It was January of 2014; Oma and I were careening down the Snoqualmie Pass heading from our desert home to Tacoma during a snowstorm. The pass had closed as we reached the top, and we had to slide our way down carefully in our old 2005 Chevy Venture. That van had gotten us through a lot, but this was something else. To my right, a semi truck was blaring its horn because it wasn’t able to slow down. An old 90s shitbox was in front of him, and didn’t take the hint until the last moment. They would up turning a sharp right into a ditch on the side of the highway rather than be flattened by the ten ton monster barreling down the mountain behind them. White-knuckled and clear-eyed, I made my way down safely, much to your Oma’s surprise and delight.
We were heading to Tacoma for two reasons: I had to take the bar exam, and we both needed to attend Baba’s funeral. I’ll devote some space in another chapter to talk about him, as he was an important figure in our family, who sadly passed long before you were born. I had spent the summer critiquing pornos and occasionally listening to the odd bar prep lecture or taking a practice quiz while sipping beers and going on hikes (more on that elsewhere). I felt fairly well prepared for the test, but if I failed, I would likely need to give up on my ambitions, so the pressure was high. Nevertheless, I was confident in my abilities.
We attended the funeral, which was a predictably sad affair. Afterwards, I steeled myself for the bar exam, a two day, sixteen hour marathon of question and answer exam that consisted of a multiple choice test, an essay component, and a legal document drafting portion. I wound up finishing two hours early on each day, which meant that I was either extremely well-prepared or extremely ill-prepared, with no space in-between. It also probably meant that I was crazy, which is something people had oft said of me, but which I didn’t realize was patently true until later in life.
The months passed, and I spent the intervening time between the exam and waiting for results to come in working for Ric Rose’s Social Security Disability firm in Puyallup. I was doing case management for Ric, and making sure that all his case files were fully developed in time for the clients’ hearings before an Administrative Law Judge. They had to wait two full years for a hearing date, usually being homeless and destitute in the interim, which meant that the hearings were very high priority. I’d have to be sure that we had all of the client’s medical records submitted to the Court, and that Ric had a summary analysis for each case in the front of the paper file he’d bring with him to the hearings. This was a fun gig, because it paid halfway decent for the time, and I was able to find jobs there for two of my college friends. Working with friends is great, and we got to socialize and enjoy each other’s company whilst doing a public service. It was genuinely great.
One day toward the beginning of Summer, I got the letter informing me that I had passed the bar exam. It was a moment of subtle relief, and I believed in the moment that I had gotten the hard part out of the way. I informed Rick the next morning; he congratulated me and invited me to start using his conference room at a rate of $20/hr to meet with clients as I began to roll out my own firm. I accepted with enthusiasm, and started to get to work that evening building my firm. It was Wednesday, and I knew that the first thing I’d need would be a domain name, with a website & email address tied to it. I had a coupon with GoDaddy that I had gotten somehow, and used that to reserve the domain. After doing some research, I signed up for VPSDime to rent a virtual private server at the low, low rate of seven bucks a month. I was making ok money, but I was still broke (a theme in my life). I rolled my own email server (#NeverAgain), and set up OwnCloud on the server to act as a file store. I built a quick website using OctoberCMS, and spent some time theming it before deploying it on the server. After that, I’d just need to start advertising. The next day, I started looking for cheap ad options. Google ads were expensive, and took a long time to bear fruit. I wanted something more direct-to-consumer that was highly targeted. Thumbtack was a small startup at the time, and they had a promotion for a pack of free ad credits when you signed up for an account. They were highly targeted, and you can’t beat free, so I gave them a try. At this point, I had spent seven dollars and a couple of coupons to get my firm started. I had no business license, no malpractice insurance, just a self-built, totally virtual law firm.
Within a few hours, I had a response from a potential client seeking a divorce. We scheduled a meeting for the next day while I would be at work. I was genuinely surprised with the speed and efficacy of this ad campaign, and already had another two meetings in the pipeline by the time I went to bed. Friday morning came, and I took the train to work, just as I usually did. I putzed around the office for a bit, getting some medical records sorted and chatting with my friends as usual. My potential client arrived with a partner and we proceeded to the conference room to chat.
They were a cute couple who needed to get divorced from their respective spouses in order to get married to one another. Each had been separated from their respective spouse for at least a decade, so this would be quick and easy. Plus, I got two clients out of the deal for the price of one, which I thought was stellar. We got to the end of the meeting where the client inevitably asks how much this would cost. I had not considered this part. I knew from my experiences working with Erik (who I’ve devoted an entire chapter to) that he always charged a $2,500.00 retainer. Granted, he wasn’t doing family law cases, but that was equivalent to what I made in a month, and I couldn’t imagine it would take me more than five or six hours to handle a couple of divorces (ha ha). So, I offered them a two-for-one deal at $2500, and to my great surprise, they pulled out a checkbook, drafted a check, signed my fee agreement, and left. I was now a 26 year old who had just made an entire month’s wages in a fifteen minute meeting. I took the elevator downstairs, walked down the street to my bank, and deposited the check before heading back to work. I took the elevator up, walked into Ric’s office where he was working on some cases, and gave him my two weeks notice. I never looked back, and what was about to happen would change my world forever.
