About Joe Mullich
Joe Mullich’s writing has appeared in more than 500 publications, ranging from the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Wired Magazine to Consumer Reports, Cosmopolitan, and The Onion. He has received more than four dozen writing awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, National Headliners, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, LA Press Club, and other press organizations. He has written more than 50 stories for Super Lawyers, including regular cover features in Southern California. The common thread in his work is story telling—relating even the most complex topics in terms of the effect on people.
Articles written by Joe Mullich
Opposing Forces
For Joan Fife and Jahan Sagafi, being on opposing sides doesn’t mean yelling across the tableDefense attorney Joan B. Tucker Fife was in the spectator area of a courtroom, waiting for another hearing to conclude. The two attorneys were squabbling back and forth on trivial matters, until the exasperated judge silenced them, pointing to the surprised Fife and telling them they should conduct themselves more like her. “I want to be the most reasonable person in the courtroom,” Fife says. “If a judge needs a fair and accurate answer to a question, I want him to look at me.” …
Hooray for Bollywood
Nitasha Khanna lists her favorite films from IndiaFamily law attorney Nitasha Khanna, an inaugural member of UCLA’s Nashaa Hindi Film Dance team in the early 2000s, is a big fan of Bollywood movies. “I love the colors and the joyful mood,” she says in the 2021 issue of Southern California Rising Stars Magazine. “It’s very happy. A lot of the Bollywood mainstream cinema is romantic, and I am a romantic at heart.” Here are some of her favorites. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Big-Hearted Will Take the Bride) (1995): Two …
Going Bollywood
Family law attorney Nitasha Khanna has a background in Hindi danceAs a psychology student at UCLA in the early 2000s, Nitasha Khanna spent hours and hours dancing in the college’s underground parking lots. Khanna, now a family law attorney at Harris Ginsberg, was one of a dozen members of the UCLA Nashaa Hindi Film Dance team, and there usually wasn’t a room big enough to fit everyone. “So we often practiced in the parking lots, several times a week, for three to four hours at a time,” she says. Founded in 2002, and still going strong 20 years later, …
In for the Long Haul
When Amrit Kulkarni’s not catching waves, he’s helping build big thingsWhenever Amrit Kulkarni flies through Los Angeles International Airport, he takes a moment to reflect on what he calls his “small but meaningful part” in the airport’s growth—successfully defending LAX’s $13 billion expansion plan against four consolidated lawsuits a decade ago. Kulkarni, chair of Meyers Nave’s land use practice group, has many chances for such quiet moments. Quite a few California structures bear his fingerprints. The NBA’s Kings play in a glistening stadium in …
The Science Teacher
How Heidi Keefe used a tin recipe box and a pink stuffed animal to explain tech to juriesIn 2014, a fast-growing technology company called ServiceNow faced a lawsuit from Hewlitt-Packard, which claimed it had violated eight of HP's patents. HP wanted unspecified damages, plus royalties going forward. One patent was for technology that stored information alphabetically in a computer system. It involved complicated issues that the smartest layperson might struggle to understand. But when Heidi Keefe, a partner at Cooley LLP, went to court, she didn’t talk about bits or bytes or …
Palace Intrigue
Bronze Star recipient Phillip Hosp’s path to the law went through IraqPhillip Hosp is the first to admit he wasn’t the best cadet in the ROTC at Boston University. “I was good at enjoying the social aspects of college,” he says, “but not at pretending to be a soldier.” 9/11 changed all that. “It recalibrated the experience you were going into,” he says. “Instead of being about my own personal growth and adventure, it became about serving your country in a time of war.” Hosp trained to become an armored tank officer at Fort Knox. Tanks, he says, …
The Enforcement Mechanism
How Daniel T. Pascucci became an expert in global asset recoveryFifteen years ago, Daniel T. Pascucci represented a Southern California company in a seemingly straightforward case against an Asian company that failed to honor the terms of a business deal. The facts of the case made a winning verdict seem like a slam dunk. Then Pascucci raised a crucial question: If we win, can we collect? He’s been answering that question ever since. In the last two decades, Pascucci, a managing member at Mintz in San Diego, has built a sizable reputation for global …
Medium Cool
Why you can't fluster Mona HannaAt age 7, Mona Z. Hanna was standing on the balcony of her home in Cairo when sirens sounded, bombs shook the city, and her father threw himself on top of her. For the family, it was the final straw. Within days, they were on a boat for the United States, fleeing the three-year-long War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt. It was during that voyage that Hanna became a lawyer for the first time. She and her younger sister were fighting over a favorite doll. Her parents, both attorneys, decided …
Barbara Moser's Big Picture
The San Francisco attorney puts her psychology creds to work in her family law practiceAn attorney was racing to the elevator at the San Francisco Superior Court when he spotted Barbara Moser, a founding partner at Kaye Moser Hierbaum Ford, and came to an abrupt stop. Early in her career, Moser had out-strategized him on a child custody case, and he had refused to ride in an elevator with her ever since. He spun around and waited for the next one. The irony: Moser’s winning “strategy” had been to treat the attorney and his client with unrelenting kindness. It paid off; the …
A Figure of Speech
Mane Sardaryan learned English with the help of Lucille Ball and Charles DickensIn 2011, Mane Sardaryan, a member of the championship team in the National Civil Trial Competition held at Loyola Law School, performed direct cross-examination of expert witnesses, responded to and argued objections, and gave closing arguments in her team’s victory. Fifteen years earlier, she didn’t know a word of English. The 31-year-old Sardaryan, now a litigation associate at Skiermont Derby in Los Angeles, was born in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. At age 5, her family moved to …
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