How We Do It

You don’t have to tell millennial attorneys that change is a constant. From the Great Recession to the pandemic, they’ve lived it their whole careers. Civil litigator Kimberly Chojnacki was in her first year of law school when the bottom of the legal market fell out. “I saw older students sobbing because offers were being withdrawn,” she says, “and people were suddenly unemployed when they had already bought a house on their future salary.”

None of this has made them averse to change. The opposite: They’re interested in making more change. “Young lawyers want to work smarter rather than harder, for the work-life balance,” says personal injury attorney Jessica Rodriguez-Wahlquist. “They want to change the idea that, because we do it this way, we’re going to continue to do it this way.

From evergreen topics—like what law school doesn’t teach—to contemporary issues like AI and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, five under-40 Texas attorneys weighed in on some of today’s most pressing issues.

How It Started …

Miles Peterson, 30, O’Neil Wysocki Family Law, Dallas: I remember watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and seeing Uncle Phil, who was a litigator. Fast forward to my dad and I watching Law & Order. I’m a very competitive person, so getting in the courtroom and trying to be better than the opposition just appealed to me. Originally, I wanted the fast life of personal injury, but after I got into it, I realized it’s not all bells and whistles. I didn’t even see the inside of a courtroom. Then I got a call from O’Neil Wysocki, and they were telling me how much litigation experience I’d get in family law. The rest is history.

Jacob Jeffries, 36, Orsinger, Nelson, Downing & Anderson, Family Law, Frisco: The law wasn’t something I was planning on. After college, I spent time at a nursing home with a great-grandparent. Having to experience some of the regulatory red tape that people go through, it was irksome. It just felt that something seemingly predictable shouldn’t be that hard to figure out—who’s eligible for what, that sort of thing. I ended up in family law by accident. You could go into a hearing and actually get a result.

Kate Kim, 32, The Law Office of Katherine Kim, Intellectual Property/Business & Corporate, Grapevine: I went into law school thinking that I wanted to help business owners, but I got really interested in white-collar and financial crimes. I waffled back and forth, but I really just like helping people with the creation of their businesses and with intellectual property. I found that to be more appealing than the dark side of business law. I like being with people from the beginning of their businesses, not just when something goes horribly wrong.

Jessica Rodriguez-Wahlquist, 33, Sorrels Law, Personal Injury – General: Plaintiff, Houston: I was 18, and a month out of high school, when I was the victim of a bad car accident. I lost a scholarship to college and had to stay with my parents so they could help me recover. The silver lining was being in the courtroom, meeting a mentor and being able to see advocacy in action. I noticed there were not a lot of people who looked like me, and there were definitely not a lot of people who understood DACA recipients [like me]. Not many kids know what they want to do in law school, but for me, I knew I wanted to do personal injury on the plaintiff’s side.

Kimberly Chojnacki, 36, Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, Civil Litigation: Defense, Houston: We hear a lot that representation matters. I saw women in law, and not just as receptionists and secretaries. I saw my mom, who was a paralegal and then went on to law school. I was in college and was the one who got to call her to let her know that she passed the bar exam. I thought I was going to work for the ACLU and walk in the footsteps of women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but there’s more gray areas in civil law than I think a lot of people realize. As I got deeper into the litigation process, I discovered how much I enjoy developing a case, grappling with factual and legal issues, and stretching myself intellectually. That only grew when I moved into commercial litigation. I’m no RBG by any stretch of the imagination, but I am very proud of the work that I do because it matters that you can’t walk into a courthouse and file a lawsuit and expect to walk away with a big check. That’s not how our society should function.

Law School vs. IRL

Kim: The thing that they really don’t prepare you for is building relationships and client management. It’s a very practical aspect, but it seems to fall through the cracks. Once I went out on my own, it was a learning experience figuring out how to navigate all these tricky things that come up when you’re building relationships with clients or opposing counsel.

Peterson: Law school doesn’t adequately prepare you for the bad-news calls. That was something I had to learn on the fly—how to deliver bad news to a client.

