The Path To Space Law: A Compilation Episode
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Show Notes
This compilation episode features some of our guests who focus on Space Law - in academia, private practice, and government. Michelle Hanlon, Caryn Schenewerk, Franceska Schroeder, Ruth Pritchard-Kelly, and Bailey Reichelt share their paths to the law and the growing field of Space Law specifically.
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Relevant episode link:
Michelle Hanlon – LinkedIn, Caryn Schenewerk – LinkedIn, Franceska Schroeder – LinkedIn, Ruth Pritchard-Kelly – LinkedIn, Bailey Reichelt – LinkedIn, For All Moonkind, CS Consulting, Schroeder Law, Aegis Space Law
Transcript
Welcome to the show, where we chronicle women’s journeys to the bench, bar, and beyond and seek to inspire the next generation of women lawyers and women law students. In this episode, we’re featuring another compilation episode focused on the path to space law. We’ll share the stories of some of our guests who focus on space law, whether in academia, government, or private practice, about their journey to the legal profession and law school. Also, their journey to space law specifically. Enjoy their stories. These are the stories of Michelle Hanlon, Caryn Schenewerk, Franceska Schroeder, Ruth Pritchard-Kelly, and Bailey Reichelt. Enjoy.
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Michelle Hanlon - Director, Center for Air & Space Law, University of Mississippi, and Founder, For All Moonkind
Michelle Hanlon, Director, Center for Air and Space Law, University of Mississippi, and Founder For All Moonkind. Hanlon on the path to law school.
It is interesting because I’m the first lawyer on both sides of my extended family. It was one of those, “Be a doctor.” My parents were diplomats. For me, a lawyer was like LA Law. I went to college and anticipated that I would go into government service. When I graduated, I was able to work on the Hill as a staffer. Everybody on the Hill is a lawyer. Everyone told me, “Get a Law degree because it is incredible discipline and a great education. You don’t have to be a lawyer. It gives you the tools to be so many different things.”
I was young, had no idea what I wanted to do, and thought, “That would be good.” I was fortunate enough to be able to go. I was a paralegal first. I worked through law school and fell in love with the detail of it. I started as a contract lawyer and enjoyed the discipline of making sure the periods were in the right place. It was a comma, not a semi-colon, and it is an and or an or, and understanding the difference very little words can make to a contract or a case. I fell in love with the art of it. As hard as that year was, it was very challenging. It is one of those where you feel very proud of yourself for making it through.
Hanlon on finding space law.
I was a corporate attorney for 25 years and have transitioned to academia. I joke because I got my Air and Space Law at McGill University when I was 50 years old. This is a late mid-career change. It was while I was at McGill that I learned we have these cultural artifacts, the Apollo lunar landing site, and the blueprint that is unprotected. I said, “I have been an M&A attorney for 25 years. I know how to close deals. Let’s go and get a convention to protect our heritage in outer space. How hard can that be?”
It was 2017 and we had the ambition of having a convention in place inside by July 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo lunar landing. That didn’t happen. I had a very quick lesson on how public international law works in the United Nations and so forth. It is a lot harder to hear nations than it is to hear bankers. We are still working on it, though.
A bit more on the draw to and importance of space law.
I enjoyed being a corporate lawyer and did a lot of mergers and acquisition work, banking deals, financings, and so forth. It was tedious. A lot of people don’t like it, but I enjoyed translating, having my client tell me what the document is saying, and being able to make the document say it. There is a lot of money moving around. After a while, it is fun, but we need to change. I started out in a big law firm. I left and was consulting and working out of the house. I have two sons. It was perfect. When my older son was about 11 or 12 years old, he has always been massively into space.
As I have introduced him to Star Trek and Star Wars, he said, “Mom, I read this book by this guy named Virgiliu Pop about who owns the moon, I want to mine asteroids when I grow up.” I said, “That is great.” He said, “Apparently, there is some confusion about whether you can or not. You are a pretty good lawyer.” I said, “I like to think so.” He said, “Do you think you could get that figured out by the time I grow up?” I was like, “Challenge accepted.” He went to the Naval Academy. He has four cubes that are in orbit.
He is now a submariner, which has bought me some time before he leaves the Navy. He has re-sparked that interest. I was a Star Trek geek. I was a total space nerd. I feared Engineering and Math. I resigned myself to being that Poli-Sci and Humanities person. Once I got to the Hill, I didn’t regret a moment of it, but when I realized that there was an intersection to be had and this was going to become something valuable, I jumped at the opportunity to get involved. After my youngest went to college or empty nesting, I told my husband he would empty the nest by himself. I moved to Montreal to earn my LLM up there. At that time, McGill was the best in the world for air and space law. Mississippi is now.
