Hi, I'm Cari.

(upbeat music) Welcome to Bar Review, a space where we talk honestly about life and the legal profession. I'm Carrie, and I'm Anika. Welcome to the conversation. Just a quick note before we get started. We are not your lawyers, and this is not legal advice. And to the extent either of us are employed by the time this airs, this is where we share our personal opinions and not the opinions of anyone else, especially those kind enough to employ us. And one more time for the people in the back. We are not your lawyers. This is not legal advice. Thank you for listening. Hello. Hi. My name is Carrie. So I wanna start your lawyer. I'm a lawyer. When did you decide you wanted to be a lawyer when you grew up? I'm still deciding if I wanna be a lawyer when I grow up. But I first knew that I wanted to abolish the death penalty. I was a philosophy major in college, and we spent a lot of time in classes with people that I deeply respect and professors that I deeply admire. Talking a lot about what it is to be alive and what it is to be human. Literally my parents were a nightmare of what I was gonna do with my college education, but I loved it. And I feel like studying philosophy in college taught me how to think. I say all the time that the first book I ever really read was King Lear in my second year of college literary and criticism class, 'cause it was the first time. I don't know, I can't even replicate it in words, but the way that it felt to talk about King Lear, the way that we were talking about King Lear in that class, filled me in some way, in a different way than, quote unquote, "reading" had before. I think I was one of those people that always chased invisible stars. So I read books that were an assignment, or I read books to show people I was reading books probably. And that was the first time I really read. I really read that book. I read it for me and talked about it for me and also happened to be in a class. But within those conversations, I got very taken by the idea of questioning violence and I should probably acknowledge that I had a pretty violent thing happened to me when I was in college. So I think those questions were on my mind in a big way of why do people choose to hurt other people and really wrestling with this idea that I do and still do believe that at the center of every human is a goodness, there is no such thing as a bad person, so to speak. That is my viewpoint. I'm sure there is a thousand and 47 challenges to that. But we might make mistakes, we might do things that don't align with our values, but at base, we do have values. And then this really, really intensely violent thing happened to me and I was trying to reconcile those things. And that's, it ended up formulating a lot of what I chose to study and a lot of who I chose to study with. So I left that questioning why we have the death penalty. And I knew that it's not right and the way that it is used is not right and I wanted to be part of some kind of national conversation or some kind of conversation about why we shouldn't have it. And I tried to do that in a few different ways. I worked in book publishing for a little bit. I worked as an investigator for a little bit. And then I went to law school and it was a absolutely fantastic law school. Every single professor had a passion project. I did not know when I applied to law school that I wanted to be a lawyer. I just knew I wanted to be part of this. And I happened to find at law school that I was in love with being in law school. And I had an incredible professor who runs the KEDA Taylor Colby death penalty clinic. And I went in my one-el summer to Mississippi and worked in the Mississippi office of post-conviction council where I got to see people sitting on death row who have literally been failed by every single American institution that really should not have let them slip through the cracks. And now we're waiting for the state to literally kill them in whatever way. The US Supreme Court at the moment says is an okay way for the government to kill a person. And I just was strengthened by that. And that just guided me. I ended up transferring to a different law school and I transferred to that law school in order to be part of the clinic. And then I did, I loved law school every second of it. I think I loved law school more than being a lawyer. I accidentally found my way from law school into lawyer into my path. - So where did you go? What was your first stop after law school? - I'm not from a lawyer family. I didn't really have a lot of background in how to do this. I just kept really finding people that I respected and followed them around and listened to everything that they say. So I had a professor in law school who had clerked on the US Supreme Court and cared a lot about encouraging more women to apply to federal clerkships. And she took an interest in me and really encouraged me to apply. I did not know what a federal clerkship was or what a clerkship was before my second year of law school when I was talking to her. It was definitely not something that was on my radar, but I respected her and it was important to her. And she helped me to see that I could be a good candidate. And then my first stop was when I interviewed with the judge that I ended up clerking for who became essentially a family member. He married me and my husband. He was just at my son's second birthday party. Very important person to me. I could tell in him right away that he was a mentor and that I wanted to work for him. So my first stop out of law school was where I still currently live but I thought I was only coming out here for a two-year clerkship. - It's least of that to you. - Yeah. - Was your clerkship one year or two years? - Two years. - Okay. - And it was structured so that there was always a junior clerk and a senior clerk because mentorship was something my judge valued and teaching was something that my judge valued. So it was understood that in the second year of your clerkship you were onboarding the person who was in their first year of the clerkship. - I love that, I agree. - And we also shared an office where the only clerks and he did it by design 'cause he could have had the wall built up to create two offices and he called it the factory of ideas. He wanted the two clerks that were working for him to face each other in a room and talk about the law. - That's incredible. - It was great. - So you have this great experience these two years as a clerk and then where do you go? - I got lost. I got swept up into the, now I'm a lawyer of it all and there, I had bills to pay. I had things I needed to be able to afford. I went through the public defender application process and kept getting rejected because it