Jeffries: Just like in high school and college, you have your jocks, nerds; you have your punks, preps, burnouts. Skill level varies and you get to see all types of lawyers, from the ones who care to the ones who are in it for the money. Dealing with those different personalities in ways that actually allow you to represent your client, that’s definitely not covered in law school.

Rodriguez-Wahlquist: It’s expensive to be a lawyer when you’re just starting out. Everyone wants a membership fee! And if you’re a young minority with student debt, forget it. There are so many areas of law that are based on what type of clients you bring in: some practice areas and firms expect new attorneys to bring in significant clients, a pipeline of clients that minority attorneys just don’t have access to. If the tools to reach those clients are not made available to minority lawyers who are just starting out, then it’s setting them up for failure.

Chojnacki: Litigation is very much about a puzzle. You have to put the puzzle pieces together. You need to understand your client’s story as well as they do. The first case I tried to a jury, one of the fact issues was what was said in certain meetings of this entity’s board of directors. We had the board minutes and we’re in the middle of trial, and my client leans over to me and whispers, ‘We videotape all of these meetings. Would those tapes be helpful?’ I certainly learned a very valuable lesson that day about the scope of questions to ask my client.

The Generation Gap

Kim: I think a lot of the misunderstandings are rooted in how our generation and the older generation view work. Millennials want to have a work/life balance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to compromise on the quality or consistency of our work. It doesn’t mean that we’re working any less or that we don’t know any better.

Peterson: Millennials are not lazy; we’re efficient. We know how to do something without spending days on end preparing to do it. We don’t necessarily crack open a code book and turn through hundreds of pages. We can just pull up statutes on our phones.

Jeffries: I think that some older attorneys—not all of them—assume that younger attorneys are completely ignorant to the real world. They try to take advantage of younger attorneys. Early in practice, I would have some older attorneys tell me, “There’s no way the court will ever do this,” or “There’s no way the court’s going to find someone in contempt” for something. We would have the hearing and, lo and behold, the court would find their client in contempt, or order sanctions against them, and it just didn’t go the way that the older attorney had tried to represent it.

Rodriquez-Wahlquist: Both generations can work together and have a mutual, beneficial environment. Older attorneys can learn from younger ones, and younger attorneys can learn from older ones. The firms that have older generations in leadership who refuse to listen to younger generations, they don’t seem to be thriving like the ones who accept the benefits that younger generations can bring in.

Chojnacki: When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time in the office with my mom, so I often have the sense that I mentally straddle two different generations. Older generations, millennials included, have echoed the same things that have been said about “the younger generation” for centuries now. I don’t think anyone’s misunderstanding anything. I think we’re just going through the motions of what we’ve always done.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Today

Kim: It’s hard for me to know if I’m on the receiving end of somebody who’s biased against me based on my age or my gender. Sometimes it might be both.

Chojnacki: Last fall I first-chaired a three-week trial in Houston, and we were waiting on the verdict. The court was holding a hearing on something else, and the male lead counsel for that case came over and focused only on my male colleague. He didn’t even bother to engage with me. There is a very distinct experience of being disregarded that can be difficult to describe without sounding juvenile, but it’s very distinct and it’s very disheartening.

Jeffries: In family law, there may be a 50-50 split between women and men attorneys. At least in North Texas, as far as I know, female attorneys are more represented than they were 20 to 30 years ago.

Peterson: There are plenty of female Black lawyers who represent family law, but I have not seen a lot of Black men. I see a lot of Black men in the personal injury space and in the criminal space. That’s another reason why I got into family law—I feel like there’s a trail there to be blazed.

Rodriguez-Wahlquist: I’m a Latina, an immigrant, I’m an out-and-proud queer woman. I represent a lot of diversity from many different angles. I constantly see overqualified minority attorneys passed up for promotions for less qualified individuals. As a Latina, I still walk into rooms wearing a full suit and carrying all my stuff for deposition, and there’ll be a court reporter with a stenographer sitting there, and a male lawyer will still come up to me and ask, “Are you the court reporter or the interpreter?” While there’s still a lot of diversity work to be done, we see a lot of allies who have come into our corner.