You have played an important role in that. There are not many places to study or focus on that.
There are four that are focused on the space aspects of it. Those are McGill in Montreal, Leiden in the Netherlands, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Mississippi. All of our programs are growing rapidly. One thing that is clear, a dear friend, Steven Freeland, who is a space lawyer from Sydney, Australia, has said, “Ten years from now, if you are a lawyer and you don’t understand Space Law, you will essentially be malpracticing your clients. That is how important and how immersed in space we will be at that point in terms of using satellites or harnessing other resources from space. It is going to be a huge part of our lives and the economy.” I’m starting the #TeachSpaceLawAsPartOfOneLYear Movement.
This is another example of you seeing where things were headed early and being tipped off to this by your son, but there is still some debate about how quickly some of these things can be accomplished. Certainly, there is no debate. We are at an important juncture in history when there is old space and new space co-existing together. New space will look very different from the old space, which is a few large governments that have the money to fund launching things into space and working together with particular discreet government contractors.
That still exists, but there are many smaller countries that are becoming involved and having their own space programs. There are also other companies most famously run by some very well-known billionaires in the world, but there are also many that are engaged in this. It is not a government-only or a few government-only engagements.
The most exciting thing about Space Law is that it is constantly changing. It is also the most annoying. As a professor, I can’t use the same syllabus year-to-year because there is so much change happening, but that is what makes it exciting. I love getting my first two Ls when they haven’t had other classes. I say, “We are going to study Space Law. It is essentially this two-page treaty.”
They looked at me and I said, “You are my goal. My job is not to teach you Space Law. It is to teach you what Space Law needs to be for us to be successful both on Earth and in space.” It boggles the mind, but that is why I love it. You did ask how I ended up in academia. This is the opportunity to shape the way we want the law to look. There has not been an opportunity like this since the aviation industry started in the 1920s.
Arguably, this is going to have a much bigger impact on humanity. When we think about Christopher Columbus, when he arrived in North America, he pitched to Isabella and Ferdinand, “I wanted to take this boat to North America.” Nobody alive at that point could have imagined where that would end up or we would get a whole new nation, jazzed, and civil rights movements.
That was just one boat. Imagine what we can get out of space. Our minds can’t fathom all of the opportunities that are out there. To be able to sit on the sidelines, I have resigned myself to the fact that I probably won’t make it to the moon. I probably can’t afford to go even into lower orbit at this point and helping guide how humans are going to relate to each other with and around and in space is an extremely exciting and fulfilling path.
Caryn Schenewerk - Founder, CS Consulting
Caryn Schenewerk, Founder of CS Consulting, on the path to law school.
I grew up in a family that was dominated by engineers. My father was an engineer. The path I thought I would take when I first started school was to become a doctor, even though I am not that old. I’m also not that young. Young women were not becoming engineers in my world. I had no role models as engineers. The expectation was I could become a doctor. I started as an undergrad and studied to become a doctor. I realized this was not at all what I wanted to do.
I’d done debate and was very successful in debate when I was in high school. In college, I got into Model United Nations. It was a form of debate and policy of engagement. I loved it. I started realizing that I didn’t want to become a doctor. I was interested in international affairs. I managed to land an internship in DC after undergrad and working for a nonprofit that was focused on international affairs and international women’s, at the base of it essentially.
When I looked around at the people with interesting jobs that I was interacting with, many had legal backgrounds. They weren’t necessarily practicing law anymore. Perhaps, had never practiced law but were applying the legal skills against their background. It’s an a-ha moment that I could identify with the way that they broke down problems, developed advocacy plans and efforts with the engineering world that I felt like I’d grown up in that I felt very comfortable in.
When you look at people who have interesting jobs, many of them have legal backgrounds.
Very hands-on, like thinking about problem solving. Also, tactically, I like problem-solving, like taking apart sinks. I’ve been doing a lot of things with my dad that felt very tactical and addressable. Applying some of that skill set to thoughts, behavioral aspects, and policy aspects. That’s what made me decide to go to law school.
I didn’t go to law school to become a traditional lawyer. From day one, I went to law school because I wanted to engage in policy. I thought my career at the time would take me more in a human rights humanitarian direction. My friends used to joke that I took the liberal arts approach to law school because I took very few bar classes. I ended up doing an LLM in International Criminal Justice and Armed Conflict, which has been quite a nice contribution to my practice area now. That was where I wanted to go with my career. It didn’t work out that way, but it certainly was what I was thinking. That’s how I got a Law degree and into law school.
On the path to space law.
