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 pro-Union. In my opinion, unions were very proud organizations going back to the United Mine Workers.
So I took some employment and employment law classes, but I could never really get into it. What was taught in law school didn’t seem to have much to do with the workplaces he’d been to. In fact, most of it seemed so academic that I gradually lost interest.
I started out in practice with no real address until I started doing bankruptcies and finance cases. Money seemed like a pretty good thing to learn, so I kept doing 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 an attorney 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 attorneys and their clients were abusing the system. As I thought about all those hundreds of people and all the companies that I had advised, represented, and litigated, I grew increasingly 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.
All the rest were ordinary people: teachers, office workers, taxi drivers, students, and contractors, who had simply made bad lending 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 like 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 a labor lawyer after all.
