A year ago today I sat down in front of a camera in Huntington Beach and was asked to explain myself.
The man asking was Mike Alder. He has tried more than seventy cases and he holds the largest personal injury verdict in Ventura County history. We were at Trial Lawyers University, where he was recording interviews for his podcast. I had passed the California bar exam a few weeks earlier and had not yet been sworn in.
We had known each other about fifteen years by then. The first time we met, I was running a law firm and he had come by to talk about a case.
Why I went to law school at all
Years before I ever applied, my younger brother was killed in a car accident. He was nineteen.
I had been working in personal injury since 1997. I knew exactly what happens next. The claim, the adjusters, the records, the waiting. I had spent my working life on the professional side of that process, and then it was my own family, and I learned how little any of that knowledge helps you when the case is your own.
As I told Mike, I was now stepping into the shoes of the clients we had represented.
That is when I knew I was not finished. There was more inside me that I wanted to do.
What it actually took
I graduated from Pacific Coast University in 2015. Night school, because I worked full time. It was my mother and me, and a more expensive school was not within reach. I gave up my evenings for four years.
I took the bar that July, the way most of my classmates did. Two people in my entire class passed it. I was not one of them.
Here is the part people get wrong about going back. They assume the hard part is facing down the studying. It was not. The hard part was how am I going to pay for this again. That exam is not cheap, and every attempt is a bill.
My mother worked double shifts as a caregiver so that I could sit for it again. She is the reason there was a next time at all.
Then life did what life does. I met my husband in 2018 and we married in 2021. Covid arrived. I stepped back for a while.
What I had to learn in those years is the thing I would say to anyone in the middle of their own version of it.
It is so difficult, and it is so hard, not to label your failure as being a failure, and instead just look at it as an event.
Deciding
Eventually I asked myself a direct question, and it is the one at the top of this page. Do you really want this, or are we going to keep playing this game?
My husband put it more kindly. “You are never going to be happy if you do not do this. Finish it. That is a huge chapter of your life.”
So I unplugged. Completely. It was fine to miss a birthday party. It was fine to skip a dinner and stop checking my phone. I told my own office that I was leaving, that they would figure it out, and that they should not call me.
Three months of that. Then I passed.
What this has to do with your case
You may be reading this thinking that I am newly licensed, and wondering what that means for you.
The honest answer is that I am new to the bar. I am not new to injury cases.
I started in personal injury in 1997, as a receptionist. Over the years that followed I became a case manager, then an office manager, then chief administrative officer. Since 2017 I have run intake at a personal injury firm. I read every case that comes through the door and build the case plan for it. Then I sit down with the attorneys and the case managers. My job was making sure nothing fell through the cracks.
Some of those cases resolved for millions of dollars. I want to be precise about what that does and does not mean. I was part of the team that got them there. I was not the attorney who tried them, and I am not going to take credit for another lawyer's result.
Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case is different, and the outcome of any case depends on its own facts.
What I will claim is the twenty-eight years. Mike said it better than I would have, and he had no reason to flatter me.
Most law students coming directly out of college, going right into law school without that practical experience, graduate from law school and have no clue whatsoever about even how to get to a courtroom, or get to a pleading, or anything like that. You do all of that.
Twenty-eight years in personal injury law came before the license. Now as your attorney.
And the rest of it counts too
Most people who hire a personal injury lawyer are in the middle of something that is taking longer than they expected and costing more than they can carry. They are being told to wait. They are wondering whether it is worth continuing.
I spent years being told, officially and repeatedly, that I had not made it yet. I know what that feels like, and I know what it takes to go back in.
That is not a marketing line. It is the most useful thing I own.
