Bonus Episode: Girls Inc.
Live recording of a Portia Project Podcast panel for Girls Inc. of Orange County’s “Girls Meet the Workforce” job readiness and externship program for high school girls
00:48:28
Subscribe and listen on…
Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | PocketCasts | iHeartRadio | Player.FM Podcasts
Watch Full Interview
Show Notes
As part of a Girls Inc. Of Orange County "Girls Meet the Workforce" job readiness and Externship program, 100 11th grade girls from Orange County gathered at Santa Ana College for a live recording of the Portia Project® podcast, which featured prominent female lawyers and judges from Southern California.
This live event featured previous podcast guests and was tailored for Girls Inc. of Orange County attendees. In addition to podcast host M.C. Sungaila, panelists included Justices Eileen Moore and Joanne Motoike of the California Court of Appeal; Judge Kimberly Knill of the Orange County Superior Court; Orange County Senior Assistant Public Defender Tracy LeSage; and Loyola Law School professor, Rebecca Delfino.
Girls Inc. of Orange County has been a respected member of the non-profit community since 1954. The mission of Girls Inc. is to inspire all girls to be strong, smart, and bold. We put our mission into practice through the Girls Inc. experience that equips girls to navigate gender, economic, and social barriers and grow into healthy, educated, and independent adults. Health, education, and independence are the three main areas that surround its program curricula.
Relevant episode links:
Girls Inc., Girls Inc. Orange County, Justice Eileen Moore, Justice Joanne Motoike, Tracy LeSage, Rebecca Delfino, Judge Kim Knill
About Girls Inc.:
Girls Inc. of Orange County positively changes the lives of 4,000 girls, kindergarten to 18 years old, each year by providing year-round holistic, compensatory, and intentional programming focusing on STEM, financial literacy, sound body image, healthy relationships, and college and career readiness.
Transcript
Welcome all - girls in the workforce at Girls Inc. Orange County. We're lucky to have some wonderful women lawyers and judges in Orange County here for you today. We're going to discuss our various trajectories and whatever advice we might provide to you all at the high school level. I wanted to introduce everyone who's participating in this episode.
We have two justices from the Court of Appeal here in Santa Ana, the California Court of Appeal, Justice Eileen Moore. Justice Joanne Motoike, we're lucky to have her, a week on the Court of Appeal and previously on the Trial Court bench in Orange County. Tracy LeSage from the Orange County Public Defender's Office and Rebecca Delfino, a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. Finally, Judge Kim Knill, who is on the Orange County Superior Court.
In addition to being the host and creator of this show, I'm an appellate lawyer and a shareholder at an AmLaw 150 Firm called Buchalter here in Orange County. Without further ado, I wanted to start with some of our panelists by asking them some initial questions about how they decided to become a lawyer? How did you decide what law you wanted to do? One of the beautiful things about the law is that there are so many different ways you can practice and many different things you can do within it. I want to start with Professor Delfino first.
Delfino: Thank you, MC, for having me. It's so great to see so many young women. It's inspiring to see you all. Thank you for coming. I decided I wanted to become a lawyer when I was about your age. I was in high school. My mom had gone back to college. She went to Cal State. She would take me to the theater department plays and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I thought, “What's going on?” We went to a play called The Merchant of Venice, which has a character by the name of Portia, who was a lawyer. I don't know if you've ever read or seen the play, but you should.
It's phenomenal. It is funny. It's insightful. This character, Portia, plays a lawyer in the play. What she does is she uses her wit and her guile to outsmart the men to get what she wants in terms of a result. I thought, “I want to do that.” My mom said, “Do you want to be an actress?” I said, “That might be fun, but no, I want to be a lawyer. I want to do that.” I have no lawyers in my family, none whatsoever. I'm one of the 1st or 2nd people in my family to go to college, after my mom and my dad. I didn't have a lot of professionals, but I did have curiosity and was opinionated.
If you go down a route that you think is just perfect, don't be afraid to change if you realize it isn't.