I failed to realize that if I wanted to practice international law, I needed to have more than one language. I came to this idea of what I would do with such an idea of so much American arrogance that I thought I could go and get this Law degree at an international school if I did well in my studies, which I did. I was studying in England.
I would have opportunities in the international arena, but my arrogance led me to completely miss the idea that I needed to be, at the very least, bilingual and I wasn’t. The opportunities that were opportunities that were out with my background at that point with my degree were not open to somebody who only spoke English.
That’s so interesting because you’re thinking about like, “I have to get my legal training in this but not like the practical thing.” What’s the job requirements? This would be helpful, the different languages. I remember I was asked to rate a brief in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The first thing was, I was like, “Please, I hope it doesn’t have to be in high formal Spanish or anything because I’m not going to be able to do it. English is fine.”
They assured me it was fine. It turned out no. Ultimately, I needed a brief that was in high formal Spanish, which I managed to work out. The first thing is you look at all the different languages, you’re like, “It might be helpful, but in some case, they might want me to use another one,” when you look at the courts. You’re like, “I was focused on this part, this criteria and not the other.”
It was a great lesson because it made me realize that I needed to think holistically about any opportunity I was going to pursue. If there was something that I wanted to accomplish in my life professionally or even personally, there's a good survey of all the actual requirements. This ties very much to what I do now in the space industry. You need to understand all of the regulations and requirements, whether those are engineering requirements or legal requirements and regulations.
If you're going to embark on completing a task or developing your professional life, you need to understand all those things and be prepared to develop a plan to achieve them to meet that goal. I didn't have what turned out to be a good plan. I came back to the US and took a job with a law firm where I had spent my two summers in DC. That was an international-focused law firm, but it was focused on international trade. It's a trade remedies-focused law firm. In the end, I can't complain because I'm so thrilled with where I am in my career. The experience I got at that firm set me up for the various and interesting steps along the way to land me where I am.
It's always in retrospect. When you look back, you go, "It's these various things that happened to me, which may not have seemed to be very good at the time or were not what I had planned. When I put them all together, they put me in a particularly sweet spot for the next opportunity." All of this thinking about international law and the understanding of how that operates in treaties is such the backbone when you're dealing with international issues with regard to space companies. You need to understand that it's not easily obtained. You have that and the trade. All of these things building on each other leads you to be well-positioned for where you are now.
The trade practice is an administrative law practice. I became familiar with practicing Administrative Law, particularly practicing something that's before administrative judges and judicial systems. That is very much about my practice area because I spend my time with the Code of Federal Regulations on a daily basis. I'm in the CFR. That's where I was back then. There was case law back then and administrative decisions that I could look to, which we don't have yet in this area of practice, but it certainly let me become technically capable of doing the work I needed to do.
That's pretty neat. That worked out well. You worked in government policy as well. How did that come about?
I was practicing at the firm and doing International Trade Law. A friend of mine from law school had gone to work for a member of Congress. She was changing jobs, so she recommended me for her role because it was his ways and means council. Two of the main topics that the ways and means committee of the house deal with are tax and trade. International Trade Law and what was happening with trade negotiations at the time was an important skillset to have to bring to that role and to be able to advise the member on.
That allowed me also to develop tax awareness. That was a great opportunity because I had not practiced Tax Law. I loved Tax Law in law school. It was one of my favorite classes. There's an engineering aspect to Administrative Law, like looking at what the code says, applying that against a fact pattern, and then deciding how you want to then advocate how that has policy implications. Tax is interesting because so many of our priorities as a country are codified in our tax policy.
There's so much interesting underlying policy and social impact.
There's social engineering that happens through tax policy. That ties to what I do now because of where we want to push the industry or what we want the industry to achieve in space. We very much need to understand how the regulations of that industry will incentivize or disincentivize activity in the industry. Are you promoting innovation? Are you promoting safety? Are you disincentivizing innovation? If you disincentivize innovation, does that have an impact on safety? If you're dictating a certain approach, does that mean that we can't come up with a more innovative approach that would be safer?
It was great to study that tax piece, understand that policy, learn from people practicing advocacy around tax policy, interact with them, call upon professors and practitioners, and learn from them how they saw the activities happening in person. It would be somebody on the Hill calling me and saying, "I want you to explain. If I take this approach, what would that mean for your company? What do you see that meaning for the industry?"
I relied heavily on outside experts and found that to be an inspiration for how I try to behave with regard to mentoring and having a high level of integrity in my advice and counsel to people trying to tackle hard problems internal to the government. I did Congress for about five years. I had the honor of working for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords when she chaired the space subcommittee and got to know her and her husband, now Senator Mark Kelly, who also happens to be an astronaut.
