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S5E05: Rutgers Law Associates, January 6, and the Rule of Law, with Chris D'Alessandro RLAW'18
15 Plays11 months ago
Chris D'Alessandro RLAW'18 joins Dean Bond to chat about the Rutgers Law Associates, starting his own firm, and his work representing a client directly impacted by the events of January 6, 2021. You can read more here.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Production Manager: Shanida Carter
Series Producer & Editor: Nate Nakao
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Transcript
Introduction: Joanna Bond and Chris D'Alessandro
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to The Power of Attorney, a podcast from Rutgers Law School. I'm your host and dean of the law school, Joanna Bond. Today, I'm joined by Chris D'Alessandro, who is a proud Rutgers Law grad. And thanks so much for joining us today, Chris. Thank you. Glad to be here.
Chris's Early Life and Career
00:00:34
Speaker
Can you tell us a little bit about your origin story? How did you get to this point?
00:00:40
Speaker
So I'm originally from Northern New Jersey. That's where I spent most of my life in places like Clifton, Passaic, and Rutherford, which are sort of suburbs of New York City. I'm 54. I currently live in West Chester, PA. I'm married, have two children. My wife is Dr. Patricia McKernan, who is also a proud Rutgers graduate. She's a graduate of the DSW program. She's chief of staff for Cadenza, a large provider of services in Pennsylvania.
00:01:09
Speaker
Italian-American, as you can tell by my last name, raised by a single mother, which I'm very proud of because my mom worked very hard to bring me up, to give me what I needed to succeed. Some other things about me, I didn't make through high school. I dropped out when I was 16. I'd started work when I was 15, and I also started playing guitar, and I was more interested in playing guitar in heavy metal bands than I was in school.
00:01:31
Speaker
So I did that for a couple of years, but you know, my family's very interested in seeing me move forward. So they convinced me to get my GED, which I did when I was 18, went to college, didn't do so great. So I decided to join the Army and the Army, you know, a couple years in the Army taught me discipline and it taught me how to succeed.
00:01:48
Speaker
And when I came out, I went back to college and I did well academically and sort of got focused on getting into a career in law enforcement. Because while I had worked in a factory when I was probably 18, one of the managers there, he had been in law enforcement and he had spent many years in the military in the Army and the Air Force. And he convinced me, he said, hey, this is no way to live. You have to start doing something for yourself and do something to get yourself out of the situation and do other things. So he convinced me to join the Army.
00:02:16
Speaker
And also got me interested in law enforcement so when i got out i did eventually get a job with the new jersey state parole board is a pro officer in nineteen ninety seven i work for them for eighteen and a half years retired at the rank of lieutenant twenty fifteen. I had reenlisted in the army in two thousand five.
00:02:35
Speaker
And I actually started Officer Candidate School on my 36th birthday. I was the oldest person in the class. And I have been in the Army National
9/11 and the Decision to Pursue Law
00:02:44
Speaker
Guard since then. I was commissioned as an officer in 2006. I've deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm still serving in the Army National Guard as a major. I'm a logistics officer.
00:02:55
Speaker
That is pretty much me at this point. That's a great story. And I love that you were interested in heavy metal as a kid. That's fantastic. Who was your favorite band when you were really playing a lot?
00:03:09
Speaker
It was all the early thrash bands like Metallica and Anathrax and Slayer. And I still play in a heavy metal band to this date. I deal with guys that I've known for, I think I've known a one guy for like 35 years. But we still go out, we go on many tours, you know, we play like four or five shows in a row around the area. And it's a lot of fun.
00:03:26
Speaker
Oh yeah, absolutely. That's great. And I love that your path also led you back to higher education. That's a fantastic story. So can you tell me a little bit about the impact of September 11th on your life?
Choosing Rutgers Law School
00:03:40
Speaker
Sure, I was a parole officer at the time, and I was working in Clifton. On September 11th, I was on my way down to Trenton. I think it was to get an ID card or something. As the attacks happened, I heard it on the radio. I think I was listening to Howard Stern at the time, as funny as that is.
00:04:00
Speaker
At first, it was being reported as an accidental plane crash into the Twin Towers. But then, you know, once another plane hit, it was pretty clear that it was an attack. So I did a sort of turn and burn at the Turnpike Toll Plaza and just started racing my way back up, back towards home.