I thought, “I want to look into this.” I started looking into it. I thought I could try becoming a lawyer. I took a little sideways into being an elementary school teacher for a couple of years, but I went to law school and saw, as MC said, there are a lot of different areas you can work in and started out thinking that I wanted to be a trial lawyer and did that for a while. I ended up where I started as a teacher. That is my journey inspired by the theater.
It’s appropriate for the show since that is exactly what the show is named after, Portia from The Merchant of Venice. It's a perfect opening answer. Tracy LeSage, what are your thoughts on this?
LeSage: Thank you. Welcome, everyone. I echo everything that was said in terms of how inspiring it is to see such vibrant smiles in a room full of people with hope. Know your future is bright. My path is a little different. I grew up in a background where we didn't have a lot of money. Anything that I did, I had to work for on my own. I felt that to be successful, I wanted to be a doctor. That was always my dream. I wanted to be a pediatrician because I thought that would lead to a happy life that I could enjoy. Be very successful and have nice things that I never had as a kid. I went to UCLA. I got in and was pre-med. About a couple of months in, I realized this was not going to work for me.
I was miserable. It brought me no joy. I didn't want to spend my life doing that. It took me a lot longer to figure out where I thought my path would lead me. I ended up changing my major to psychology. I thought, “Maybe if I'm going to be a psychiatrist, I could help people.” I was always fascinated with the mind and the way it works, but that again, too, I thought, “It wasn't as fulfilling.”
I took a year off. I graduated and have always worked multiple jobs since I can remember. My father died when I was young and I didn't know a lot about his education and a lot of the memories weren't fresh in my mind. I realized when I learned more about him and his path that he was in law school when he died.
That's when I knew I became interested. I thought, “Let's give this a try.” I took the LSAT and got in. I was still working full time. When I started law school, I went at night. I loved it. I absolutely found my passion and knew that was the right choice. That's how I ended up going to law school and wanting to be a lawyer. I'm at the Public Defender's Office. I do criminal defense work. I've been there for several years. I've never had a day where I woke up and didn't want to go to work.
My path to criminal is I did a lot of anti-discrimination type work like housing and employment discrimination, anything that would make me feel fulfilled. It seemed like a nice transition to go to the criminal defense field where the people who need the most help that I could help. It drew me there and I've been there ever since. Welcome.
There's good teaching or lesson there in terms of, if you go down a route that you think is perfect, don't be afraid to change if you realize that it isn't. It might sound good on paper or what you think it is to do that career. It feels a different way, but when you start to trust your gut in terms of whether something is right for you or not and have the courage to make a left turn instead of continuing to go forward with that. Tracy's case found a great place where she's done important work in the county. I'll say also serving the bar association here in other ways. She's been a great asset to the community and to the community of lawyers in Orange County too. Justice Moore, how do you decide to become a lawyer?
Moore: I realized when I used to be a trial judge that my voice doesn't carry. I didn't have the privilege that the professor had or Ms. LeSage had so far as coming from a family that encouraged their goals. I came from a family where I won an essay contest in Philadelphia. When I was younger than you are, I thought to myself, “I wonder if somebody like me could go to college.” I had never known a single solitary soul, what stepped a foot inside of college. I sat down with my parents and my father explained to me that there were four boys in the family. The money for college had to be saved for them. I would be getting married someday. Why waste the money on a college education for a girl?
Meanwhile, I went to a nursing school. A nursing school was entirely different in those days. Girls did not have the opportunities that they have now. I went in the Army and served as a combat nurse in Vietnam. When I came out, I realized that something had happened in the country. Something called the Women's Liberation Movement occurred. It clicked, “Could me, the daughter of a high school dropout and nothing, study at a university?”
The Constitution is there to ensure that no one can go to jail or have their liberties taken without having the protection of a lawyer or someone to guide them through that process.
I grabbed for that brass ring and clung to it. I never looked back and kept going. I got into the University of California Irvine. There were women all over the country, thousands of them that picked up their Danny little feet and kept open the doors at the universities because women were discriminated against in an unbelievable way in those days. UCI had a project called the Vira Christie Project, which from what I've heard about what you're going through now, is what the Vira Christie project was about. That was the most important thing that happened to me so far as my career choice.