That got me involved in space policy because of her role on the committee and thinking about space policy. When I went from there to the White House and the Office of Management and Budget, I worked on 1,000 different issues. One of them was a proposal to adjust the authorization for NASA's programs of record in 2010. It was a big shakeup and point of discussion and debate in the space industry. That solidified my interest in space policy and gave me access to people thinking about space policy in a way that I wouldn't have otherwise had.
Franceska Schroeder - Founding and Managing Counsel at Schroeder Law PLLC
Franceska Schroeder, Founding and Managing Counsel at Schroeder Law, on finding space law.
Years ago, when I started this journey, I was interested in doing something interesting that would allow me to engage in international transactions. I studied Russian, German, Foreign Policy, the politics of Europe and the United States, and political and foreign policy history at Tufts University. I knew I wanted to do something international. I didn't think I wanted to be a lawyer. I thought that would be boring and trite. Everybody is a lawyer. I didn't want to do that, even though that was what my mother wanted me to do.
In the end, she knew me better than I knew myself. I was interested in all things international and was good at foreign languages. I got a job working for the Federal government in the intelligence community. I was able to work on issues that allowed me to practice my Russian and German professionally. I thought that was amazing.
In the course of that activity, I was introduced to the space community, which I thought was fascinating. I have always had a love of space from a child. I'm a child of the Apollo era. I thought, “This is fascinating. I can put together my love of space and things international and make a career out of it. This is great.” Through that work, I learned about this discipline called space law. I said, “I am going to law school because I want to be a space lawyer.” It wasn't the law.
When I went to law school, I originally thought I wanted to do international law. I concluded the opposite of that. I went, “No way, am I doing international law.” It didn't seem like what I thought it would be. I was like, “This is way too much transactional.” We are not talking about litigation and storytelling in that context. I said, “No, I'm going to change direction.”
What is interesting is that you said, “I can put together all of these things that I have an interest in.” Space law has only entered the lexicon that people are talking about outside of academia. Maybe it is because of the new space and all of the renewed interest in space exploration, but that is not something that I was even conscious of. It is unique that you found both of these things and said, “I can put those together.”
Being in the national security community, which has relied on space assets since the ‘50s, it is true. I had a unique insight into what would be available and what was going on that might not be immediately obvious in a purely private sector context, but it existed. I knew it existed because private sector companies were serving national security. The major aerospace and defense companies were working commercially as private sector actors serving the national security community, the Armed Forces, and all elements of US Defense and National Security.
There was this thing called NASA that was advancing human space exploration and deep space exploration. It was going on, but you are right. As a legal discipline, when I told people, including my family, that I wanted to be a space lawyer. They were like, “Let's say what she does with this one.” Miraculously, it worked out, but I was tenacious. I relied heavily on the benevolence of my mentors and my tenacity and the tremendous support of my family.
There are stories like that throughout the show of people putting together things that are unique interests or skills they have and combining them into a practice area or an area on the bench or in academia that is the perfect fit for all of their backgrounds and interests. I haven't heard such a story of cutting-edge being in a situation where you are able to discover a newly developing area of the law that would only develop more in the future and pursue that into law school. That is a unique story and a unique one in that you had to carve a path. You are not only carving a unique path in practice. What does that look like?
I had great mentors who were critical in helping me fulfill my dreams. Among my most critical mentors, because you look back, they were all critical and played an incredibly critical role at that moment the first one was the general counsel of the agency for which I worked. It was amazing that I had the guts. It is purely out of ignorance and naivete of a young woman in her early twenties. I figured, “The general counsel of this huge agency will talk to me.”
Having great mentors are critical in helping you fulfill your dreams.
It is good not to know, Franceska. That is what I found when I did stuff like that, especially early on. People look horrified, and you're like, “I didn't know anything different.” That comes across. You are authentic and genuine. Nobody thinks you are trying to overstep or anything. You are out there.
That is how she received it, which was wonderful for me and we hit it off. This was when I was not in law school. This was when I was still working on space issues but not as a lawyer. She said, “Yes, you should go to law school and focus on these areas of law.” She recommended administrative law, regulatory law, international trade and export control. She knew because she was one of the most senior people in the legal field in the national security realm. She helped me choose my classes and my law journal note and comment.
When I went back, I was a summer associate at the agency and that was great. At the same time, I met my space law professor at American University, Washington College of Law, where I went to school. She and I hit it off. She became another incredible mentor for me. I said, “I want to practice in this area, and I would like to do transactional work as opposed to the work of a government lawyer.” It would have been equally fantastic, but I'm a New Yorker. I love big business. My family didn't understand why I didn't want to grow up and work on Wall Street. That would have been the normal path for me.
