Episode 63: Sonia Escobio O'Donnell
Trial and Appellate Litigator; Former Second in Command of Miami U.S. Attorneys’ Office
00:51:34
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Show Notes
M.C. Sungaila welcomes Sonia Escobio O'Donnell, Partner at Sonia Escobio O’Donnell P.A., and the former Chief of Appeals and Head Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Miami U.S. Attorneys' office at a time when few women held such roles. Sonia shares how she helped foster the hiring of more diverse attorneys in the U.S. Attorney's office, and how her judicial clerkship and relationship with the judge she worked for, as well as her work with other significant mentors, impacted her career. Join in the conversation to learn from Sonia’s experiences.
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Relevant episode links:
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About Sonia Escobio O'Donnell:
Sonia Escobio O'Donnell
Sonia Escobio O’Donnell has experience both in government and private practice in litigation and appellate. She was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of Florida from 1979 until 1995 and has been in private practice litigating complex federal cases and writing and arguing appeals since 1995. During the sixteen years at the U.S. Attorney’s office, Ms. O’Donnell tried cases, criminal and civil. She worked on hundreds of appeals and supervised one of the largest appellate divisions in the country covering the range of federal law. In private practice since 1995 she litigated in federal trial and appellate courts including representing financial institutions in class actions, tribes in environmental cases and Indian law and constitutional and international law. Since 2017, after she opened her own practice, O’Donnell Law Firm, she has continued to focus on litigation and appeals, most recently the state court guardianship case of Mrs. Henry Ford II and the probate and trusts case that followed. Her firm recently reversed two criminal convictions, a bank fraud case where the sentence was 40 years, and a case where the issue was jurisdiction on the high seas.
Transcript
In this episode, I'm very pleased to welcome Sonia Escobio O'Donnell. She is such a wonderful friend of mine, but also someone with a wide-ranging and amazing career from very high-ranking positions in the US Attorney's Office in Miami, Florida to large law firm practice to now her own practice. Before we cover all the interesting things you've done in your career, I wanted to talk first about how you came to the law and how it is that you decided to become a lawyer, and what interested you in doing that to begin with?
This is going to be a very funny answer, but it's the truth. I was a Journalism major at the University of Florida. When I was young, I always loved Perry Mason. This is the truth. I was born in Cuba, and that was my favorite program. I used to love to see him on trial. When I finished, and I was interviewing in newspapers to become a writer, which I always loved to do, I thought to myself, "I should try being a lawyer," and I applied to law school in Florida. I always thought, "Maybe I'll do journalism or law," but once you go to law school, you're hooked. You're in.
That was it. You're not the only one with a journalism background that we've had on the show. Kalpana Srinivasan, who's the Co-Managing Partner of Susman Godfrey, started out doing journalism and saying, "I could also do this legal thing," and now has a great trial lawyer career. There's a link there. For you, a link between journalism and the kind of law, you are a great trial lawyer as well, but also an excellent appellate lawyer. Writing is very important to that work. There's crossover in that regard.
You have to like writing if you're an appellate lawyer because there is a lot of it and not just in appellate briefs, but motion practice. I came to appellate because I clerked for a Federal Fifth Circuit Judge, Judge Fay. It was the former Fifth Circuit before it split. It was in New Orleans, the whole entire Fifth Circuit, which was six states. Now it's 3, and the 3 was in the Eleventh now. I went into the US Attorney's Office very young, right after my clerkship, and also pregnant. At that time, in 1979, that was a little bit not so usual. I was only the third woman in the US Attorney's Office.
They were very nice. I started trying cases and I did a few trials, a lot of hearings, jury trials, and then I had my baby and there was an opening in the appellate division, which I love writing briefs anyway. I decided, "Could I do half trials, half briefs?" I love doing briefs. Trials were fun, but they did take me away from home. If you have a trial the next day, you can take your record home or whatever. You have your witnesses in the office and everything else. It was difficult to do trial work in the US Attorney's Office and have a baby.
At that time, there wasn't any such thing as maternity leave or anything like that. You had a few weeks of your annual leave and some of your sick leave and I had to start it. That's when I went to the appellate division. There were only 30 of us then. They're 250 now, so 30 assistant US Attorneys. I went with this woman who is the only person in appeals who became my mentor for my whole life, and I adored her. I wrote an article about her in the ABA Journal at one point.