They had people from academia, businesses and all sorts of professions who came and talked to us. They tested us, spoke with us, and interviewed us. At the end of the quarter, they told you where they thought your talents might lie. They said something to the effect, “With your mouth, maybe you'd be a good lawyer.” That was the beginning of my thinking about going to law school. When I got out and did, I went to Pepperdine University for law school after graduating from UC Irvine.
When I got out of law school in 1978, to give you an idea of what the atmosphere was like, in one of the job interviews I had, it was the head of a law firm who interviewed me and I was dressed nicely. I had decent grades and thought I made a pretty good impression. At the end of the interview, he said, “I know a lot of firms are doing it, but we're not ready to have a woman in our firm.” That wasn't the end of it, however. First of all, that may sound bad, but at least the man was honest with me.
If he hadn't been forthright with me telling me what the real reason was, that the real reason was the way God made me, I didn't qualify to be in his firm, I would have thought that I had flubbed the interview or something along those lines. It was important to me that he told me the truth. Fast forward twelve years and I was holding onto that brass ring. I was the supervising judge of the Law and Motion Department on the Orange County Superior Court meeting that I was a judge at that time. Who do you think walked into my courtroom and everything was within my being wanted to say, “Are we ready yet?”
I thought he was honest with me. It was obvious to me. He had no idea that we had ever met before, but it was such an important incident in my life. I heard his motion, ruled on it, and sent him on his way. I gave him the respect. I've never said anything else. Let me see if when the professor was talking, I wrote something down to remind me to say it.
That is that early on as a young lawyer, a young woman lawyer, I felt as though I was underestimated every step of the way. I could have been aggressive, nasty and kicking and screaming at the lack of respect, but I never said a word. I let them underestimate me because it was such an advantage be underestimated. At the time of trial, I showed how brilliant I was. That's how I got there.
That's a good approach. I used the same approach. I wanted to make an observation from what's been discussed so far, but also from all the various episodes and interviews that I've done so far is that I hope this helps you realize how incredibly lucky you are to be born in the time that you're born. Those of us who were in law school afterward. The Justice Moore's story, there are others that we're talking about graduating in the 70s or even early ‘80s where they were told women need not apply.
Men on law review only and don't even bother applying. When some of us graduate a little bit later, even ten years later, so much had changed in the 1980s, but it still isn't perfect. Certainly, no one would think of saying that at the outset of you shouldn't be part of the interview process. There's been change all along. We hope that they'll continue to be more, but that at least is something that hopefully you don't need to face at this point in time. Justice Motoike.
Motoike: Thank you. It's great to be here, especially to have such an attentive crowd. Justice Moore, I didn't realize that story. I am thankful because you're such a trailblazer, like MC said. I appreciate that because you kicked down those doors for all of us to be here. Thank you for that. My story is a little different. I was lost. I always knew that I wanted to give a voice to people. I knew that I had this advocate in me because I had witnessed injustices on my father's side because they were interned in Mansdorf or the concentration camp or internment camp for the Japanese in World War II.
I always knew I had this advocate in me and wanted to give a voice, but I didn't know how I would do that. Similar to Tracy, I went to college and started taking business courses or any type of classes that I could get my hands on. I ended up in Calculus, which was not my thing. I immediately decided, “Business, money, that's not the way I'm going to be able to give people that voice. I'm not going to be able to serve people in that way.” It didn't work for me. I finally decided that I was going to go to law school because I had spoken to a friend of a friend who worked for the Public Defender's Office and their job and their description of their job was so interesting to me.
You have to plan on becoming part of the larger society where you will represent people on issues concerning all kinds of things.
It was the criminal side of things, which I always found to be interesting, as well as the advocacy, giving those people a voice, making sure that their rights were respected and represented in court, and giving people access to the system. Those were things that attracted me to law. I went to law school with the purpose of being a public defender.
I waited because in the public defender's office, when it came time for me to apply, most of the counties, including Orange County, were under bankruptcy. I waited about eight months before I could get hired. During those eight months after I was a lawyer and passed the bar, I worked at Nordstrom's, helping people pick out special occasion dresses. I was also a background artist for Central Casting.