00:04:19
Speaker
Stopped my house make sure everything was okay went to my office and there were reports coming in that state offices are being attacked now in retrospect as it served as it may seem that a parole office is going to be attacked. We're all sort of on guard for that so we still guard the office and.
00:04:37
Speaker
At some point, our chain of command started to ask for volunteers to go down to the World Trade Center site itself to do recovery efforts. I did want to do that for a day on September 13th. I didn't go back after that one day was enough. But the impact that that had on me just really made me rethink my life. It made me think to
00:04:59
Speaker
get out of the box that I was living, get out of my comfort zone, start taking risks, doing all the things that I wanted to do. Because what I saw that day is it doesn't matter how much money you have, how much power you have, whether you're a guy sleeping in the street outside of the first floor, the guy in the 100th floor, when it's your time, it's your time. So use your life wisely. That's what it taught me.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's an important lesson, but such a tragedy. And so you decided to go to law school at some point. Why did you decide to go law school and why did you pick Rutgers specifically? So I had peers in the military who had gone to Rutgers Law and become attorneys. And
00:05:44
Speaker
they described to me the experience of going to law school and the profound impact it had on their thought processes, the way they looked at themselves, the way they looked at the world and things around them. And these are people who I had a great deal of respect for in terms of their intellect and their drive to succeed. And there were people that I sought to emulate. And also my job had afforded me, my job at parole afforded me the opportunity to go to the FBI National Academy
00:06:12
Speaker
located in Quantico, Virginia, which is sort of the premier law enforcement training in the nation for law enforcement supervisors. Now at the time I was a lieutenant, but I was there with chiefs of police from some of the major cities, top-level law enforcement executives, and one thing that these people had in common is that they had gone to law school. That had a big impact on me as well in terms of what credentials
00:06:34
Speaker
one might want when you're moving forward in your law enforcement career. But what sort of sealed it for me is being in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and just seeing that the rule of law had eroded to the point where the only rights that some people had there were the rights afforded to them by the strong men, the warlords, the people with the most guns and the most power. And I also saw there that lawyers were involved in every single thing that went on there. They were the ones making policy. Many of the things that we did
00:07:01
Speaker
in a tactical sense or an operational sense on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those policies were reviewed at a minimum or promulgated by attorneys. So that impressed me as well, involved in everything from negotiations to logistics, which is what I did, to detainee operations, which is what I did in Iraq. So that made me think that law school is a way to go. Be an attorney, have that,
00:07:32
Speaker
door open to perhaps have an impact on the world around me and help people.
00:07:37
Speaker
That's fantastic. I tell students that all the time, that lawyers are involved in so much of what we do in everyday life. And certainly you saw that up close in the military when I'm sure lawyers were making calls about what logistics and operational initiatives were approved or not. So I think that's a great up close look at how useful the law can be.
00:08:05
Speaker
And why Rutgers? Was it the connection that some of your lawyer friends had to Rutgers, the fact that they were Rutgers alums?
00:08:16
Speaker
Sure, so there's a few reasons. One of the main reasons is that with the New Jersey Army National Guard, as long as you're in good standing, tuition is free at any state school. So certainly when looking at different options, going to Rucker's Law, my entire legal education, I think cost somewhere around $13,000. And that was books and fees and various expenses, because the tuition is covered. So long as you maintain your grades and you're in good standing with the National Guard,
00:08:43
Speaker
However, I'm also a graduate of Seton Hall. I went there for my master's degree in human resources. I have an ed S from Seton Hall. So it was sort of a tough choice. I looked at both schools, but Rutgers seemed to be more of what I was interested in. Rutgers seemed to teach people.
00:08:58
Speaker
the more concrete skills that are needed to win in the courtroom where Seton Hall seemed to take more of an academic approach to the law. Now, both are valuable. However, I wanted to learn how to win for my clients, and I liked Rucker's history of activism, and I wanted to learn how to accomplish that, how to be an activist, how to advocate for causes that I believed in, and I feel that Rucker has filled that role.
00:09:23
Speaker
That's great to hear. That's certainly what we aim to do.
Impact of Rutgers Education
00:09:26
Speaker
Okay, so now it's time for a softball round, Robin. What was your favorite and least favorite class in law school? So it's hard to say because I liked all my professors. I can't really think of one professor I didn't like, but certainly Professor Marterson's tort class, which was the first law class that I was in, that had a huge impact on me because the first day of class, she was cold calling students.