That's one of the threads that have come through different interviews on the show, too. It’s different times, as you said, in 1979. That's a very different time for women in the law and women in practice and in law school. There still weren't that many. As you mentioned, there were not that many in the US Attorney's Office where you went to. How did you decide to go to the US Attorney's Office? Let me go back first to the clerkship before we go beyond that. You clerked for a federal appellate judge and what was that work like and how did that work or that relationship with the judge impact your career overall?
There were a number of wonderful judges then in the Fifth Circuit, but he was unbelievably wonderful. He just passed away. He was on the bench until the end. Everyone who knows him will tell you, he is not only so incredibly bright and hardworking, but the nicest human being you could ever want ever. Every morning I would go in, and of course, you're a little afraid. He's a Fifth Circuit judge in the Federal Court and you don't know what to do.
I would go to him in the morning, "Good morning, your honor. How are you?" "Couldn't be better." This went on and on. I thought, "Is this for real? Is he like this all the time?" He was like that all the time. He was happy with life and a wonderful wife. I got to know his wife really well. He was very close to his law clerks. It was wonderful and after that it's downhill.
My clerkships were a very special relationship too, and amazing mentoring. I felt, at least in my case, that I learned how to be a lawyer. I was trained by the judges that I worked with even more than law school. It's a lifelong relationship and an extended relationship with the other clerks as well, which was nice.
I remember in the beginning because here I am out of law school and I figured I could argue any side. You're young. He would get your assigned cases and he would say, "You had already looked at it. What do you think should the outcome be?" I would say, "Judge, what do you want it to be?" He would say, "No, what is it?" He clearly wasn't one of those judges that invented things to get through an end. He would just follow the law, but it was so funny.
That taught me to stick with the law, but creativity was good. Pressing and asking and all that, he was great with that. He was a great mentor and so was the appellate chief for a long time in the US Attorney's Office, a woman, and at that time, there were only a few of us. She was tough as nails. Everyone respected her and she always had your back which was important. I was really lucky.
The day before the argument, you better know what your argument will be.
That's not very common that you have that back-to-back like that and have that support. You made an important point, too, in terms of maybe needing to adjust things in your career as other things are going on in your life. A growing family and all of this, sometimes you need to assess what is going to work between all of the various parts of my life.
That's a choice. I am very close to many assistants in The US Attorneys. I was there sixteen years and there are some that are my very best friends. Some are men, but as we grew, we added a lot of women. Different people made different choices. I have friends who chose to do very sophisticated criminal litigation, which meant many nights in the office and an incredible sacrifice to their families. Many of them had children.
What ends up happening is sometimes when you can't be there, now appellate isn't necessarily, obsessive anyway. When the children were little, what I would do is I would take the records, and at that time, they were all hard copies. Sometimes they were nine months of trial. You could take a little bit at a time every night. You could spend a couple of hours with the children, then you would be up until 2:00 AM reading, but you would be in your house. I had the original work from home. I went to the office during the day, but I didn't have to stay through the night. If you had a trial, when you have witnesses the next day, you don't have a choice.
There's some flexibility in that, at least that it's more portable and you can do it at different times.
Once I trade-off, though, because the sittings usually at that time would start in New Orleans, because when I left, it was still the Fifth Circuit, and then it was Atlanta. Sometimes I did the whole week of arguments because, at that time, the trial attorneys weren't arguing a lot of their cases, so we were arguing them. You did spend five days a month away from your family. It's never perfect.
That's a lot to do to have that many arguments in a row as well. For appellate lawyers, we like to not have the back-to-back like that.
You had no choice. One time, a judge was on the panel. I had 3 in one 1, two back-to-back. I got one, sat down, got up again, and then there was one in between, and then the third one. The judge said, "Mrs. O'Donnell, the government got its money's worth out of you today." You get used to it. I couldn't do that now. When you're young, you adjust. Assistant US Attorneys have back-to-back trials, and other people do too, but in government, you do have that schedule.
Still, that's pretty good, that many arguments that in one day.
Young people can do that.
We'll go to the argument then in terms of, do you have any particular tips for oral argument for people arguing appeals from the experience that you've had, especially in federal court?