I did those things because I was interested and wanted and committed to being a public defender. I waited for that opening. When they finally had that opening, I jumped on it and took it. I worked there for about twelve years and went to The Hague, where I was an international war crimes prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
I did that for a couple of years, again, wanting to give people that voice, representing those victims of those war crimes and being able to give them access to the system on an international scale. I came back to be a public defender. At that point, I was interested in other people who mentored me and, obviously, encouraged me to apply to the bench. I thought that's a different way to people, again, give people access to the system. That's pretty much how I got here.
Judge Knill.
Knill: Thank you, MC, for inviting me and welcome to all of you. It's a pleasure to be here. I grew up in a home that was broken early and had role models that went to college. At least I had that, but I went to the school that those role models went to. No one gave me any other option, but I did get to go to college. When I was there, I studied what came naturally to me, which was accounting, but it's not very fun and very exciting. In the end, it was not going to be my career path. I did have a relative that was a prosecutor district attorney. One time I was invited to go watch one of the trials that he was prosecuting. It was a murder trial.
I remember being in the courtroom, transfixed by everything that was going on there, all of the moving parts, the judge, the defendant, the attorneys, the witnesses and the family members of the victim. Looked around the room, like, “What is this? What am I witnessing here?” That was the first time that I ever got an idea in my mind that maybe I could be an advocate like that someday. When I was getting ready to graduate from college and all of my friends were interviewing with big accounting firms and other big corporations to go off and use their accounting skills. I thought, “No, this is not for me.”
I went down the law school path and was fortunate enough to be accepted at a law school.
Once I got there, the first year was very challenging for me. I wasn't sure I could do it, but I did not give up. I kept going and was able to do it and graduated. While I was there, I found that I liked to write. It was the first time I learned that I liked to write and maybe had that skill.
I was very involved in doing mock oral arguments, various types of writing and appellate-type work even from the beginning. I got out of law school and worked for a large law firm. The benefit to me was for six years, I had good mentors. We might talk about mentors a little later, but those folks helped me learn how to write well and be a good advocate, but they were males.
There were no female mentors in the firm at the time. Now we have female mentors. I'm still a mentor to others and still have a mentor of my own, who is a female. I can't stress enough how important it is to have a good mentor. Through that time, I learned the basic skills to be a good lawyer and later became an appellate lawyer for many years until I was encouraged to apply to the bench. Now I'm a trial judge handling matters in my courtroom every day.
I still get the chance to write, not as much as I did when I was an attorney, but I love the law. I fell in love with the law in law school. I'm still in love with the law. For all these years that I've been doing it, many years I've been in the legal profession, it never ceases to amaze me how there are still issues that come up and there always will be until the end of time that have never been seen before. You have to look at it and figure out how we are going to get through this legal issue. It never gets old, stale, or boring. It is a dynamic profession that is always moving and I would encourage you to give it some serious thought.
As you can see, very different personalities, skills, and interests, but we're all lawyers or judges. You can bring your whole self and do a lot of different things. Judge Knill, I'm an appellate lawyer. I like to write. I first thought initially when I was in grade school that I wanted to be a poet and had an image of me starving in a garret. I thought, “Maybe not a poet, maybe something else that would allow me to have a roof over my head.” I decided to become a lawyer. What I do is writing to persuade, to win for clients, and to change the law. That's what appellate lawyers do. We do some argument, but that's the showy part. The writing is important.
Find a mentor and get around folks doing things you want to do. Look at someone in a position you think you might want to. Figure out what that person does and do what that person does.
Judge Knill talked about mentoring, which we'll talk about a little bit more as well, but I also would encourage all of you to get to know each other and other people through serving the community would be the common thread amongst all of us here. Professor Delfino, I know her from teaching at Loyola Law School. Judge Knill and I were campaigning for a Bar Association of elections together. We both preferred not to have to do that, but that's how it happened. We did it together, which was great. You could be cutthroat about elections or be like, “We're all in it together,” the best people win and that's our attitude.
We bonded over that. Tracy LeSage has been very involved in Orange County Bar committees. Justice Motoike and Justice Moore, from my perspective, I've seen them in action. They're great judges. I'm glad that they're here for you. Speaking of the judge part, I wanted to use this opportunity to maybe explain everybody might have some impression of what it is to be a judge.
