A Learner, Rather

Is there better legal training than helping adolescents get along?

“Tell people you teach middle school and they all confess how they were in the seventh grade,” says Michelle D. Da Rosa, a one-time teacher at Waldorf schools in California and Oregon, who now practices real estate law at eponymous offices in Portland and Olympia. “You see a lot of conflicts among kids, parents, colleagues. It’s good preparation for the law.”

Da Rosa was first drawn to the Waldorf philosophy as a parent when she and her husband enrolled their three kids in its schools in the 1990s. “It’s developmentally based, so everything you do is tailored to the age and emotional and intellectual development of that child,” she says.

Originally working in the aftercare program at Monterey Bay Waldorf, she was asked, in 1991, to step in when a fourth-grade teacher left midyear. Over time, she was trained in the Waldorf system, even traveling to the Netherlands for mentorship.

Because Waldorf teachers keep the same group of kids from first through eighth grade, Da Rosa had to learn new subjects every year. “There are no textbooks, except sometimes for foreign languages and math,” she says. “You follow a pedagogy but the teacher designs the curriculum.” Each class year includes basic history, social science and literature, she adds, “and you use that to teach everything else—art, math, writing.”

Over the years she taught foreign languages, civics, algebra, drama and even physical education. “It was the richest liberal arts education I could get anywhere, and now I know a little bit about almost everything,” she says.

As her own children got older—they’re adults now with their own kids—the family priorities changed, as did hers. “Part of it was a practical financial consideration. I also wanted to swim in a bigger pond. I wanted to know how the larger world worked—the business and politics and laws we lived by,” she says. She had been toying with the idea of being a lawyer since she was 16; one day she had an epiphany.

“I was looking at my seventh grade class, and I felt a lightning bolt: I am supposed to do something else, go somewhere else,” she remembers. Because she would have to commit to a new group of students once her current class finished eighth grade, she decided to stay with the class one more year, during which she studied for the LSAT and applied to law schools. 

When she started working at Stoel Rives in 2007, she admits it was a culture shock. “It was not like Waldorf. For one thing, my colleagues didn’t hug me every day,” she says with a laugh. Meetings were different as well; they were efficient. “At Waldorf, meetings go on forever and we accomplish things slowly. They are very ‘feeling’ people, with absolutely no competition.” She learned how to be a lawyer at the firm, though. “The real estate team was fantastic. … They trusted me and gave me a lot of latitude.”

Her previous profession prepared her in other ways. As a teacher, she says, “I really learned to listen to people and have a sense of what they needed. That comes to bear with my client relationships in a huge way. I had the skills to talk to people and learn what they needed. I was a beginner in law, but I wasn’t a beginner at that.”

In 2014, she hung a shingle. “I miss the kids, I miss the warmth among colleagues, but I love the intellectual challenge of law,” she says. “I taught everything from knitting to organic chemistry, but with the law I learn something new every day. It’s a lot like teaching at Waldorf.”

Habitats

At Stoel Rives, when Michelle Da Rosa was handed her first pro bono account, Habitat for Humanity, she knew little about the org. Now? “It’s a big part of my life,” she says.

It presents her with some of her most challenging intellectual work, touching on issues of affordable housing, financing, grants, leasehold deals and more. “It’s helped me professionally become more adept at doing things others don’t know how to do, such as affordable housing work,” she says.

She’s since served on the board of Habitat Portland Region, along with various committees. “I grew up knowing service is essential,” she says. “Lawyering is not helping our community in the same way, and I needed to fill that gap in my life.”