First of all, this is me. What I always did was reread the record. It didn't matter when I wrote the brief. This one that I did, I reread the record twice and it was a long record. It was two weeks of trial, a long record and a lot of pleadings. There are 14,000 pages in the record. It was big. I always reread the record. I always reread the transcripts and I still either bend the page or put a clip and write something. I will go back to that later. After that, I read the briefs again, for I don't know how many times. I then go back and read all the cases, so by then, I have all the cases hard copy.
I sit down and read all the cases. Even if they're in alphabetical order, it doesn't matter. I want to see what all the cases say. I then start to write out my argument and this goes on for days. I start looking at the record back to, "What about this? What about that?" Things come to you as you're writing, to me anyway. I start putting the pages. Sometimes I pull the pages. Two days before the argument, all the cases were underlined and had notes, but I didn't take them all. I only take 2 or 3 cases with me up to the podium because you're not going to be able to look at them anymore.
By the day before the argument, you better know what your argument is going to be. The night before the argument, you have to be Catholic to understand this, but it's like the Holy Spirit comes upon you. You're going to be facing these three judges and they're going to ask you all these questions, and you don't know what they're going to be. A lot of times, they're off the wall what they ask you.
Not off the wall that they're wrong. It's just that I didn't expect them. If you prepare enough, you always know, maybe not the exact question, but what the problems are or what they're going to focus on. Maybe not the exact question, but you should by the time you get up. I've never been surprised about the questions that are asked. I've been surprised about the interest in one thing and not the other.
I've been surprised that I thought I had a case that we're going to trial on, but I reversed a criminal case, and I thought that judges were surely going to be interested in these two constitutional issues that were clearly an error and they weren't. They were interested in the denial of a continuance because that's a constitutional error for too.
In this case, what happened is the attorney who was court-appointed didn't have time to prepare and it was a huge case with a lot of paper. I somehow thought, "That's an interesting issue, but there are so many other issues.” They referred to the conviction of the co-defendant and they did all these other things. That's what they wanted. When that happens, even if you have what you think you want to say, you go with what they want.
They're deciding the case, so you want to go with what they're interested in.
That's what they're interested in and you know it's reversible error, so you go with their questions and then you try to get back. I did try to get back. I did mention the other things, but they went with that. They're not always that clear. In fact, it's unusual that they're that clear. The other thing is I never, ever read an argument. By the time I get up, I only have an outline. Sometimes the last one I put under the outline because if I go blank completely. I can go back and read it, but it's never happened.
I was going to say that it's very brave of you to go up with the outline, but for that fear of something that hasn't happened, but could, you want to have it there.
I put that underneath, but I've never had to do it because there's not a lot of time and not a lot of chance to go back and read something.
There are often lots of questions and lots of things going on, so you don't have the time.
Even if they're not questions, I love it when they have questions because it's the worst having to go through your stuff because you want to know what they're worried about. You always want to be looking at them. That's why you don't want to be reading because you want to see their expressions, how they react because that's how you go. You go with them to whatever they want to be answered. They're the judges.
Follow their lead, where they're going. I've heard from appellate judges in the past and on this show too. If asked, they'll say, "Answer my question.” Please answer my question because I'm going to be thinking about it if you don't answer it. I'm going to wonder why you didn't and what else is going on. It's hard to concentrate on other things until that question gets answered that someone's concerned about.
The other thing I do, which is funny and weird, and it shows my psychosis, but I always write out my name. When I have my outline, I always put my name because I say, "As long as I don't forget my name.”
If you know nothing, ask questions.
I do the same thing. I write across the top of my name and who I represent, in case I forget that.
When I was an assistant, I always represented The United States. It's not hard to forget, but I write the name of the client. I thought I was the only one. As long I get through that, I'm okay.
If I blank out, I can at least look down and see that. Usually, once you get started, if something like that happens, it starts rolling, but you need the cue to keep going. You were in the US Attorney's Office for sixteen years. Were you always in the appellate division or do you have other roles after that too?