It didn’t take long for reality to set in. I had no fucking idea how to draft divorce pleadings. My family law course in law school was super generalized, and I went to law school in Pennsylvania, which wasn’t even a no-fault state at the time. But I had money to live on, and I loved learning new things, so I resolved to figure it out — with a little help from your friendly neighborhood law librarians! If there’s one profession in this country that’s tragically underpaid, it’s being a librarian. They’re professional researchers. If you have a question about anything, they may not know the answer, but they know where to find it. In that way, they’re a lot like attorneys. Just, really underpaid attorneys. Or are lawyers just really overpaid librarians? I digress…
I walked into the Tacoma law library, nestled in the corner of the County-City Building (which I would become intimately familiar with over the next eight years). I asked the law librarian if they had any desk books on family law, and indeed they did. I was about to check out with the book and leave, but the law librarian also asked if I was an attorney. I said that I was, and she mentioned that they had a pro bono family law clinic running at that very moment. She asked if I could step in, as they only had a paralegal running it that day. I thanked her for the offer, but informed her that I knew nothing about family law, and that was why I came in the first place. She said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, Christy is a great paralegal, and she’s been doing this a long time. She’ll tell you what to say to the client, and you just parrot her, ok?” In hindsight, this was a super illegal and unethical arrangement, because I had no fucking clue whether the advice I was giving was good, bad, or ugly. But a law librarian asked me to do it, and it would serve the public good, so along with the scheme I went.
Sometimes, you’ll be presented with an opportunity to do something scary that you’ve never done before in order to help others. You may be on a plane during an emergency and be asked to help people put on their oxygen masks. Maybe you’ll be at the scene of a house fire and have to run into the building to save a kid who’s screaming from a second story window. Or perhaps you’ll be a lawyer and wind up in the situation I did. Sometimes, bending or outright breaking the rules is justified if it serves a greater good. And testing your own improvisational limits is always a good character building exercise. I recommend doing it each time the opportunity presents itself — it’ll make you a better, more well-rounded person, and hell, it may even give you a good story to tell your kids and grandkids one day!
I was escorted down the hallway to a small meeting room. The law librarian opened the door and introduced me to Christy, who ran the clinic. Christy was elated that an attorney was available, as she wasn’t allowed (as a non-lawyer) to give legal advice. There was already a client seated in the room, so I introduced myself and took a seat on the small plastic chair (the kind you see in schools, prisons, and libraries) that was sitting in the corner. Christy gave me a summary of the case, along with what she would like the client to do, and I basically just parroted her words back to the client. Then the client thanked us for our time, and left. There were several other clients that day, and we were able to help all of them move the ball forward in their respective cases. I learned a lot about the basics just working with Christy in that clinic. The clinic was run through Tacoma Pro Bono, and I developed a special and complex relationship with them over the years. I continued to run that clinic, only missing a week or two, every Tuesday morning for four hours, for eight years.
Those first two divorces were mercifully simple and uncontested. The vast majority of the ones I handled weren’t. I became something of a go-to person in complex domestic violence, child abuse, and child sexual abuse cases. I have no idea how that happened, but I saw so many horrors over the course of my short career… I won’t trouble you with the details. Suffice it to say that each of those cases steals a piece of your soul with it, and after a half dozen years, I didn’t have much soul left. I still don’t. Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. Horrors, once seen, are seared into nightmares forever. Evil, once witnessed, will always be with you. All you can do is survive.
I built that firm up over the course of eight years; at our height, we were running nearly $400,000.00 of annual revenue. I employed six attorneys, two paralegals, and an administrative assistant. I went from a run-down office on the eighth floor of the Washington Building in downtown Tacoma with no working elevator to a small shared office space in a real estate firm, to our own space talking up an entire floor of my own. My firm handled hundreds and hundreds of cases over the years. I won three Pro Bono awards from Tacoma Pro Bono and the Tacoma-Pierce County Bar Association. I volunteered as a member of the Washington State Bar Association’s New and Young Lawyer’s Committee, and was elected to serve on the leadership team. I chaired the committee one year, during which I built interest in a law firm incubator program which would address both lawyer unemployment and access to justice issues. My efforts building buy-in among bar association staff and the Board of Governors played a small part in what would eventually become the STAR Committee and the Rural Practice Summer Internship Grant program. That program will hopefully ensure that rural areas of our state have enough attorneys to serve local needs for generations to come. I made a lot of friends. I made a few enemies. My protegé went on to graduate top of her class in law school, and completed a clerkship with the Washington State Supreme Court. I played on Tacoma Pro Bono’s softball team.
Then COVID hit, and everything began to fall apart — gradually, then suddenly. Tacoma Pro Bono offered me a job running their domestic violence division. Immediately after I finished winding down my firm, a week before I was due to start, they rescinded the offer. I was told that after the public announcement of my hiring, “concerns were raised.” They refused to specify the concerns or whom raised them. Your mother suspected it was one of those “few enemies” I had made along the way, some of whom wielded considerable political power. I never found out, and I’ll never know. I could have filed a lawsuit, but it would have hurt the public whom I had dedicated my career to serving. I tried to rebuild the firm from the ashes, but the realities of COVID lockdowns made that impossible. Plus, my mental health was rapidly deteriorating. I attempted suicide in the early months of 2022.