I still had that interest. I'm like, “How can I marry my love of business and national security and space? How can I put all of that together?” I work for a big New York law firm. That will do it. Luckily, my space law professor, who became an incredibly critical mentor at that moment, said, “One of my friends, who is a partner at a big New York law firm, is looking for an associate. I'm going to recommend you.” That is how I got my first job right out of law school.
Ruth Pritchard-Kelly
Ruth Pritchard-Kelly on finding space law.
My father was an engineer. We didn't know any lawyers. Lawyers were the butt of many of his jokes. All I knew was I did not want to be an engineer. I decided to be an actress. I got a degree in Theater and tried to work as an actress. As you may know, they don't make much money. As with many people, I went to work for my father, the engineer, as a day job. I was filing papers. I was the mail room clerk. I slid open letters. I date-stamped them. I walked them physically to people's offices and put them in their inboxes. It happens that he was a satellite engineer.
If he had been a carpenter or a scientist, who knows? I was there when there was a big international incident, a fight between France and Germany. My father was hired, I believe, by the ITU as an expert witness in effect. The situation was that Germany had launched a brand-new satellite providing German language television that could be received all over Europe. If you know anything about a satellite, it shines like a flashlight in a circle, in a beam, a footprint as it is on the ground.
The French were angry that this German-language TV was being broadcast over their nation. My father said, “It's in outer space. Under the treaties, it is allowed to broadcast. However, as a sovereign nation, you are also allowed to prohibit your people from receiving that signal if you want to be the country that prohibits its people from receiving information.” That last sentence was enough to make the French sit up and say, “That sounds terrible. We are not the kind of nation that prohibits its people from receiving information.”
I thought, “What is that? That's not engineering.” My father's like, “That’s spectrum policy.” I said, “Where do I sign up?” I first went to George Washington to the program known as its Space Policy Institute. At the time, it was only its first or second year. It was getting itself accredited. I got a Master's degree in what was then called Science and Technology Public Policy, which was focused on why donations support basic science. Why did the US decide to go to the moon and then change its mind? Big questions. I went to work for a different small satellite company, a startup. I was very excited, but they had a legal problem. I was helping the lawyers do some research.
By then, there were computers and the very earliest internet. I did some digging and came up with some very helpful information. The lawyers who are still in the business said, “You'd make a good lawyer.” I thought, “I would? I'm 30 years old.” Someone said to me, “You're going to be 34 in 4 years whether you get a Law degree or not, so why don't you get the Law degree?” I went back to school again at night. These degrees were both done part-time at night.
By this point, I was married, and I had one baby right before the start of law school, and a second one was in the middle. I hadn't seen my husband for four years, but he was invested in this, too. That's important. This was something we both thought was valuable for the family. My other degree probably could not have supported a family on the one degree and salary. We both thought, “A lawyer makes more money.” Maybe he could stay home with the kids and do writing during the evening.
It happened, as these things do. We got through it. I got the degree and the kids are fine. They're both adults. The husband is still with me. I worked part-time for almost fifteen years. I taught law school and bar prep. I was a substitute teacher in their school. I did a doc review. I'm sure we all know what that is. It is soul-sucking, but it makes money. I did whatever I could do that let me get home by 3:00 so that I was there when the kids stepped off the school bus. That was what our particular family had decided was the right way forward.
When they got into high school and college, I went looking for a full-time job. Somebody that I knew from the early days said, “There's a satellite company that's starting, and they're looking for people who have market access. Have you done market access?” I said, “No. I have no idea, but I'm willing to try. That sounds interesting. I know I want to work for a satellite company.” They said, “The job is in The Hague. Is that a problem?” I said, “No.” I went home and pulled out an Atlas. I was like, “I’ve heard of The Hague. I know it's in the Netherlands.” Honestly. At that point, I could not have done more than say vaguely that it was here in Europe.
I did. I went to The Hague for a year. It was amazing. I loved it. The Netherlands is a very easy country to live in, especially for a solo person. The infrastructure all works and everybody speaks English. I tried to learn Dutch, but they laughed at me. My husband came back and forth to visit. At the end of the year, the company let me move back to Washington, DC, because they had expanded and had an office there. It was a company called O3b, which is part of SES, the big Luxembourg company. It was a great fit for me. After a few years there, I went to yet another startup satellite company, OneWeb and had a wonderful few years there as well.
Bailey Reichelt - AEGIS Space Law
Finally, Bailey Reichelt, Aegis Space Law, on finding law school.
I never intended to become a lawyer. I am so glad I did. It seems like that’s not an uncommon path or answer. Sometimes, we go to law school not because we want to necessarily be a litigator, but because the skills are appealing or because the degree or the license helps us accomplish something. For me, what I wanted to do, coming out of high school and going into college, was to be like Margaret Bourke White.