00:09:50
Speaker
to answer about the reading and that is something that I think is really valuable to be taken out of your comfort zone. It's part of the reason I joined the military. I like the feeling of having butterflies in my stomach and asking myself, what are you going to do if you're called on? What are you going to do if this happens? Because then you have to think and that's how we evolve and that's how we become better problem solvers and we learn how to
00:10:12
Speaker
think creatively and how we're going to address these situations that come up in a spur of the moment. And that's the way the courtroom is. Nobody's going to take their time and ask you whether you've done your research or you have the correct cases in front of you or whether you've prepared your witnesses. It's either you have or you haven't. There are other courses, certainly, that I liked. Professor Lohr's deposition class was great. That prepared me for depositions. Professor Overdeep, if I'm saying his name wrong, I apologize. But he had a philosophy in the law class
00:10:42
Speaker
And in my first divorce trial, I used one of the egalitarian philosophies that he had discussed when advocating for a client who had spent her life providing care for the family. And I equated that into what would this look like in terms of if she was earning a wage for doing these same duties.
00:11:02
Speaker
as the professionals that provide these for people. And it was a compelling argument. I thought that was interesting. Right. Oh, I'm sure Yvonne Oredik would love that story. Oh, yeah. No, I've told it to him already, because as soon as I did it, I said, hey, I snuck this into a case. I'm sure I'm not the first lawyer. But it was very good. And also, Professor Kaplan's sex crimes class, I had read her editorial in the New York Times. And I supervised the sex offender unit, well, part of the sex offender unit for the state parole board. And I also supervised sex offenders for many years.
00:11:31
Speaker
So her editorial in the New York Times, I thought it was brave. And I thought it was, although I didn't agree, I thought it was compelling because people need to speak about these things. And people try to speak about them and say, let's have a different perspective on these intractable issues. And they're excoriated for it. So it takes a lot of courage to come out and write something like that. So I took a class because I wanted to hear what you had to say. And it was a great class.
00:11:57
Speaker
That's great. So yeah, I think Rutgers, when you go there, in terms of value for the faculty and what you're learning, and of course, Professor Rothman, RLA, but that's a completely different thing because me and my partners, we consider him our mentor. But yeah, Rutgers, you can't go wrong with faculty there. All right, we're going to talk a little bit about RLA in just a second. But in the meantime, let me ask you a food-related question. What was your favorite place to eat near law school?
00:12:25
Speaker
Probably the Victor Pub, down by the river, and I still go there sometimes, and I'm at court, I'll walk down there, because it's a nice walk from the law school, you get a little exercise, you get out of there for a little bit, especially when we're working at RLA, sometimes the pressure's on, and you just dealt with a lot of interesting cases, and now it's time to take a walk and talk about things. Not particularly in Camden, but in, I think in Pensac in the pub, great old school New Jersey place.
00:12:52
Speaker
It's like a dark cave with a salad buffet and you know, they serve all these old school sort of, uh, I guess comfort food dishes. That's another great place. Definitely. Yeah, that's great. I haven't tried that one. I'll have to try it. Uh, okay. And, and so tell me before we get to our conversation about RLA, which, which I want to ask you about in just a second, but before we do that, what, what would you say is the most important thing you learned during law school?
00:13:21
Speaker
Not any one thing, but what I've often told my wife in our conversations about our mutual educational accomplishments is that law school changed the way I think. It took me from one level of thought to another. So I guess thought isn't the right word, but it changed the way that I look at things, the way I look at the world.
00:13:43
Speaker
So I look at things now and I don't look at it just for what it is. I say, well, what else is this? So it's not just this is a rock, right? I look at it and say, well, this is a rock, but does it have any value in economic sense? Or whose rock is this? Or does this rock belong here? Did somebody put it here? And it's a different kind of rock. And maybe somebody could be sued because somebody will trip over it. So I mean, that's sort of simplistic. But I feel that it evolved my thinking to a different level. And it changed me. That's the most important thing that law school did for me.
00:14:11
Speaker
That's fantastic. Yeah, I think we teach people how to be problem solvers and look at the world in a different way. And your example is a perfect one. Okay, so now I want to talk about Rutgers Law Associates.
