About C.A. Hudak
C.A. Hudak is a communications professional and attorney. She practices law pro bono, representing people who seek asylum. For more than 20 years, she has created just about every kind of content for organizations including Microsoft, Seattle Children’s Hospital, The Seattle Art Museum, and a variety of startups, upstarts, and small businesses. Her creative work has appeared in King County’s Poetry on Buses, Seattle Review of Books, Ghosts of Seattle Past, the Sextant Review, and at Gallery 110 in Seattle. Her current day job is doing communications for her local elections department. She encourages you to register and vote.
Articles written by C.A. Hudak
Wakatta Forever
The lessons Matthew Draper learned in Japan influence his arbitration practiceIt was the summer before his senior year in high school and Matthew Draper was faced with a dilemma: Get a job or go to Japan as an exchange student. It wasn’t much of a dilemma. “I wanted to avoid doing hard labor in the Santa Fe sun all summer,” he says. “And Japan blew my mind.” Dropped into what he calls a “never-ending sea of three-story buildings” in suburban Tokyo, Draper found himself in a place where he could not see the horizon and did not understand the language. Draper …
'I Shouldn't Be the Only One Moving Forward'
Clarence M. Belnavis on the importance of mentorshipBack when he was a baby lawyer in the mid-’90s, Clarence Belnavis and a colleague from the Owen M. Panner American Inn of Court were asked to coach the mock trial team at Jefferson High School in Portland. Jefferson was—and is—the only school in Oregon with a majority African American student body, and its mock trial team had been dormant for decades. “At some schools, everybody’s mom and dad is a lawyer,” Belnavis recalls. “But it takes a few third-years to coach at …
All Hands on Deck
Nadia Dahab’s roundabout path to the law and pro bono immigration workNadia Dahab followed her father’s career path only to abandon it; but with the law she’s found a connection back to him. Both parents were professors at the University of Nebraska (mother: marketing; father: civil engineering), and as a child Dahab spent a lot of time in the engineering building. “I went there for Take Your Daughter to Work Day when I was six years old,” she remembers. “I loved math and science and I wanted to make my parents really proud. [Engineering] was the …
Fighting Age Discrimination in the Modern Workplace
A majority of older workers have reported experiencing age discrimination“We spend half our lives, or more, at the office,” says Siddhartha Rathod, an employment litigation attorney at Rathod Mohamedbhai in Denver, Colorado. “When we are discriminated against at work, it shatters our fundamental identity of who we are.“ According to the landmark federal law, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), anyone in the age group of 40 and over is part of a protected class. Yet, says Paul Maxon, an employment litigation attorney in Boulder, Colorado, …
Facing the Snake Pit
Lisa Kantor fights insurance companies who deny treatment coverage for eating disordersLisa Kantor fell into representing people with eating disorders mostly by accident. In 2006, the employee benefits and appellate attorney began representing a UC Santa Barbara student who returned home from her first semester suffering from an eating disorder. Treatment proved challenging: Her psychiatrist wanted to medicate her; group therapy sessions were often empty; and the insurance provider declined to cover treatment. To pay for it all, her parents had to mortgage their home. In …
Scientific Breakthrough
Why Siew Yen Chong gave up the lab for the lawSiew Yen Chong says the idea took root in the lush rainforests of the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, where her parents often took her as a child. “We stayed at this little mission bungalow and would take walks out in the rainforest paths. I really liked being out there in the green and fresh air.” So much so that when asked early in elementary school about career paths, she said, “I want to be a biologist in the rainforest.” The science part of the equation worked out; the rainforest …
‘Leave Things Better’
Joshua Stadtler’s pro bono work stems from the Jewish tenet Tikkun OlamJoshua D. Stadtler’s first pro bono client was a combat veteran named Kevin who grew up in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, where Stadtler was raised. The two men are roughly the same age. But, says Stadtler, “our lives diverged in significant ways. ... Kevin had been in numerous combat situations and had seen things, horrible things, that no young person—or any person, really—should have to see. It had clearly impacted him in ways that anyone outside of that context would have …
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