I thought to have, from the Court of Appeal perspective, Justice Moore and Justice Motoike explain a little bit about what does their day look like? What does it mean when you're a judge? If you're thinking about it in the future, so you can see if you're interested in it, and Judge Knill as well from the Trial Court perspective. Justice Moore?
Moore: The phrase or the words appellate court have been used a lot here. Does anybody know what the Court of Appeal does? If you come into a regular trial court, there's going to be a jury box, a witness stand, and there’s going to be one judge. If you've come into a Court of Appeal and there are six Courts of Appeal in California, you won't find a jury box and a witness stand.
We deal mostly with paper and digital forms these days. We have the transcripts from the court reporters. You see the court reporter and movies taking everything down. We have those transcripts and the clerk's transcript. That is everything that the court clerk at the window downstairs somewhere stamps in. We have copies of those. We have all these papers, but we don't have any witnesses.
What we do is, if you can picture any movie or TV show that you've seen that concerns lawyers, you see in the background shelves that have books in them. Those books are usually beige in color and have a red or black something written on them. Those contain opinions. Courts of Appeal write those opinions. They're used as precedent. Judge Knill was talking about how every situation is different, but by analogy, you can apply some case that was written some opinion previously. You can say, “We'll remember what happened in Smith versus Jones. This is a little different.” You explain why. Another opinion goes in the book.
What we do at the Fourth District Court of Appeal, which is in Santa Ana, right in the civic center, is we have oral arguments once a month. That is one week out of the month. It's usually the lawyers who come in. They come in and argue. Whoever lost at the trial level filed an appeal. What we're talking about is the appellate process. That is the case where somebody lost at trial comes in for an appeal and whoever lost tries to argue why there was an error in the trial court and asks us to reverse. To turn things around, either give them another chance or give some other order where they didn't lose.
When we're not in oral argument, we're usually scribbling away writing those opinions on our computers. A lot of my time is taken up by discussing. I have three lawyers in my chambers and discuss the cases with those lawyers as to which way we want to go. What about this idea? What about that idea? The people who work at the Court of Appeal and the lawyers there are truly brilliant people. It's such a pleasure to work with people that are so smart.
We have something called writs. That's like the emergency room of the courthouse. Let's say somebody's house has been foreclosed upon, and it's going to be sold next Tuesday at a foreclosure sale. You can't tell them to get in line for an appeal because, by the time their appeal comes up, it's going to be months down the road, the house is long gone, and somebody else's living in it. If something's going to be done, it has to be done now in this emergency room process. We have those meetings once a week where we discuss those risks. That's probably a pretty good description of what goes on.
Do you have anything to add, Judge Motoike?
I can say that I'm loving it so far.
Our institutions, courts, and democracy are only as credible as those who run them. We need more diversity across the board to create and build credibility, so we have institutions in which people want to have faith.
Judge Knill for the trial court.
The trial court serves a different function. In most cases, it's the first place that litigants come to if they have some dispute that needs to be resolved by a judge because the parties can't resolve the dispute. The trial court is the place where we do fact-finding. We hear from witnesses. We look at documents and try to determine what the facts of the case are. If it's a judge trial, the judge makes a decision based upon all of the facts and the law that's applicable to the case. If it's a jury trial, the jury will make the decision on the factual matters.
If there are legal matters, the judge will make that determination. Mostly in a jury trial, the jury is being asked to decide the case. We are in trial every day at the trial court with either court trials or jury trials. Once our fact-finding process has ended and the court issues some judgment, that is the time when the losing party can then choose to file an appeal. If they do that, the case gets shifted over to the Court of Appeal where Justice Moore and Justice Motoike are located.
Once it gets there, the facts are set in stone. The fact-finding that I do is something the parties live with on appeal. They're arguing that the judge made a mistake, the jury made a mistake, the law applied incorrectly, or something of that nature once they get over to the Appellate Court. We operate five days a week, about 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning to get started. We go until about 4:30 every day with a lunch break. It's usually time spent in trial.