RLA Fellowship and Starting a Law Firm
00:14:25
Speaker
After graduating, you became part of Rutgers Law Associates. Can you tell us what RLA is and what your involvement in it was?
00:14:35
Speaker
Rutgers Law Associates is a fellowship program through Rutgers Law, and it's a small law firm run by Professor Rothman out of both Newark and Camden, and it provides low-cost services to citizens of New Jersey, primarily low-income or modest-income people, but also if the case is of value to the fellows to work on,
00:15:00
Speaker
then sometimes they'll take cases from people with more money. However, if it's something fellows can learn from, we'll take it on something novel or something interesting. And at Rutgers Law, it's run in the vein of a medical
00:15:15
Speaker
Internship in doctors get together. They discuss cases. They talk about how they're approaching Medical problems what diagnosis is made how that's going to be treated and it's very similar with the law so we would have rounds or we would Sit on the whole deck. I believe when we're in Camden and we would say, okay We each have these cases while I'm going to trial what that what is that looking like? What issues are you coming up with and then professor Rothman would offer us recommendations and he was
00:15:44
Speaker
There constantly to offer us guidance. And it also teaches you how to run a small law firm, which in my case is really good because that's me. My partners did when we got out of records law associates and. That those are things that you may not think of. So things how to send the facts. How to scan documents. How to put emotion together how to. Put interrogatories together all these things that are
00:16:13
Speaker
difficult to learn when you're on your own, but when you're part of this collective, part of this fellowship, and you're all working together towards common goals, it teaches you all these things. Also, it teaches you courtroom demeanor because I think the second day I was there, I was in the courtroom with one of the other fellows.
00:16:33
Speaker
So I would say that Rutgers Law Associates, besides just being a fellowship, right, of course, you get paid for it, which is nice, but it puts you in that. So in the military, we have a thing called left seat, right seat when you trade out in positions. So I come in in Afghanistan and I'm going to take over the supply yard. I will work with the person who's already in that position.
00:16:57
Speaker
for a couple weeks before I take over and then they move to the left seat and then or the right seat and then we're talking from there and then that person eventually moves on. So sort of like that where you're getting this guidance why you practice the law and when you're done you're more competent as an attorney and you're ready to get out there and advocate for clients where I think if you just graduate from law school and then you just go out on your own that's got to be very tough.
00:17:25
Speaker
I think that is challenging. And it's wonderful to have this program that's really based on that medical apprenticeship model where you're getting a lot of feedback and learning the whole time that you're out there representing clients as a Rutgers Law Associate. And so tell me a little bit about what happened after you finished the fellowship. And I know you and two other Rutgers Law Associates started a firm together. So tell me a little bit about what that looked like.
00:17:54
Speaker
Sure, so when I got to the fellowship after graduating in 2018, Keith Peterson, who's one of my law partners now, he started with me at Rutgers Law Associates. Linwood Donaldson, I believe he graduated in 16, so he was
00:18:09
Speaker
16, 17. I'm sorry, but he was already at the fellowship. So while we were there, he finished up and he briefly went out into private practice. But as we got closer to our graduation date from the fellowship, we started talking and we were talking about various things we might do. I was thinking about getting back into law enforcement leadership. I'd applied for a couple of jobs, but really didn't interest me. And when we talked,
00:18:34
Speaker
None of us were interested in working for anybody else we felt that we had the skills to go off on our own and open a law firm we had the. Modest money to start the law firm and limit because he had been on his own he knew some of the mechanics of it suggest securing the proper insurance leasing.
00:18:54
Speaker
billing things of that nature and we have learned all that ruckus all we learned how to use clio which is the software we use we learn how to use the courts we learn how to file documents. And all the office things that we needed we already knew what we needed because we had seen it ruckus law so we needed a scanner printer we needed a shredder we needed deaths so we got together and we said we know it's a risk but you know what it's time to start a law firm and go out on our own.
00:19:21
Speaker
So that's what we did. We started a law firm in September 2019. It was our official start. And we did have some clients that came with us from Rutgers Law Associates with the blessing of Professor Rothman. But we immediately started getting into domestic violence advocacy. And that remains a huge part of our practice. And we've just taken it from there. That's great. And you're now four years in. And has it been a fun and successful four years?
