labor law
I went to law school to be an employment lawyer. Before I went to law school, I didn’t even know what lawyers did, but until then my jobs were on farms, in a warehouse, and on construction sites. At the time, Northeastern Pennsylvania was still very much in favor of the Union. In my opinion, the unions were very proud organizations going back to the United Mine Workers.
So I took a few labor and employment law classes, but I could never really get interested. What was taught in law school didn’t seem to have much to do with the workplaces I’d been to. In fact, most of it seemed so academic that I gradually lost interest.
I started in practice with no real direction until I started doing bankruptcies and financial cases. Money seemed like a pretty good thing to learn, so I kept at it, handling hundreds of bankruptcies for debtors and participating in many more on behalf of creditors. I was very active in this until Congress changed the law in 2005.
Bankruptcy is hard work for a lawyer and Congress really added some homework to the process with the Code Amendments. What’s worse is that the reforms were based on the assumption that bankrupt lawyers and their clients were abusing the system. As I thought about all those hundreds of people and all the companies I had advised, represented, and litigated, I grew more and more disgusted. In all those years, there were only one or two people who, in my opinion, were trying to commit bankruptcy fraud and I refused to represent them.
Everyone else was ordinary people: teachers, office workers, taxi drivers, students, and contractors, who had simply made bad loan decisions and obtained credit on terrible terms.
What Congress had done was so offensive to me that I greatly reduced the scale of my involvement in bankruptcies. I thought of a way to help people get out of financial trouble without having to file for bankruptcy under these new laws for the past few years, and finally decided to start making a special effort to reach out to these people. Sometimes the irony of my previous career decision surprises me. My representation of people who feel they can’t afford a lawyer and have nowhere else to go is designed to work for working people and small businesses.
Maybe I turned out to be an employment lawyer after all.