was viewed that since I didn't immediately go into public defense, my heart didn't bleed enough of the blood required to be a public defender. So I was told, you know, we'll let you know, we'll let you know, we'll let you know. And I got to a point where I was getting uncomfortable would I have a job after my clerkship and I was a federal clerk. So I was also being pursued by some of these larger big law law firms and the difference between being pursued and being rejected had a real impact on me and my ego and I gave in to the sweet, sweet paycheck of big law. Well, I stayed there for exactly two years and quit almost to the day of being there for two years. And was there a reason why you stayed two years? I was miserable. I was really unhappy. I wasn't doing the work that filled me. I wasn't doing any of the work that I needed to be doing with my time. That's what it was. I was not spending my time the way I wanted to spend my time. I didn't feel like I had, first of all, control over my time. I didn't feel like when I had time to myself, I had the energy to even make educated decisions about how I wanted to spend it. I stopped reading. for myself, which should have been an indicator to me, but when I knew I needed to quit, I was walking to work from where we were living on a major street that's a pedestrian street and only buses can go up and down it. And I had this active thought, it wouldn't be really nice if I got hit by a bus, not enough to take me out or seriously injure me, but just enough where I needed to go to the hospital so I could sleep all day, but I'd have a good excuse and a good reason to those above me that I really needed, I needed to go to the hospital. I felt in order to not answer emails or answer my phone. It didn't occur to me that I could go on vacation or that I could just take a day where I really did that. That's the level of burnout I was where I was fantasizing about getting hit by a bus enough where people felt badly enough about where I was at that they wouldn't email me or call me for a little while. I think a big theme of the decisions I've made in my career so far is I just, I collect mentors. I have accidentally fallen into almost every single step of my career. I applied for clerkships because I respected my professor. I transferred because I respected my professor. I went to big lots and some part because of just people I admired and respected and were guiding me in that direction. And then similarly when I was unhappy, I went to a mentor's home for a dinner to celebrate how many years she had been on the bench herself. And there was just the natural, you know, how are you doing? And I finally felt after it had to have been way too long. Truly at a social event where I could truly relax and that I was like with people that actually cared about me and that I cared a lot about. And I am embarrassed to say that I got emotional. I really let myself and everybody in that situation know that I was not good and it was time to go. And somebody at that party hired me. So I went over to work for the county. I started in October of 2019 in the civil division of that county attorney's office. And my main clients were a hospital, a medical clinic, and the public health and human services benefit programs. And six months later the pandemic shut the entire world down. And my clients were at the front of it. And I was confronted with new and hard things. I think it's also important to acknowledge that in that period of time we've been talking about my husband and I were trying to get pregnant and that was not going well. So I was carrying a lot of that with me simultaneously. And then the pandemic was very scary to be in that place in life where it's already not going well and to the extent that you're thinking of adding more medicine to your life. Maybe now is not a time where you want to be in medical facilities if you can wait. And who knew how long we were waiting. How long would it be back in two weeks? Do you remember how long you thought it would take before we'd be back? Yeah, I mean I thought it would be two weeks or you know I don't even think I could have fathomed at that point what actually ended up happening. Yeah, and it all fell on the people that I was representing. So I found myself finding my feet again, finding my energy again, finding what it meant to really represent communities that I care about and solve those kinds of problems. And I was thinking the things I wanted to do with my time saved me from burnout. And again, following mentors around, there's these two women in town that I absolutely respect that I just think are the coolest ladies out among all the other cool ladies. And they had just started a law firm and I ran into one of them at a CLE, a continuing legal education course and do that. And that is now what I am doing. I think that was two years ago you did have your son. You did the cutest little guy from a planet. Yes, and I fully stepped in my power in that delivery room. And so you were transitioning back to private practice while also transitioning back to the workforce as a young mom? Yeah, and having no idea what it was like. You're still not sure that you want to be a lawyer when you drop. Where are you on that journey? Where are your feelings right now about being a lawyer and being in the legal space? I do think that I spend my time the way I want to spend my time as far as broader goes. I'm not willing to ever think about the question, I guess, as whether or not I want to be a lawyer per se, I think words can matter and I think words, you can get attached to words and then it's harder to let those things go. So the question that I hope to keep asking myself throughout the rest of my career is this how you want to spend your time? And not just necessarily my career, but I am one of those people who does not have boundaries and my career and being a mom and all of that is just one thing that I do in one big bucket. So as I sit in my bucket, I periodically ask myself, is this how I want to spend my time? And the way that I'm spending my time for the most part I'm pretty into. Well, I'm excited to keep hearing more about how you spend your time and what that looks like for you. I'm excited to have this conversation. Thanks for joining the conversation. You can find bar review wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and share. If you want to keep the conversation going, follow us on social at bar review LLC. Onnick will see you there and she'll tell me all about it. Not a question you want us to talk about in a future episode? Send it our way. We try to read every email. And just a reminder, we are not your lawyer. This is not legal advice and these opinions are just our own. Cheers.