Space Law: Sometimes, we go to law school not because we want to necessarily be a litigator, but because the skills are appealing or because the degree or the license itself helps us accomplish something.
I wanted to go be like a war journalist. I wanted to embed myself with the military or be an aid worker going in humanitarian situations. I wanted to do foreign affairs-type things with the State Department. I wanted to be anywhere international, in policy, and on the ground, making a difference. I got this undergraduate degree in political science then I left school. I was like, “I can’t do any of those things with an undergraduate degree in political science. I’m going to have to do something else too before anyone takes me seriously.” As probably many of your readers know, being a twenty-year-old woman, you don’t necessarily get taken seriously at that age.
Maybe for old that age, but especially as a woman. People tend to disregard what you’re saying and not take you seriously or undervalue how you can contribute. For me, I thought if I went to law school and got a Law degree and a license, people would take me more seriously, and I’d be able to accomplish more quickly on my route to work in humanitarian aid or foreign affairs. I ended up getting a job and that’s true.
I found that to be overwhelmingly true. A Law degree does get you taken seriously faster. People assume that if you’re able to put forth the effort of going through law school and passing the bar. You are capable of a certain level of maturity that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise give you credit for at the same age. As a young woman, I think law school is the right decision for me because it did do the thing I wanted it to do, which gave me a voice sooner than if I had waited, at least in my opinion.
A law degree gets you taken seriously faster. People assume that if you’re able to put forth the effort of going through law school and passing the bar, you are capable of a certain level of maturity that they wouldn’t otherwise give you credit for at the same age.
That’s a good point. That’s something certainly that I’ve heard others say that it gives you authority. A certain level of authority and people listen to what you have to say a little bit more. That’s definitely part of it. I loved your vision of what you wanted to do. Now, I see connections, though. There’s the international aspect and I would say, swashbuckling aspect of the law that you’re in now. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, how you found your way to space law and also to your firm, which is uniquely set up but has a unique specialty, also on finding space law and founding a law firm.
When I first left law school, I did not get a job in space law. It turns out that didn’t exist quite yet. There were a couple of people in the State Department thought that was it. I ended up getting married to an Air Force officer, and I moved with him to Dias Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas, where there were no jobs.
I don’t see a lot happening there.
I became a public defender, for lack of a better way of saying it. I took on Child Protective Services cases and minor state-level criminal cases. I did not know what I was doing. I was very terrified. The thing they instill in you in law school is ethics and you have a responsibility. From what it seems like, to know all the laws upfront so that you don’t mess up anyone’s life.
In reality, that’s impossible. You have to start somewhere and young lawyers are often more ethical because they are hyper-concerned about malpractice. What ended up happening and I was practicing on my own. I approached older attorneys in Abilene and the judges, even those that I was practicing in front of, and said, “I have no idea what I’m doing. You guys trusted me enough to put me on this list, though. Please help me.”
When you said that, I had this flashback. Simon Sinek has lots of suggestions about leadership and things like that. One of them he says was, “There’s a weak way to ask for help,” and to say, “I don’t know what I’m doing. Help me.” There’s a confident way that even though you don’t know, it instills confidence in others that you’re willing to figure it out and they’re confident that you will. The way you said that, I was like, “That’s the confident way of asking.”
I hope it came across that way. I’m not sure I was feeling it inside when I said it but that’s what I did. I find that throughout life, the more authentic you are with people, the more you say, “I will work as hard as it takes to do it right. Please tell me how to do it right.” People will rise up to help you. They will go out of their way to help you. That’s exactly what happened when I first started practicing.
I was practicing in a field I never intended to practice in. I got my specialization in air and space law at Ole Miss but I was practicing family law with child protective services. There were two main judges I practiced in front of. Whenever I was before one of them, the other one would give me pointers on litigation and be like, “You need to walk into the council table. Here’s which one it is.” That level. “We’re going to work on your objections and some soft skills like how to negotiate with other attorneys and standing your ground.”
As a young woman, when most of the people you’re negotiating with may be a 50-year-old man who’s been doing this for twenty-plus years. The confidence these older professionals instilled in me by helping me, by taking the time, their personal time to say, “Let’s work on these skills,” is a tremendous value to me. Some of the best people that I’ve met feedback I got from them was that so long as I was authentic and hardworking,” that’s what led them to want to help.
Coming full circle with this, I practiced in that area of law. I’m running my own practice for several years. What I learned was that, I got my why for air and space law out of practicing family law. Honestly, I know that sounds crazy but I needed that point in my life to bring me to where I’m at now. Teenage girls often have been removed from their families and they were runaways or they had other issues, teenage pregnancy and they didn’t know how to read. All of these issues. By the time I was involved, I couldn’t fix most of them.
