My Law Career
During my legal studies, I was fortunate to have the chance to do two things that I think dramatically advanced my legal career. The first was the opportunity to participate in the Student Litigator program at GW which gave me the opportunity to see exactly what I would be getting myself into as a trial attorney. The second was to clerk for a small law firm which conducted a general practice, which in turn allowed me to quickly identify the areas of law that were of most interest to me.
Law school didn’t really give you a feel for what you’d really like to do when you get out. For example, I got a “D” in Torts, which is the area of law that deals with personal injury litigation, and other types of civil wrongs, yet, my first position fresh out of law school was with one of the top Tort law firms in Washington, D.C. As it turns out, it was another one of those interesting twists of fate. Who would have expected to find me practicing an area of law I barely passed? Apparently, the interviewing partner at Koonz, McKenney & Johnson expected it, or maybe he just missed that part of my transcripts. Either way, I was eternally grateful for the opportunity. By the way, like most great law firms, they’ve since added 100 names to the name of the firm, but I refuse to list them as a matter of principle, and due to space limitations here.
I left law school with a little more confidence than I entered with, but I don’t know why. Maybe seeing how the soup was made helped me to realize that you didn’t have to be a law clerk to a justice of the Supreme Court to do well for yourself. In any event, my first stab and the practice was a very positive experience. I joined Koonz, McKenney & Johnson in January of 1986 as a law clerk, and worked part-time during the school year up to the date I took the bar examination. I passed the bar on the first try, which was amazing to me given my history on standardized tests, but I didn’t stop to think about that long, because before the ink was dry on my last essay, the good folks at Koonz had already saddled me up with some of the best cases the firm was handling at the time. Anyone who has experience with being the new kid on the block in a law firm knows that senior partners always reserve a few gem cases for the new guy, and I got my share of these wonderful fixer uppers. Talking about being asked to make bricks without straw, the quality of some of these cases really made you question how a partner could become a senior partner by being silly enough to take some of these things in, but then I realized that the practice of law wasn’t always about the money, but sometimes about public service. And, it was then that I realized that the senior partners were there to make the money while new associates were performing public service ( I know, I’m being really cynical here, and it’s only in the spirit of jest that I raise this fictional phenonmenon).
Fortunately, I was not dependent on being fed cases from other partners very long. Because I spoke Spanish fluently, I was able to quickly establish myself in the Spanish speaking community, partially through my pro bono work during my Student Litigator days, and partially through participating in all kinds of organziations, and extracurricular community activities. The long of the short of it is that I was fortunate to become one of the youngest attorneys at the firm to turn a profit, and according one partner, the youngest attorney ever to secure a six figure verdict in a trial matter.
Wow, I was ready for the big time now! So, on September 28, 1989, I left Koonz less than two years after starting with them, and opened my own law firm. Having my own firm was great, until I realized that I was now responsible for making sure everyone had pencils, pens, pads, and law books, that the payroll was always paid on time, and that paying employees came before paying myself. But, after a few months (actually it was more like a year) of struggling, my first partner and I hit our stride and did quite well together. The firm grew from two to seven attorneys before I made my next move, which was to leave for an opportunity to work with a medium sized corporate law firm in Silver Spring, Maryland.
That move was bitter sweet. Sweet because it happened during a time when I was getting married to the only woman silly enough to have me (and she’s still here for some reason I can’t figure out), and bitter because the firm turned out to be a disaster. There were some great people at the firm, and I still keep in touch with a lot of the attorneys I met there, but frankly, the firm leadership was a little too ambitious on growth issues, and less effective at generating business to support all the attorneys. I saw the inevitable coming early enough that I was able to jump to a safe harbor, which turned out only to be a stepping stone to eventually starting my own practice again. If you ever want to know why small firms exist, go work for a 200 attorney law firm. There ought to be a law against allowing that many attorney to congregate in one place. I hated the experience, and decided to move on very quickly to something else.
After trying my hand at entrepreneurship, by establishing my own medical transcription company, which started off in promising fashion only to sink under the weight of excessive overhead, poor financial planning, and lack of market analysis (I goofed!) , I was quickly chased back into the comfortable surroundings of my own law firm, where I remained until approximately April of 2001, when I made the transition to a number of Internet based businesses that are detailed elsewhere on this site.