Chojnacki: In 2020, I tried a case in front of Travis County Judge Maya Guerra Gamble [459th Civil District Court]. At the end of the trial, I pointed out how remarkable it was that we had two female lead counsels on either side and a female judge. It was a full female trial of a commercial case. I get chills thinking about it still.

Practicing in Texas

Peterson: Having to remember the different policies of the counties you practice in is challenging because of the number of counties and the sheer size of the state.

Kim: It can be hard to help clients navigate the changing landscape and how Texas treats businesses in different fields. Helping people come up with ways that we can work through what’s changing in a cost-effective and resourceful way can be challenging.

Jeffries: It feels like a lot of politicians are poking their fingers into the pie, so to speak, and trying to make some big change that in practice doesn’t make any sense.

Rodriquez-Wahlquist: Tort reform happened in the early 2000s. You would think that, 20 years later, some work would have been done to make laws more plaintiff-friendly, but it’s completely the opposite. Every single year, you see more and more laws come into play that are essentially just setting up roadblocks for victims who are simply trying to seek justice.

Chojnacki: Over the last few years, we have seen a course correction in the appellate courts that has made [trying a case] less about a business transaction and more about actual lawyering. What is the course correction that’s been made? The challenge is not just litigating in Texas; it’s litigating in the world of 24-hour news cycles and social media and whatever else the world is spitting out. When a juror comes into the courtroom, we don’t know what they’ve seen or experienced. We can try to figure that out, but there’s a lot that we’re operating against that litigators even 20 years ago simply did not have to navigate.

AI and the Law

Jeffries: I tried using ChatGPT 2.0 when it first came out to generate a child support calculation, which seemingly is pretty easy. And AI would invariably get it wrong every time. But I have seen people use it pretty successfully for more menial tasks, like preparing questions for depositions.

Rodriguez-Wahlquist: We’ve incorporated AI in depositions using an AI third-party software that really helps you get a transcript a lot quicker than from court reporting companies. And it’s for a fraction of the cost.

Peterson: I have this lingering thought in the back of my mind: What if I’m in a hearing or in a trial one day and suddenly someone’s putting this deep fake video on the screen that’s not really my client? How do I prove that that’s not them beating up somebody when AI is getting to the point where sometimes you can’t tell if it’s real or not?

Kim: Technology in general was already a challenge because of issues of online harassment and piracy, but now with AI it’s just a whole other beast.

Chojnacki: AI is untested. What I market to my clients is, you get my brain, you get my thought process, you get my consideration, deliberation and judgment, and my recommendations about how to move forward. And that’s not something that AI can replicate.

The Rewards

Kim: I like connecting with clients who have these really big ideas that they need help with. It’s really satisfying to come out on the end of the case with a client where they have a finished book that’s out; or their business has been formed and they’ve set up shop, and I’ve helped them in those final stages and made sure that everything’s running smoothly.

Rodriguez-Wahlquist: I have clients that literally bless me or say a prayer for me while holding me. That’s very emotional. Without that, you often forget why you do what you do. They don’t see you as just some lawyer. They really see you as valuable to their future. That’s amazing to me.

Jeffries: The most rewarding thing is having a case where it all comes together: You do a good job for your client as well as doing something that’s objectively good, because sometimes they’re not the same thing.

Chojnacki: I am a strong believer that the practice of law is one of the last true apprenticeship industries and professions, at least in the U.S. The lawyer that I am today is a direct result of the mentorship, development and training that I received, ironically enough, from older male lawyers. And I’m so thankful for them because they took a chance on me. I have taken very seriously my role to do the same for lawyers coming after me.

Peterson: That post-trial feeling after a win? That makes everything worth it: the long hours, the late nights. It makes reading thousands upon thousands of pages of evidence worth it. I remember after my first big win, we were at a jury trial in Houston and the client just started crying and he brought us all in for a big hug. You can feel and see the weight come off of their shoulders. It’s a feeling that doesn’t get replicated anywhere else.