I started in trials. I then went to appeals and then I still tried cases every year or two, but they weren't huge. One time, it was big, a two-month trial. About ten years in, we got a new US attorney and then I became the executive assistant, which is right under the US attorney. I did that for a few years until he left. That position was incredibly fun because my thing to him was I still want to practice law. I still was working on the Noriega case, not the actual trial, but on the part where they were all the motions and the issues of DEA listened to the tape between Noriega and his counsel. It's just like those constitutional issues and things came up like that.
I worked on that and I supervised the case. It was incredible. It was a judicial corruption case. We bugged the state judicial offices and they prosecuted about 4 or 5 judges for corruption. All those supervisions and getting to work on that were fun. One of the most rewarding things for me that I did as an executive assistant was, I was in charge of hiring. We hired 100 people. We were 100 and we doubled the office to 200 because we had a very strong US attorney and he said, "All the drugs that are coming here and all the crime is here, we can't do it with 100 people.”
Finally, he had a press conference and he forced DOD to give him 100 people. He said to me here, "Hire." One of the things that he said was, "The office needs to be more diverse," and I agreed. We diversified that office as it had never been. It was great. The people that we hired were all fantastic and they're all doing amazing. I still see them all the time. There are judges. They run the County Attorney's Offices. All of them are doing well.
Many of the 100 stayed and became career prosecutors, but it was rewarding to see the office still be great, but change. The US Attorney's Offices, especially when I started, were not very diverse. I was a Cuban. They didn't know what to do with me. They probably didn't even know I was Cuban because I was O'Donnell.
I was going to say, "I don't know," many may not have known that.
It's important for a government office and it was something rewarding to hire and to be able to hire so many great people.
To have that impact in the long-term for the office. That's a massive amount of hiring.
It was a community ultimately. It was one of those things that weren't just that we drew from the community because we were hiring 100 people to a pretty important office. People applied from everywhere and we had everything. We had people who were federal law clerks, people who worked in the services, the Navy or Army as attorneys or judges and from everywhere, also big firms. A lot of people left a lot of money to come work in the US Attorney's Office. It was fun. Two of them that we hired became the US Attorney later.
Of the same district?
From the same group or the same 100.
In that executive assistant role, that's more leadership within the organization and within the office. Do you have any tips for leadership from your time in that role?
Besides hiring, the executive assistant has to do a lot of stuff that leaders have to do, but they're not that pleasant, which is if somebody does something wrong, it's up to you to talk to them or decide, or recommend to the US Attorney what should be done. I did not find that to be a pleasant part of the job, but it was a part of the job. I was never one of these people that wants to fire people. I always was, "Let's see if we can work this out." Mostly it's not something horrible. It's just something that happened. That part is not pleasant, but you have to do it.
The other part is, and this happened more often than you think, people start fighting. One chief doesn't like that the other one took his computer or whatever it was. They get into fights about, "I want this person,” or all that stuff. You have to do that too. You have to talk it out. I remember one time. A person heads one of the Miami offices and became a judge. He's a bright person. He had written a brief and I was already an executive assistant. One of the people on appeal, a young person, didn't like something he wrote and said something nasty and left it when I gave it back to him then take out the note. I had to make sure everybody was appeased.
That's the thing you have to do in any leadership position. There are going to be disagreements. You have to get people to agree with you. What I'm saying is there's a decision that has to be made and the decisions were made by the US Attorney. In government, there's one person and he makes the decisions. If people don't like the decision, it was my job to try to get them to understand and maybe agree or at least accept. You need to convince and smooth out. It doesn't always work out great, but most of the time, it did.
There's some persuasion involved in that as well and working with different personalities and things like that.
The other component of it is, when you're working, especially in an office like that, like any corporation or anything, the person you're working for is, for me, the US Attorney and he is the person that I had the loyalty to. That's the person I represented. Even though I have been in the office and knew a lot of people, I couldn't say to people, "You're going to get this." It's hard to be up there too. It's hard, especially if you've been part of the group, because then we'll think you're going to leak things or say things. People think, "Maybe they're a stuck up or anything," but it isn't. It's just you have a job and your job is not to say anything.
You have responsibilities. At one point, you decided to leave the US Attorney's Office and went into private practice. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. You worked at a smaller firm and then a larger firm.
I left the US Attorney, the one that I was the executive assistant for. I waited two years because when the next US Attorney, I asked to go to civil so that I could learn civil. I had not done civil appeals. I was there for two years, but I had already decided to leave. I then left with him and we had a firm. There were three Assistant US Attorneys and then him.