00:19:52
Speaker
It has been a great four years so far. We've been very successful. So our first year we did not think we were going to be successful. We thought we were going to struggle and we thought we were going to have to kind of scramble to make ends meet. That's not what happened. We were overwhelmed with business and that's been going since and we have
00:20:14
Speaker
Essentially as much business as we can take and probably more at this point so we're looking at maybe expanding. So that's something i would suggest that people are prepared for it's good to have contingencies or a plan for the worst but instead perhaps plan for the best to be exactly just as challenging.
00:20:30
Speaker
Right. That's a good problem to have, though. That's great.
High-Profile Legal Cases and Strategies
00:20:33
Speaker
Now, I know you recently represented a Rutgers student in a defamation case where his ex-girlfriend publicly defamed him after he tipped investigators to her identity as a January 6th insurrectionist. And the judge ordered her to pay him $50,000 in damages. That's an amazing victory in a short time since founding the firm.
00:20:57
Speaker
You mentioned online that it's more than just a court victory. Can you say a little bit more about that? Sure. Well, my client is a young man. He's a Rutgers student. When he recognized his ex-girlfriend as being the individual inside of the Capitol talking about having Nancy Pelosi's laptop, where it's that effect, and then there was some traffic on Discord, which is a
00:21:27
Speaker
Um,
00:21:28
Speaker
a chat and basically a chat used by gamers and other people to communicate very popular. But when he saw some things on that from her as well, he reported to the FBI and almost immediately she took out a protection from abuse order against him and explained her flight from authorities in the context of being a domestic violence victim. Now, my client asserted that that was not true. In the aftermath of that, she had
00:21:58
Speaker
she the Riley Williams had a
00:22:03
Speaker
friend of hers who had or an associate who had also gone to the Capitol, although he had not entered. But he went online, talked to news sources like the Epoch Times, sort of these right leaning sources and also some other news sources, even in the UK, like the Daily Mail, things like that. Saying things like my client was a Russian. No, he's a stalker. Just things that weren't true. My client didn't know this guy.
00:22:28
Speaker
This man did not know my client. In saying that he was a Russian, my client took that as he was implying that he was a Russian agent. My client was also interested in a career in computer science. These things can impact his career in the future. This stuff's out there on the internet and it's going to be out there forever. We brought suit against them.
00:22:53
Speaker
Very difficult to serve them. I had to learn some new court procedures, service by substitution. I ended up serving her public defender, her federal public defender, and getting leave of the court to serve the other defendant through Facebook because he had an active Facebook page.
00:23:15
Speaker
We did that after some conversations with the actual federal public defender of Pennsylvania, the judge and I, and Ms. Williams' attorney, I was able to serve her successfully. But after that, they did not respond. I can't say why they didn't respond. In my opinion, they just decided they didn't want to. So when you don't respond to a lawsuit, a default judgment can be expected, and that is what happened.
00:23:40
Speaker
It's a fascinating case and a great example of how you learn things like different ways to serve process, right? Out of necessity, you get creative within the rules. That's great. I apologize. Why do I think that it's more of a victory than just for my client?
00:24:00
Speaker
Whatever people think about what happened on January 6th, that's not the way to do things. We have a process here in place, and the process is the rule of law. And these are things that we have here that people don't have other places, and if we don't appreciate it and use it, who knows how long we'll have it.
00:24:19
Speaker
So I view this as a victory for the rule of law because my client used a system that's in place, even though it was frustrating and it was long. And even though, who knows if I'll ever recover any of the damages that were awarded to him. However, he used the system, he trusted in it, and in the end, he even achieved justice. And I think that's a lesson for people who may
00:24:40
Speaker
Be doubting whether there is justice out there. There is it's not always easy and we have an adversarial system and there's two sides to every story. But you know the rule of law does work in our country and people need to respect that. So that's why I thought it was a victory for the rule of law as well. Yeah, that's fantastic. And it must be gratifying from a from a lawyer's perspective to to to see your client through that kind of process.
00:25:08
Speaker
It is especially a young man who, you know, he did the right thing. That's the most I could say about it. And what about some of your other wins? Are there any that you can share with us? Sure. So early on, I took on a case and it was a case that involved the two year look back window for sexual misconduct.
