Interview conducted by Travis Hueber ’26
What were you involved in while in law school?
I was the President of the American Constitution Society (ACS) during my 2L year and was a staff editor on the Texas Journal of Civil Liberties and Civil Rights. Being with ACS was a really great opportunity to get connected nationally.
The most meaningful extracurricular experience I had, though, was being a member of the Justice Center’s Student Advisory Board. I was a Student Advisory Board member all three years of law school and it really helped me to find my community. A lot of the law school culture is built around big law, which had never been my aim. The Justice Center helped me to find people that shared my values and aspirations to pursue a career in social justice work. Some of my best friends today are still people I met through the Justice Center.
What was one of your most formative experiences in law school?
My most formative experience was as a student attorney in the Transnational Worker Rights Clinic. Law school can feel very abstract, and the clinic helped remind me of my “why” of pursuing a JD. The Employment Rights Clinic allowed me to do practical work as a law student and allowed me hands-on experience of working with communities I wanted to serve as a lawyer. I got to take a deposition, engage in motion practice, and when I graduated and got my bar card, I was able to file a summary judgment motion for a case I started at the clinic that ultimately won the case for our clients.
Is there anything you wish you could have done differently in or added to your law school experience?
If I were to do it over again, I would have worried less about how I was measuring up to others. Law school can encourage comparisons between yourself to classmates and people you are competing for jobs and grants with, whether its law school rankings, class rankings, or career prestige. If I started again, I wouldn’t spend any time or energy on any of that. Getting out of that mindset will make your law school experience so much more enjoyable and lighter.
A big part of this is also not living out another person’s script. So often when I talk with young lawyers, they have defined their life or career path based on what they’ve seen in someone else’s journey. I always tell them that they should instead be open to trying different things and figure out what is actually best for them.
What was your career goal when you first started law school?
When I started in law school, I wanted to be an international human rights lawyer. I had spent a significant amount of time in South America including in the Ecuadorian Amazon. While I was there, I witnessed environmental disasters that were created by oil companies and became fired up about working on environmental law and international human rights.
While I was in the Transnational Worker Rights Clinic, it was clinic director Bill Beardall who pointed out that I didn’t need to move to the Hague to do this work. We were representing low wage, immigrant workers who were being mistreated on the job and whose employers were often stealing their wages. The right to payment for your work was a fundamental human right that we were helping to enforce. I really fell in love with the people at the Clinic, the clients we served, and the work we did.
What was your first job right out of law school?
My first job out of law school was with the Equal Justice Center (EJC). I had received one of the UT Justice Center’s postgraduate fellowships—the Julius Glickman Fellowship in Public Interest Law. The EJC had offices in San Antonio and Austin, and we wanted to expand to other cities in Texas. My fellowship allowed the unique opportunity to establish an office in Dallas to serve workers in the DFW area. It was a very scrappy experience. My office space was donated, and I played a kind of hybrid role of lawyer and organizer where I was trying to build relationships in the community so we could spread the word to low wage workers in the area.
My fellowship not only allowed the EJC to afford to hire me, it allowed the organization to take a chance on a much more innovative project than they otherwise could have. If I had simply started as a staff attorney, I don’t know if I would have had the opportunity to have that startup experience. From this fellowship, we were able to continue to build a presence in Dallas and actually grew at one point to a three-attorney office.
Can you talk about what led you to your current job as District Counsel for the Communications Workers of America?
I’ve always wanted to work for unions because I think it’s the most effective way of building worker power. A lot of my prior work felt like treating the symptom, but I wanted to treat the disease: the imbalance of power between workers and capital.
What does a typical day at your job look like?
It varies a lot. I’m the only staff attorney for my district. We cover five states where we have a team of organizers and staff, we have our political team, and then the legal team is just me and whatever interns we have at the moment (which is the coolest internship you’ll find). So, my day can really involve anything. Just today, I got a request to draft a cease-and-desist for an employer engaging in an anti-union pressure campaign. Arbitrations are a huge focus, so we’re often preparing for upcoming hearings. But a lot of my work is focused on trying to work with our local workers and leaders to strengthen our contract and fight for our members.
What is the one issue related to your work that you believe people should learn more about or be more galvanized about?
Unions are one of the few major places people are able to find a brotherhood and sisterhood where there is a real sense of connection and understanding of our shared fate and where you get that sense of being a part of something bigger than yourself. Our country is currently undergoing the greatest wealth transfer in history and it’s leaving workers behind. And what really drives this is increasing isolation that has left a lot of people’s conceptions of themselves as disparate actors; being sold, for example, an idea that they are small business owners with a side hustle when they are really driving for a Silicon Valley company that’s taking a huge share of the money they earn. CWA helps empower our members to ask more for themselves and each other and to see themselves as an essential part of the success of the Companies they work for and seeing that they deserve to share in that success.
What advice do you have for graduating 3Ls?
I would recommend really finding your “why”—why you went to law school and what is really motivating you. This means really questioning why you’re drawn to certain things and understanding what that could look like in your career. I am grateful for the new challenges and new positions that I have sought out, even though this often meant I was starting over in some ways—in a new area of law, at the bottom of seniority, etc. For me, it’s been worth it because it has allowed me more exploration. I think people in public interest work are often already more attuned to this way of thinking, because unlike other areas of law, you don’t necessarily have a structured path from summer intern, to associate, to partner. This can be intimidating, but it can also push you to be inventive about what your career path might look like. But it is still easy to forget that some jobs will be better fits than others. For me, honoring my “why” for going into public interest work, I always ask myself if my work feels like it’s aligned with my vocation.