The other thing that we do is we rule on motions. Almost every judge will have some time during the week to look at motions that have been filed. A motion is when one of the parties comes to you and says, “I want the court to enter an order that says this or that.” For example, something the party might want some particular evidence excluded before we start trial. That would be an example. The court is ruling on motion. Most judges have quite a bit of that going on during the week in addition to trials, but it never stops.
We are in a session every day when it's not a holiday. Thankfully now we're back in session in person. We still have some Zoom hearings, and people can Zoom in if they want to. We might get to this a little bit later, but I would like to invite each and every one of you to come into my courtroom anytime. You can contact me and see what I'm doing there all day long. If you can come personally, that would be best. If you can't come personally, I can certainly arrange for you to Zoom into one of my hearings so you can observe and see what we do on a daily basis.
I definitely take her up on that invitation because you don't get invitations like that very often. Tracy, your work is probably something that most people think they know about because they've seen Law & Order and various criminal cases on TV or movies, but what does it look like to do what you do?
LeSage: As you can imagine, my job is very interesting. When I meet people who I haven't known previously, they want to talk to me about every single case that I've ever worked on because it is fascinating and serious too because someone's life is on the line, their liberty and freedom. At the Public Defender's Office, we get appointed to represent people who can't afford their own lawyers. The Constitution is there to ensure that no one can go to jail or have their liberties taken without having the protection of a lawyer or someone to guide them through that process. It's tough. That's what we do here in Orange County. We have close to 200 lawyers. I'm one of them.
Over my career, I started with misdemeanors, which are lower-level crimes like taking lipstick from Target or something, but there’s still the risk of going to jail with that. All the way up to I have a client on death row, so capital case. It's very serious work. Looking at TV and shows, I think things have gotten more realistic over time. The older the shows, the less realistic.
Some of the newer ones because there's a lot of production that goes into them and they study and try to get as accurate as possible. An example would be My Cousin Vinny. It’s probably not accurate. It’s a lot of fun, but you can't yell out in the middle of the court. There are rules. You've got to carry yourself professionally.
I don't know if any of you have seen a movie called Just Mercy. If you haven't, you might want to google that and take a look at it. That's pretty realistic as they come. Jamie Foxx was in that movie. He played the defendant who was charged with a murder he did not commit. It is based on a true story. You can follow that to see how an injustice was turned around and fixed and how the legal process works. It's entertaining because it's great actors that are in that movie. The trial attorney that represented the client in that, his name is Brian Stevenson. He does a lot of great work as well because it takes a lot of money to try a case.
The sad situation is that if you have money, your chance of having your voice heard in a courtroom is far greater than if you don't have money
I always think to myself, “If I got in trouble, I don't know if I could afford myself.” It takes a lot of money, time and energy. He's an individual who helps any way he could without regard to money, which is huge. That's why I liked criminal law. It's fascinating. Most of the stuff nowadays is pretty accurate. I will say one thing, though, sometimes, when I see crime scenes on a show, and people walk through and pick up stuff, I cringe because it gets roped off. There's a protocol I have to follow and stuff. Not every detail is taken care of, but for the most part, it's fairly close if it's more recent. I love my job. Thank you.
People are walking around contaminating the crime scene generally. That is generally a good rule, especially if you don't want a wrongful conviction. Rebecca, you have so much in your background in terms of practice and also being a research attorney at the California Court of Appeal and now teaching. I'm going to leave it open to you about what you want to talk about.
Delfino: When I started out as a lawyer, as I think I alluded to, I didn't know where I was going to go with it. I didn't watch a lot of TV and think that looks cool. When I came out of law school, there weren't a lot of options. It was a bad time in the economy. I went on a post-grad clerkship where I worked for a Supreme Court. When I came back, I was hired by a big law firm similar to the one that MC works at. I worked in big law firms for a while. I got lots of great training and experiences being an advocate, which I liked, although I didn't always appreciate the people I represented. Yet, I was still remembering how much I liked the law and loved law school.