There was another person who had not been in a system, but he did like real estate or something. We were the litigators. One of our big clients wants to make a tribe of Indians. We did a lot of Indian law. We did a lot of litigation because we had gaming litigation and a lot of environmental law. They were all federal cases, thank goodness, because that's what we wanted to be. That's all we knew.
I did that for about five years and then a friend of mine was going to be my expert witness in one of the cases that I won, a Clean Water Act case. He looked at the records and then he said, "We need you in our firm." It was a much bigger firm. There are 60 attorneys. "Would you like to come and talk to us?" I said, "Okay." I came from a big US Attorney's Office and then we were little and the US Attorney, whom I love dearly and still do, never want it to grow after. He wanted to be five. It was exhausting. We had no associates. I used to have to do my own jeopardizing and own paralegal. It was just us.
I still continue to work with him. I spent half the time in his office anyway, because we were friends. He loved it because then he was general counsel for the tribe. He didn't have to worry about having all these people that had to do things, and then for some reason, at some point, there was no work, then he was responsible for all those people. He used us when he wanted to, like if it were his firm. His firm worked on everything, but when they needed help or anything, they were free to call us, and they did. That worked out for many years.
You can give people experience, but you can never make them smarter.
It's interesting because you had the criminal experience and the federal court. You knew the federal court, but then you're learning whole new subject areas and the Indian law is a very complex area. There's a lot of change there in that regard.
Yes, and very scary because it wasn't even so much in Indian law. A new area of the law doesn't bother me that much because you can learn it, especially something like an Indian law because the statutory and the case is complex, but you can understand it. What killed me was the environmental law, which I had never done because it has to do with science. That was my least favorite subject.
At first, I remember I had this case, the one I won. I got summary judgment and the Clean Water Act case, ten parts per billion of phosphorus. I start to sweat and thinking, "I don't even know what this is and I have to enforce this." I said to myself, "You work your way through the case." That was a difficult case because that was my first one because we were so small. It was only me. There were eight lawyers on the other side, including a DOJ lawyer.
When I had depositions, there were eight of them and they would all go to lunch and laugh and everything else, and I was alone. I have with me one of the environmental persons for the trial, but not an attorney. We did that for a whole week. I was so scared because, in the US Attorney's Office, you don't even do depositions. The civil cases that I had didn't have that many. I said to myself, "Ask the questions. It doesn't matter if you look dumb.” That's the worry always. "You're going to be dumb because you don't know anything, so just ask the questions."
They will have to educate you even if it's the other side, and they did, and we won, summary judgment on a Clean Water Act case. I used what they said, but during the deposition, the attorneys, all these people, knew all this stuff because they have been litigating this. They were experts in this, not just experts in environmental law, but experts in this particular area, pollution in the Everglades, and all that. No question about that and I knew nothing. The moral of the story is if you know nothing, ask the questions. Prepare if you can and then ask the questions. I thought, “From here, I’ll continue to learn,” but as it worked out, because of the writing, I knew how to put the things together. The judge granted summary judgment.
Also, putting together your writing skills from the appellate experience, but on the other part, it is a bit of faith and continuing to move forward. In asking the questions like that, you were truly curious because you weren't as versed in various things. Maybe people answered it more like, "Let me explain it to you."
I think that happened. They were expert witnesses and very good at what they did, but they were also government witnesses. They weren't as biased, meaning they were more willing to say, "Yes, if you go this high, you could pollute." They were more willing to answer and not twist things too. That could have been part of it too. It's just the experience of fright and fear.
There are so many things like that. You're doing it for the first time and courage and bravery sometimes are moving forward. It's not that you're not afraid. You're moving forward despite being afraid.
What are you going to do?
There are not many options. Sit down, give up or move forward. There is no option in that setting other than moving forward. As you said, just ask the questions. That's one of the things I like about appellate law. You do get to learn new areas of the law with each case. It's fun to change that up and not have it all be the same subject matter all the time. You have to be a quick study. You got a good start on that and in new areas of the law there. Now, you have your own firm and you are still doing a mix of things. You're doing criminal defense work, but also some civil cases as well. Can you talk about some of the cases worked on?