00:25:35
Speaker
that Governor Murphy had passed, I think, in 2019. And I was the first attorney to successfully bring a New Jersey LAD claim under that. I realized it was something novel. We fought off two motions to dismiss, but we won that. So I thought that was a good win for my client, that we successfully got that through because there was some question of whether that tier window applied, but I thought it clearly did because, you know,
00:26:05
Speaker
the subject matter of something like sexual assault or sexual harassment, I don't think that it can ever be separated from the sex of the person who's subject to the harassment. I think it's inherent in
00:26:19
Speaker
in whatever sex you are, right? If you're male, if you're female, whatever your gender is. And I believe there was a case recently that came out as well. I think from the New Jersey Supreme Court, I might be wrong here, but that sort of affirmed that saying that, yeah, these two are inseparable, right? If this happened to somebody, if somebody was sexually assaulted or sexually harassed, then clearly
00:26:40
Speaker
their identity comes into it because that's what the harassment was predicated on, right? But for that, they would not have been harassed. So that was something that we did as a firm. And I thought that was a good victory for our client and also for other victims. Great. And talk a little bit about running a law firm. There must be parts that you enjoy and parts that you don't care for that much. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Managing a Law Practice
00:27:09
Speaker
Sure.
00:27:09
Speaker
So certainly enjoying the fruits of your labor is something that is good. You work hard and there's a reward for it. There's also though all the anxiety that comes with
00:27:26
Speaker
Having to pick which cases you take and then how you administer them The work that we do is very sensitive. We work with a lot of victims as I said, we do primarily victim side domestic violence so we deal with situations that I think a lot of other lawyers do not want to deal with and you know, sometimes people can be victims and
00:27:48
Speaker
They could find themselves, even though they're victims, being prosecuted by their abuser, which is something we deal with. And there's a lot that goes into that. So sometimes we find ourselves in situations that we're not sure how to handle. We'll take on a case. And we also do some employment law, things like military discrimination, racial discrimination, discrimination based on sex and gender. So in some of those cases, we're up against very big law firms. So I had one case where I think I was up against
00:28:17
Speaker
I call them the lawyer platoon during motion hearings because I think I was up against six other lawyers at one point. Wow. So you have to learn how to deal with that, right? How do you fend off three motions to dismiss instead of one? You have to learn these processes that just by nature of our lack of experience in terms of time, we just haven't
00:28:38
Speaker
dealt with yet. So do we have to have this within 14 days or 10 days? And what's the difference between family and civil? And then anybody that does family can tell you it's sort of the wild west of law. The way family lawyers talk to each other, the way we talk to each other in court is very, very different than civil.
00:28:56
Speaker
Civil is exactly that. It's civil, polite and civil. Everybody's civil to each other. Sometimes people get a little testy, but switching from family, especially from domestic violence to civil, you have to learn how to tone it down. So we have to learn how to do that. So that's the biggest challenge is simply learning how to
00:29:15
Speaker
do these things that other lawyers take for granted or big law firms who just hand out to an associate and say, here, learn how to do this. And associate number two, go do the research. For us, it's no. If Keith Peterson has a case, like he has some cases right now that involve a lot of research. One of his cases is on appeal. So he does all the research. He learns how to file appeal. I think he had one with Lee.
00:29:39
Speaker
He had to send it in three giant packages to the appellate division because that's how much it was. I'm sure that's not unusual, but for him, it's the first time. Where do you have to put the staple? He's stapling the stuff together. We do all that stuff for ourselves. That is the challenging part about having our own law firm. That, like I said, learning how to deal with success.
00:30:01
Speaker
Sometimes learning how to handle success is as difficult as learning how to handle a setback. Also, I will say that we don't lose very often. When we do, it's a matter of concern and we sit around and look at each other and say, how do we lose? Every lawyer loses sometimes. Absolutely. If you're reading a lot, it makes it harder to actually lose.
00:30:22
Speaker
We figure it out, but sometimes we say, how did I lose that one? You know, we kind of examine and pick apart everything that we did. And sometimes they say, oh, well, that's why we lost, right? We didn't do this right or we didn't do that right. But most of the time we just chalk it up to when you go into court, sometimes you don't know what's going to happen, especially in family court. It's a court of fairness, right? So what does one party think is fair? And the other party thinks is fair. It's not always the same thing.