They were already too far in life and a cycle that couldn’t be corrected without a crazy new input of resources that I didn’t have the capability to do. What I learned is that if we had more technology available to them earlier on, Maybe that’s through more access to the internet or more technology available at the school level. It looks like technology, though, across the board and those inputs and the things that I see at space company doing every day. Those types of things change what poverty looks like.
They change our ability as a society to increase our inputs to break these cycles. I had some of my clients who again, teenage girls, still stay in contact with me after I represented them to tell me that my intervention in their life helped them get into the college. Deciding to tutor them, letting them use my laptop, working with them on reading a little bit, or things like that help them. When I finally ended up in Erin’s base law, that was my why.
It was cool before and I enjoyed it, but I’m here now because this can change the world. I don’t have to go to Mars, but if I Help a company figure out how to go to Mars, all of that technology that they spin off changes every other aspect of everyone’s life across the entire world. That’s important and that’s my why. I don’t think I answered your question.
There’s so much in that. I’m thinking about which thread to follow first. I can see at least three things. The first thing is, there are things that seem to be detours or not what we planned for ourselves in our life, in our legal training and how to use that. There’s always some aspect to it that ends up adding to your experience later or to fill out either your skills or something that gives you your why in your particular case.
It’s such a human. People can talk about space as saying, “All this technology comes back and helps us on Earth in various ways.” We wouldn’t have technology if we weren’t developing it for space because space is hard, and we need to do all of this unusual stuff. People can talk about it generally as well in terms of space, benefits and humanity from being in space itself but also people back on Earth.
Your experience is more powerful story, which people often say, “One person’s story of how they were impacted is way more influential or can move people to do something than some general statement. We’re going to help all these thousands of people or people in a certain area.” You can describe the impact of space and almost be an ambassador for it differently because of your personal experience and why you’re working on it. Also, to have that more human and heartfelt connection to the work that you’re doing now. It’s all amazing.
It’s important that everyone sees themselves as part of space, as much as they see agriculture is important to them. You should see space is important to you. We all participate in space every day by using cell phones. That’s an antiquated example. The fun example is, “Did you know John Deere uses satellites to guide their tractors?” Agriculture and space are tied together or that we use remote sensing to increase crop yields to feed people.
We’re a major grain exporter, so if you don’t think we’re using remote sensing satellites to increase crop yields to reach refugee populations or starving second and third-world countries. We’re all interconnected, and increasing technology in one area can have global effects. It’s important to realize you’re part of that, whether you want to be or not.
People don’t recognize how wide-ranging that is. There’s something about what you talked about in terms of having the different experiences in practice that you had. First, I would say more of an in interest in space law and some of that interest from Ole Miss and your studies there. Now, you have a more heart connection to it in terms of what it can achieve.
You have a perfect intersection when you put that intellectual interest plus a certain passion or reason for doing something on a larger level that it can contribute to the world. That’s all to say that even though it wasn’t something that you planned or had to do because of your circumstances. That enriched your original interest and intellectual interest in space law. It has made you a fuller person in that particular area that you’re practicing.
Whenever I talk to students like, “What’s the path?” I’m like, “Take a step forward. Don’t stall out on which step to take because anything contributes to the final destination as long as you keep moving in the general direction.” It is so much about the journey and you have things to learn and every aspect of the journey.
For me, I needed grounding and soft skills. I needed a why and the ability to do it. One of the skills that I gained early on from being solely responsible for the outcome of people’s lives, in litigation and family court was, “If I walk into this and I don’t prepare or I screw up. This person’s life has irreparably changed because of my bad night.” That put a level of responsibility and also confidence in me.
Those were things I was lacking at 24 years old. Going on my own was a terrifying thing. I had no desire to ever do that. They tell you in law school and your ethics course in your third year, “Don’t go hang your own shingle. You don’t have enough experience.” That’s exactly what I did and I didn’t want to. I had that ethics professor’s voice in my ears, “Don’t hang your own shingle. You’ll screw up someone’s life.” That did not happen to my knowledge because I was very concerned about screwing up people’s lives.
When I realized at some point that I was capable of learning things and managing my own practice at that age, and making a difference. There was a level of confidence that gave me the ability to do what I’m doing now, again, hanging my own shingle and blazing a path where none existed before. It goes full circle to say, “Whatever you’re looking at doing now, it probably is the right thing. Whatever the next step is, go and take whatever you can from it because they all contribute to the ultimate destination.”