After Jorden Burt, which was the 60-person firm that I went to, they did a lot of class action defense and things like that. I do work on some of that with them and other things, but I also had the tribe. There was a lot of work then. They did financial institution work and stuff like that. That was a new area also for me. I had not done class action, but that's not as difficult to learn once you get the hang of it, what you need and things like that. The other thing is that there are a lot of associates who are brilliant and know everything and I've been doing it and you get used to having people do things for you. We then merged with another big firm and I was there for a few years.
I then decided to go on my own. It was a little scary, but it was at this point in my life, I went with a friend, who didn't do anything that I did. She was in real estate, but she already had an extra office. She's a lifelong friend. I went to high school with her. We had decided maybe we would do things together and things like that. I went in there and was there for a few years. I did some criminal cases and a contract case, and all sorts of civil cases, and things like that.
The bigger thing that came in was I got involved in representing the daughter of Mrs. Henry Ford and we ended up going for guardianship because we alleged she was being abused. That was two years. We argued the appeal and it's not final yet. There are some issues with it, but we did get her declared incompetent, which was fought very hard. It was fought for like a year and a half and that was not challenged on appeal. We also got a guardian. They wanted him to be able to go by the documents that we said were influenced. We felt that guardianship would be something the court could regulate, so we did get that.
Unfortunately, we argued that it shouldn't be him because we alleged that he was abusing her, but the court-appointed him anyway and she died with him as guardian. My client was never able to see her mother for two years because at that point, he decided he was in charge of everything and he didn't let anybody in the family in. That was sad. This is all public record with a lot of pleadings. That was an interesting case that I never expected to do because it was in state court, which is not necessarily my forum. I'd done state appeals and a few state cases, but not anything like this. This was big.
I did talk my son into joining the firm. He then went to law school but didn't want to be a lawyer, then he found it interesting. I hooked him because it was a very interesting case. He came in with me and then started doing some of the criminal cases. My daughter had done criminal cases with me. Right now, she's doing other thing like compliance work for a corporation, and stuff like that.
I've been doing that for a few years and I have a criminal case coming up and a number of civil appeals in state court. To me, it's okay because it's not that different. It's a little different, but it's not that different. That's been a whirlwind that case because it was a lot for a small firm. I did get a local attorney who does only as states and trusts and guardianship to join us. She's been with us through the whole thing because that's very specialized.
That work is very specialized, so it's good to have someone who knows that.
We learned an incredible amount and we feel like now we're experts on it, but honestly, you can take a trial like that. I was doing the trial. It wasn't appellate. I wasn't sitting and writing. I was doing the trial. I was doing witnesses and depositions, none of which I like that much, closing arguments and everything.
That experience in the US Attorney’s Office gave you both trial and appellate experience that you could adapt to different settings and you might prefer one over the other, but you can do both.
It gave me enough to be able to do it now. If somebody were to ask me, "Are you a trial lawyer?" My answer would be, "No, I'm an appellate lawyer. I can do a trial, but that's not how I see myself."
Do you have any advice for newer lawyers or law students who might be interested either in US Attorney's Office or now you're your own private practice? Any advice for anyone interested in those?
The US Attorney's Office Is Fantastic. It's very difficult to get a job there out of law school. I came from a federal clerkship and even that was difficult. I got lucky. At that time, he was the only circuit court judge in Miami that had chambers in Miami. They had a lot of appeals and then everything came together for me.
You need experience. That's what I knew.
When I was hired, I did hire straight from clerkship when I was hiring 100 people because I believe in clerks. I always used to say to people, "You can give them experience, but you can never make them smarter." It's okay to get somebody smart that doesn't know because you can train them and they learn quickly. I did get pushed back by people without experience. I was limited to a certain amount. We had a great training program. We did establish one, but so a clerkship is great and training in large firms can be a pain, but they also are very good associates. If you get the right mentor, you could be lucky in a firm.
Doing community service and meeting new people is rewarding.
Mine is too small of a firm, at this point, but a smaller firm, you don't get the same training. You learn, but you don't get the same training and you don't have the same resources. I happened to have a bias towards either government, the US Attorney's Office, DOJ, or some government or a large firm if you can get hired a good firm. Even not huge, maybe 40 attorneys, but big enough that they have the ability to give you resources to train you and send you places to get trained. To me, that's the more valuable experience.
