing work that brings you purpose is not a failure of motherhood, it is a fuller life.
My first supervising attorney told me I would need to be more prepared than anyone else in the room. It wasn't soft, and it wasn't entirely fair, but it was honest. Two decades in, here is what that advice and the support system around it actually built.
A conversation with female associates at the office turned into a request for the real stories of working parenthood. Not the polished ones. Not even the ones that wrap up with a lesson. Just the real ones, where nothing really gets resolved.
Four days at a conference with women trial lawyers who have been practicing 15+ years. The thread running through every story: they put in the work. Not just the expected work but the extra time, especially at the beginning.
My husband is Jewish, I'm Catholic, so when Passover and Easter fall in the same week, we lean all the way in. A full, imperfect, very good week, and a simple reset coming out of it.
Those of us who are planners are especially prone to mistaking preparation for certainty. A weekend reminder that the most important skill isn't executing the plan, it's knowing when to change it.
Every March our family fills out NCAA brackets with great confidence and very little actual information. What a busted bracket has in common with a verdict you did not see coming.
Strength in women takes many forms. This Women's History Month, I'm thinking about the women who didn't just cheer me on, but who challenged me to think harder about what I actually wanted.
A mom, a litigator, twenty-plus years in the courtroom. This is where I am going to put what the work actually teaches you, the things that are harder to put in a bio.
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