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“If You Don’t Know How, Learn.” Lessons from A Million Miles Away
Last week after an especially jolting 5k (pro tip: don’t decide to run a 5k and then fail to train when you have asthma), I decided to take it easy for the day and watch A Million Miles Away. oh. my. god. I was a sobbing mess. It’s a must see, if you’re Latino, if you feel connected to migrant farmworkers and their story, or if you simply want to see a story about perseverance and determination. AMMA is a biopic of the first Latino to go into space, Jose Hernandez. He grew up as a migrant child farmworker, earned a degree in engineering and went on to join NASA,…
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What Flamin’ Hot Teaches Us About Success
First, if you haven’t seen Flamin’ Hot—you must! It’s a great American story and Eva Longoria knocks it out of the park with her directing. I’m probably going to watch it a few times because there were so many moments in the movie that resonated deeply and symbolism that’s worth re-watching. But when I was watching it, the piece that jumped out at me like a huge neon sign on How to Succeed happens towards the end of the movie. Not when Ricky pushes himself to be the best employee despite his circumstances; not when he gets the courage to advocate for himself and his idea; not when he recognizes that…
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Here to Stay: Balancing Social Media with Your Legal Career
Bloomberg’s latest article discusses the pitfalls of Biglaw attorneys on TikTok. It discusses how slow firms are to respond and how conflicted they are with associates being active on social media. I’ve been seeing more and more legal content on TikTok and when a recent Cravath associate opted to resign then to stop creating content (content that seems to be very lucrative), I couldn’t help but notice how far we’ve come! fyi, Cravath is the most white shoe of white shoe firms–if any firm is going to have a conservative stance on social media it’s going to be these type of firms. In 2015, I wrote a social media dos…
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Big Law is Horrible…Or is it? What the Latest Big Law Drama Can Teach Us
This week a slide from an alleged presentation by Paul Hastings dropped and boy…did people have a lot to say. Whether or not it was actually part of the presentation, the overall consensus was the Big Law is horrible and this is just another example. And I get it—seeing the slide by itself and how it prioritizes work above everything seems, at the very least, a little unhealthy while others may see it and think those expectations just come with the job. There is a widening gap in the way people approach work with a younger generation being more attuned with their rights and pushing for a more tenable work/life…
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What, Like it’s Fancy? Understanding Prestige in the Legal Industry
I spoke recently on tiktok about not grasping how “prestigious” it was to work for the governor’s legal team when I was in law school. It just didn’t set on how other folks may view that as important or how I could leverage that into another opportunity. I just had no clue! And for a lot of us first-gen, low income kids who grow up detached/excluded from professional spaces, who don’t know any attorneys or people in the field, we often fail to see prestige. Why is that important? Because, as always, the legal industry loves its systems of power. Being able to create hierarchies even within the industry means…
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Who are You to Judge? Managing Feelings Around Clients
You’re not going to like your clients. Well, you’ll like some of them but more than likely you’ll have a few that you just don’t like. It could be because of their personality or because of their decisions, or because they zap your energy, or they’re downright rude…clients are humans and we normally don’t always love every human we engage with. But when you’re representing them, you’re duty to your client requires you figuring out how to overcome feelings of dislike. Now to be clear, there’s no duty to like your client. But when you dislike someone or find yourself judging their behavior/character, it impacts your work and that is…
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Adjusting to Office Work: What Every First Gen Needs to Know
As summer is getting closer and closer, I’m thinking a lot about my summer experiences in law school. My 1L summer was also the first long-term exposure I had a professional/office setting and I’m so grateful it was in a small social service agency, focused on Latino community because it let me “ease in” to those office standards and it didn’t feel so jarring. Looking back at my other experience, I do think one reason I always felt out of place in the other internships—and thus, didn’t really make the most of my experiences—was because I felt like I was playing a role of a professional rather than being one.…
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Managing Angry & Volatile Clients
One thing they don’t teach you in law school is how to respond when you think a client is going to harm you. Hopefully you never need to know that, but reading a recent article of an immigration attorney who was stabbed by their client, it dawned on me how necessary it is to talk about managing experiences with volatile clients in order to keep yourself safe. First, I don’t want to talk about this to instill fear in people or make lawyering seem overly dangerous. However, in one study of 22 states, it found that up to 46.5% of registered attorneys had been threatened or assaulted. It helps no…
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Two Years Later…
Two years go by so fast that you don’t even notice how things change. I want to take some time to reflect on the past two years (times BC) because I think it’s important and also because, in general, people are so quick to dismiss the trauma and the shift we’ve experienced and that’s not healthy, bestie. First, and most important, there are so many people whose lives were upended because of this illness (to put it lightly). And as a country we’re really quick to overlook the loss of millions of people gone and what that means. I don’t have any solutions on how to make us more empathetic…
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Best Way to Calm Nerves When First Working With Clients
Ok, you’re a licensed attorney, you have a real lawyer job, with a client case and everything! But now you actually have to talk to clients-on your own and sometimes they don’t trust you because you look so young. Or they expect you to know about some random issue that has nothing to do with your practice area. How can you present a cool, calm, collected persona so that your clients trust you when you know there is so much you don’t know? First, take a deep breath. The good thing is that knowing there’s a lot you don’t know is the first step in good client counseling. It’s good…