Some people love going to a small farm and doing everything. I feel like it's more structured for me. It’s always been better. I don't know anything other than that. When I started at the US Attorney's Office, as I said, they didn't know what to do with me and I had no training. The first week I was there, they gave me a stack of indictments and they said, "Go and indict it." It wasn't even an attorney who told me this. It was the secretary. I said, "Where's the grand jury?" I knew the grand jury because I had clerked. I had read a lot of government briefs, but I didn't know what to do.
She said, "It's over there." You had to walk a block or something. It was in another building. I stood in front of the door. Somebody pointed me to it and I was like, "What do I do with this? I don't know what to do." Another assistant saw me and he came in with me, and he did a couple of them like, "Call the agent in and ask the agent his name, this and that.” Let the agent talk and then, "Any questions?" "No."
You go out and you hand him a ham sandwich. They had no training, but they did. I say they had no training as far as in the office but they did send you to DOJ for a two-week trial training. They sent you for all sorts of training, so there was a training. It’s the same thing with firms. Firms will train you and they'll send you to places to get training and things like that.
Also, you're involved with community and bar activities, ABA, which is how we met. Also, you served on other boards in your community. How do those things contribute to your practice, professional life, and overall that experience?
The ABA and AIDC are the professional ones. It's been great because I've met a lot of people and I've seen a lot of panels and been in panels. You get all of these great writings and all this stuff. I did the book board and you get to see all the books for the ABA and it's been great. Also, the community is completely not even tied at all to law.
I've done the opera. I was on the board in that and it is beautiful. The women are great. They love to do all these beautiful parties and all this stuff, and it's great. I don't do that much anymore, but I'm still on it because I'm a life member. It was fun when you're young. You have more energy to go and do the stuff that you have to do. As you become older, and then you've done all this stuff and you're a life member go to some things, but not many.
I did become very involved in a board on an Episcopal school that my children went to and now my grandson is going to go to. I got off the board. It's a three-year term. Also, my late husband was very involved in building it because we merged with the school and then it became Episcopal. I'm very tied to it. I was on that board.
I've done a lot of different community things like that, that are rewarding. I've done a lot of things. When my daughter was young, we did a lot of community service and things like that. Those are rewarding in a different way. They're not at all tied to the law. You meet different people. I did a lot of federal bars. I wasn't on the board in that, but I went to a lot of things and federalist and all that. I'm not involved in any leadership in that, but I do keep track of it and go to it. Those are lawyer things, but it's also important to be around lawyers, not just in the office.
It keeps you connected with a broad array of lawyers and people outside your office, but also may be outside your practice area that you get to know and talk to. You feel much part of a broader legal community, which is a nice field.
You do meet people. You could be in one of those things and meet people, especially if they're local things because you'll exchange a card and sometimes, they call and you get to know people.
It gives that sense of community and creates a community within the legal profession, which is always nice to have. That community service outside the law is rewarding in the same way. You're contributing to your local community and meeting people who aren't lawyers, which is also good.
Sometimes all you see are lawyers.
That's a little variety, so that's good as well.
We need a little variety.
That's instrumental to satisfaction in your career, but also some meaning being able to apply your legal training to the boards as well. It can be helpful to have a lawyer on a board that has other business people. We think about things a little differently, so we can contribute.
The boards do think about that. They have all sorts of different people, but a lot of times on boards that I’ve been in, “We do need a lawyer,” because you have a different way of looking at things and it's important. Most boards have their own lawyers anyway for their own specific area, but also, to have a lawyer on the board that will say, "Our brain is different."
It's wired differently. We think about problems differently. I remember that from the first boards that I sat on, which one of them was an opera board, I was struck because from law school and all that stuff, you've been around lawyers. There's a certain critical thinking and analytical approach that we have that's common. When you sit on the board where you're maybe 1 of 2 lawyers or something, you realize, "Not everybody does this reasoning. I look at the problem a little differently," and that's valuable. Everybody has different perspectives.
I did a lot of pro bono work, especially when I was at Jorden Burt, which was twelve years because I was head of pro bono there. I learned this from the ABA because some of the big firms do this. We would do CJA appointed criminal cases, and our managing partner there was very happy to do this, and the judges were very happy because he would put an associate with me, and then he never asked for reimbursement. It was a good experience.