As with a lot of the women here, I found a spark intellectually about how the law works and it applies. The law, to me, is beautiful. That sounds cheesy. The law is what keeps our world running the way it does. Everything you do, see and eat about your lives was at some way created by a law that's designed to protect you or make your life better or safe. Everything comes from the law at some point. That's cool. When you're in law school, you start thinking about how that fits together and how the law should work. I love the law more than I liked representing people. I had loved being a clerk. There were openings at the California Court of Appeal in Los Angeles and I applied.
I spent seventeen years at the Court of Appeal working with justices like the ones that are here. I loved that because we worked together shoulder to shoulder to try and figure out in each case what is the just right appropriate resolution? It was engaging intellectually and hard. Sometimes, my head would hurt. I would go home and say, “I can't figure this out.”
If you sat back, you would figure out the path through. It's like a puzzle. If you like puzzles, you might like being a lawyer. I did that for a number of years, but the thing that always bothered me, with all due respect to appellate lawyers, was how bad the writing was. I would read briefs and say, “What? It's not my briefs.” Probably not yours.
I would say, “What are they trying to say?” I spent a lot of time trying to decipher the point and making arguments for them in the work I did with the justices. One of them said to me, “Why don't you stop complaining and do something about it?” I had a friend who was teaching at Loyola and said, “We teach appellate advocacy is where you teach people how to write for the courts. Come and try that.” I was like, “Okay.” I started doing that. I remembered, as I told you, I'd been an elementary school teacher and thought, “This is the best of both worlds for me personally.” Eventually, when an opportunity came to transition from the court to law school full-time, I did that.
Now, I train people how to be lawyers and teach legal writing, which we've talked about. It is something that anybody can learn with effort, care, and discipline. I teach ethics, which are the rules that define lawyers and guide them in doing the right things. When they're representing people, there are certain rules of professionalism that guide them. I teach ethics. I also teach the rules of procedure. The rules that the lawyers that appear in front of all of these folks need to follow. I teach young people, not much older than you, by the way, how to apply those rules.
As with my colleagues here, I love it. I feel so fortunate to wake up every morning and say, ”I am so lucky to love what I do and have great inspiring people around me.” That's what I do. I'm a teacher. If you're like, “What does she do?” Think of the teachers you have, but teaching the law is what I do. I work with young people. I talk and guide them. They inspire and amuse me. All the things that your teachers do that you already know is what I do now. It's terrific and amazing.
I'll say that I teach many students who have been taught by Professor Delfino and they come in very good shape. You did a very good job in training them. They all say very wonderful things about her in terms of her impact on them and their writing. You’re doing a good job. Since we have three judges with us, which is quite unusual, I wanted to make sure that all of you are thinking about this. If you are thinking about the law, you might think about maybe becoming a judge someday.
Failures are just a stepping stone to your next destination. And one of those stepping stones you eventually step on will be a beautiful success if you never give up.
I wanted to get at least one short bit of advice that any of you might give. Starting with Justice Motoike, if someone out there might be interested in someday becoming a judge, what's one thing they could do to explore that thing and figure out whether they want to do it or move forward?
Motoike: Judicial externships are important and you'll get opportunities to pursue those. It's something that I never had an opportunity to do. I had an unintended path to the bench, but I would suggest that if you are interested in doing that, my former court, the Superior Court has a wonderful externship program that Judge Knill could probably talk about.
Moore: One of the things that I realized, and I was about your age when I realized it, is that the people from my neighborhood where I was from spoke in a very colloquial, relaxed way using oftentimes substituting off-color words for other words. I realized that when I saw people who lived in the nice homes, they didn't do that. They spoke differently. Somehow all of this was going on in my mind. I decided that what I needed to do was to improve my vocabulary and probably that sounds so mundane to you, but I forced myself to start reading books with a dictionary next to me.
Every time I did not understand a word, I looked it up in the dictionary and tried to consciously and purposely improve my vocabulary because I realized that if I was going to succeed, I had to be able to understand what was going on in the larger world. I also started reading newspapers. I know that you probably don't even know what a newspaper is, but if you're going to be handling these cases that the professor said are so interesting, Judge Knill said each one is so different.
You have to be a mini expert in all these areas that happen in life. If the only thing you know is what's going on in your immediate atmosphere, you're not going to be very good as a lawyer. Somehow you have to plan on becoming part of the larger society that you're going to be representing people in issues that concern all kinds of things.