00:30:45
Speaker
Right. Well, it must be nice to have two other law partners to compare notes with and debrief at the end of a long case. Definitely. And we learned that Rutgers Law Associates that working as a collective, we're much stronger than if we work as individuals.
00:31:00
Speaker
So we all sit in the same office and we share ideas. We do work from home sometimes, but we find ourselves in the office at least two or three times a week altogether. And we discuss our cases and we offer each other input and creative criticism. And we tell people, well, we tell each other, not other people, things that need to be said. So if one of us writes a brief that isn't good, we'll tell the other person, well, hey, this needs some editing, right? Or maybe you don't want to use those words, or maybe have you considered this part of the law? Or sometimes I'll get,
00:31:29
Speaker
anxious about something another lawyer says to me, hey, I'm going to do this. And I'll say, you can't do that. But then I'll ask my partners, can they do that? I'll say, oh, yeah, they can. So that's why it's good to bounce things off of other people. And I think if I was a solo practitioner, I wouldn't have that. So very important lesson to work as a team and get things done for your clients. It sounds like you carried some of the best parts of Rutgers Law Associates into practice with you, which is fantastic.
Advice for Aspiring Lawyers
00:31:58
Speaker
So my last question for you is what advice would you give to law students who may have an interest in someday opening up their own law firm?
00:32:08
Speaker
So they need to be tough. And I think Rucker's law teaches lawyers how to be tough. I don't think Rucker's law is a place for the faint of heart, in my opinion, especially not in your first day at torts class. And the professor is cold calling people and saying, I'll wait till you get the answer, right? That didn't happen to me. It happened to somebody else, but that was really cool. So I think that lawyers need to learn how to be tough. If you're going to start your own practice, especially if you haven't been in law very long,
00:32:36
Speaker
other lawyers who are more experienced are going to try to break you down by saying, oh, well, I've realized you've only been a lawyer for six months, things like that. But the way to handle is that after you've beaten them, you think to yourself, well, I guess I learned more in that six months and you didn't need your 40 years because I just beat you. Have faith in yourself. Don't go in and think you're going to lose just because somebody has decades of experience on you.
00:32:59
Speaker
What we found is that some law firms do the same things the same ways over and over again despite their clients. They don't listen to their clients. We were taught to be client-centered. We listened to our clients. We listened to our needs. We listened to what they have to say. We listened to their facts and we looked for novel solutions. So lawyers wanting to start their own firm, they have to realize it's you. It's your reputation. It's your win or your loss.
00:33:23
Speaker
It's your ability to interact with other attorneys. Courtroom demeanor, very important. New lawyers, when they go in a courtroom, don't go in there with an attitude. If the judge tells you something, do it. If the judge tells you, hey, I've heard enough of that and it's time for that to end, then you need to stop. If the judge heard your argument and doesn't want to hear it again,
00:33:45
Speaker
There's no need to argue with a judge. That's just silly. You're not doing your client any favors. That's something I would suggest I see over and over again. Learn how to do things as correctly as you can because some things there's no format for. You're going to just have to learn it. How do you do emotion and consolidate? I didn't know. I had to do one. I asked Professor Rothman. He kind of set me on the right track, but there was no
00:34:10
Speaker
form for it, right? You have to do these things yourself. How do you do an order to show cause? How do you do these different things? You have to figure that out, but it's better to do it right the first time or as right as you can than just say, I'm just going to do whatever and submit it and see what happens. Um, so yeah, just have faith in yourself, be a risk taker, take the qualified risks that you have to, because without taking risks, um, when you have your own law firm, it's unlikely you're going to be successful if your risk adverse.
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's great, great advice for both our current students and any prospective students who may be thinking about law school with the idea of a solo practice at the end of it. That's fantastic. Well, thanks so much, Chris, for sharing your inspirational story. And we really appreciate it.
00:34:59
Speaker
We did have a conversation with Andrew Rothman about Rutgers Law Associates. Also, that's on another episode of the podcast. So anyone who is interested can get more information about Rutgers Law Associates. It's a program that we are very proud of. So I'm so glad that you were able to be a part of that program and that it helped launch your successful career. So we'll continue to follow your success. Thanks again, Chris. Thank you very much, Dean. Appreciate it. Take care.
00:35:28
Speaker
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