If you're not sure how to go or you know how to get there, take the next step. That's all you can do. You're like, “I can only see one step ahead.” We'll take that one, then keep going. Let's talk about the transition the transition from that work and hanging your own shingle to now where you are with your team.
There were some steps in the middle. I went to DC for a little while. I worked for the Commercial Spaceflight Federation very briefly. DC was not where I wanted to be at that point in my life. I had some other priorities, like my marriage. My husband was deployed to Germany at that point in time. I did want children. I wanted a couple of other things as well as my career. They were equal priorities in my eyes, and I was trying to figure out how to balance them, but DC wasn’t right for me at the time. I ended up going in-house for an aerospace company in New Jersey, where they decided I was their chief compliance officer. They’re like, “Have you ever heard of this thing called the ITAR?” I’m like, “One time. I don’t even remember what it stands for.”
They said, “Great, you’re in charge of it.”
It turns out that’s often how this goes when you’re in-house. They’re like, “We don’t have anyone else to wear the hat. Can you acquire the skills to wear the hat?” Again, that’s where it comes down to, “Do you have enough confidence in yourself to learn what you need to learn to do this competently? Can you go figure it out? Find the training, find the mentors, and figure it out and apply some skills.”
That’s the great thing about law school. Law school gives you the ability to learn and teach yourself, and that’s my big takeaway. If you learn nothing about contracts law, you learn how to figure out how to read a contract by using the library. I went in-house and they threw me a compliance hat. I was in charge of Foreign Correct Practices Act, export controls, import imports, contract review, government contract review, and commercial, and foreign military sales. You name it. They’re like, “She learned this stuff. Let’s just keep adding things.”
I thought it was completely overwhelming and this was insane. How could they possibly do this? This is unethical. I left and went to another company and it was double that. We started with where I was at the previous company, which was the base expectation. They kept adding, and I realized, “This is what corporate is. This is what all corporate is.” There are certain expectations and hats get thrown around. This is how organizations work at a certain size. You either like it or don’t like it.
For a while, I loved that challenge. At some point, I could not work twelve-hour days anymore and still pursue my goal of having a family. I also wasn’t getting to choose what I worked on. I was barely keeping my head above water and answering emails about ITAR. I was like, “I want to work with space companies. I’m not letting go of that dream.” I like working with startups because I love their passion. No offense to Lockheed Martin, but their employees don’t tend to be as passionate as those at Astroscale.
Anyway, I had a buddy, Jack Shelton, who’s now my law partner, whom I had met on a YouTube video. He had made a video called the ITAR in 10 Minutes. I had dropped a message in the comments, like, “You should make one of these for the EAR. This is fabulous.” We started chatting and became good friends. We had never met each other, and we decided one day to meet for ten minutes at a cracker barrel while we were crossing paths in Memphis, Tennessee.
A few years later, we still chit-chatted about trade compliance issues. I’m wanting to leave my job because I need more balance and he calls me. He’s like, “I’m starting my own firm. I need another international trade attorney. You’re the only one I know. Do you want to join me?” I said, “Yes, I have some ideas about what I’d like to do and where there’s a gap in services.” We took my space background and he had a maritime background. We thought this goes great together.
We started an international trade law firm. As it progressed, we’re like, “While export controls are fundamental to helping space companies, they need a lot more than this. There aren’t a lot of places for them to go get like telecoms for FCC or remote sensing from NOA.” They don’t even know that they need these things half the time. We are telling them about it in the context of export controls or when they need a review because they’re taking foreign money.
They’re so small. We found a lot of these companies were failing because of regulatory stumbling blocks. We’re like, “We’re growing and we have clients. We know that international trade is not going anywhere. We could create a space law firm. We could round out our offering to cover all the regulations that space companies need to talk about. We could change our business model away from hourly. We could do something that works for small companies that have very tight budgets. We could probably figure out how to streamline a lot of this and make it flat rate so it’s predictable.”
Space Law: We all want to be more than just lawyers. We want to make a huge difference in bringing technology to the market for small space companies and for creating regulatory paths and streamlining.
It can incentivize us. You and me and our telecoms attorney will. We have a government contracting attorney, Kelly. We could work together and could come up with the best and most optimal solution for this small company to achieve their goals with minimal stumbling blocks at an affordable rate. We can do that. We could also have kids and still get to see them every day. We can have it all. We just have to build it. We can’t start with what’s already existing. We have to figure out a different way.
That’s been the most amazing journey. My team is so amazing. We’re united around this mission, and we all want to be more than just lawyers. We want to make a huge difference in bringing technology to the market for small space companies, creating regulatory paths, and streamlining. We also all have our kids and want to see our kids. We all enjoy having hobbies and having identities outside of being a lawyer. We’re united around these missions and support each other in creating a new way forward.