You have to stand up even when it's difficult, and you need to gain that strength internally for yourself and others.
Knill: My biggest advice to you would be to get around someone that is doing what you want to do, a bigger scope than maybe what the direct question was. Oftentimes, I swear people into the bar, once they've passed the bar exam, they need to be sworn in before they can begin practicing as an attorney. Most of us judges have the opportunity and privilege to do that for folks. I've done that. One of the things that I always encourage is to find a mentor and get around folks that are doing things that you want to do. Look at someone in a position you think you might want, figure out what that person does, and do what that person does. It's quite simple if you boil it down to that.
In order to do that, you might need some help and maybe you don't know someone who's doing what you want to do. Ask around and find a teacher or a professor or one of us or someone that you meet to Girls Inc., someone that runs Girls Inc. and see if they can introduce you to someone who can help you learn more about what it is that person does. You might have to do this repeatedly because you might find out the first time around that it's not going to be for you, whatever it is you decided to try to learn more about.
That's okay too. One part of success is learning what you don't want or learning what you're no good at. That will take you one step closer to learning what you do want and what you are good at. The best thing you can do is get around other people that have accomplished what you're hoping to accomplish in life.
One of my goals with the show is if you don't know someone who does a particular law or a position that you think you might want to do that through the podcaster, able to meet that person, at least virtually listen to their stories, see whether there's something that resonates with you in terms of whether you want to pursue that. It’s virtual mentoring through the show. By being here, we're adding a little in-person aspect to that as well.
I want to check in. We're running close to time. I want to make sure we have time for the girl's questions too. I want to check in if anybody else wanted to talk about the mentor point. Anything else in terms of mentoring?
Moore: I do want to say one thing about mentors. Be open to anyone being a mentor. I have twenty mentors, all on different little things I want to learn, like some of my colleagues here. Most of my mentors when I was a young lawyer were men. I know as a woman that seems galling, but take it where you can get it. Learn, be consistently curious and ask questions, and you can develop those relationships. Don't think that there's going to be necessarily one person that can help you. Lots and lots of people can help you. It's as easy to ask. Don't be afraid, ask. Most people will say yes. They know what it's like to start from the beginning spot.
I wanted to say that mentoring runs both ways. Already most of you are considered executives. You could reach down and help one of these associates learn, pull them up, help them, and spend your life helping other people get to where you are and allow them to improve themselves that you owe it. People have helped you and you owe it to others to help others.
That's the only way to do it. It's hard to repay those who help you directly, but the way to do that is to serve others and pay it forward to someone else. Do you have anything else to add on mentoring, Tracy or Knill?
LeSage: I'll mention something because I know it was very intimidating to find a mentor when I was starting out. How do you do that? How does that happen? If someone in your life, such as a teacher or a sports coach or somebody, if you don't have someone like that around, keep in mind that most of the government jobs have programs.
Externship programs are basically mentoring mentorship programs. We take college students. For example, if you like criminal defense work and want to work at the Public Defender's Office as a college student, you can contact us and work for us. We pair you up with an attorney with whom we think you'll work well, and there you've got your mentor and didn't have to work too hard at it.
Over my career, that's a lot of joy, which is why I wanted to mention this too. It's exciting for me to work with people who are so fresh, bright-eyed, excited and their life's beginning and see them rise and succeed. We get a benefit too. That's one way you can try to connect with a mentor if you don't know or have someone in mind. It is necessary. You'll have to figure out your comfort zone, find one, and work with them. Don't forget, as has been said to also help those, whether it's a sibling or a friend. You can give something back to them as well. It's a full circle. That's what we do.
Thank you so much to everyone who joined us and also all of the wonderful women lawyers and judges who've participated in this live episode experience. I have one more thing, which is, if you're interested in hearing more of the women's stories who were here, there are full episodes of the show that are up on PortiaProjectPodcast.com. You can read their whole stories or hear more about what they do and things like that. You can do that. There are also many more episodes up there. By the end of 2022, there'll be close to 100, including Jessica Hubbard from your own Girls, Inc. Thanks so much.