We did a lot of that. At one point, I represented children coming in and things like that. We did a lot of pro bono work. Not as much in the other firm that I went to. Ours was a smaller firm and it was easier to walk next door and say, "Do you want to do this?” This is harder with a bigger firm. I did a lot of that and that was legal.
It's another way of giving back and for newer attorneys, that's a great way of training as well.
It’s rewarding, too. In some of the criminal cases, I don't know if they're rewarding in that way. My deal with the associates with the firm's permission, and the clients’, because these were smart associates, was to say, "If it got to oral argument, you do the argument, I will be there, and I will say that I'm splitting the argument in case I have to say something," but it worked out well. Only 20% of cases get a real argument.
I think about that with my Ninth Circuit appellate clinic students in law school. They got that great opportunity to be able to argue a case before they've even graduated from law school. That's pretty neat. I usually ask a few lightning-round questions. Which talent would you most like to have but don't?
Many, I'm sure. My late husband was an incredible speaker and he could speak extemporaneously. I can't do that. I have to prepare. I do not have that gift. That is a good gift if you're a lawyer. If I'm successful at all is because I prepare. It's not that he didn't prepare, but he had that gift of extemporaneous speaking, which my son has too, and my daughter, but my daughter is a little bit more like me, though. My son is very much like his dad and I used to watch him and say, "That's not fair." For the law, that's a gift not that many people have.
You’ll be successful when you prepare.
That is a gift. As you said, there are skills that you can learn and things you can teach yourself, but that's something that you have to work at it. Who are your favorite writers?
First of all, I was a Superman fanatic from when I was a child. I learned to read from reading Superman comics. I love Lord Of The Rings. I've read them I don't know how many times. I love CS Lewis. I also love Russian novels, Anna Karenina, and all those great Russian novels. I read a lot because, as a lawyer, I'm so tired of reading complicated cases and this and that. I call them airport books. I have 200 of them around because I pick up whatever one, if it's a detective one or something lawyer ones, and things like that. I read a lot of those. I'm not saying that any of those are my favorite. Patterson and any of those are not my favorite writers, but they're fun.
It's fun and it's a break reading those. Some of the others you mentioned are much denser and require a certain level of concentration. The others are entertaining.
I love Harry Potter, but that's a children's book. They're fun and my grandchildren are now reading them. It's so much fun to remember them again because she's very gifted, but it's the same genre. I call it Lord of The Rings light. I love that stuff. I read Nora Roberts, The Awakening, The Becoming, and it's like that about witches and stuff. Not sophisticated at all, it was an airport book, but it was fun.
Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you invite a dinner?
At this point, right here in Florida, Ron DeSantis, Ron the Great. We have a great governor.
What is your motto if you have one?
I don't have one. I don't think about my motto. I just do it.
Who is your hero in real life?
I have a number of heroes, but as I get older and I look back, I have to say my parents. I know that sounds like everybody would say that, but my parents were very young when Castro came to Cuba. They were 27. They had to come to the United States with nothing, fleeing communism, and start over. They were both professionals. My mother worked in a factory. My dad was doing bookkeeping. He was an accountant. They never complained. We went to New York City first, which I loved because, to me, it was like a wonderland, snow, Macy's, and all this stuff. We lived in a hovel in the Bronx. I thought it was the greatest thing because I was little.
They never made it like it was terrible that we were there. They always made it like, "Look at this. We can't go to Radio City Music Hall because we can't afford the tickets, but we can get you new shoes and a new coat. We can walk around and see the people and we can see the Macy's decorations." I never felt like I was missing anything. I always felt happy to be in Macy's basement and getting fresh turkey or whatever it was. I think that they were always positive and that's a great thing. I'm not sure I'm as positive as they are, but I'm not horribly negative. I can't even explain what it is. It's almost like an ability to keep going. Think about it, they lost everything, but they didn't worry about it and they didn't dwell on it.
That's very appropriate and well deserved putting in that category, given what you described. Thanks for sharing that. Thank you so much for joining the show and sharing your insights over a very distinguished career. Thank you, Sonia.
Thank you, MC.