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
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 …
In the Style of E.B. White
Martin Buchanan enjoys a good fight; he just prefers it in writingOn Feb. 23, 2011, Martin Buchanan received a phone call and wanted to shout for joy. He stifled the urge, however, when he looked around his new shared office; he felt he didn’t know his colleagues well enough to disrupt their work. So he went back to his reading: “I don’t think I even took the day off.” The news he didn’t share that day was something many attorneys spend their entire careers longing to hear: He’d just won a unanimous decision before the U.S. Supreme Court. With …
A Midwestern Soul
Nancy Sher Cohen is firm but fairThe jurors in the Fort Worth courtroom, some with arms crossed, looked curiously at Nancy Sher Cohen. It was 2012. Cohen, now a partner at Lathrop Gage, had flown from Los Angeles to Texas to handle the voir dire in the last phase of a case she had already tried and won. The current issue was attorneys’ fees, and the attorney on the other side had gone on and on to the 42 prospective jurors about the “Hollywood lawyer” and the exorbitant rates she charged. A decade before, Cohen, the …
Trying History
How Dale Minami took on the U.S. government and rewrote an internment survivor’s storyGrowing up just south of LA, Dale Minami rarely heard his parents speak about the three years they endured at Rohwer, one of 10 locations where the U.S. government incarcerated 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. “They were embarrassed that their patriotism was questioned,” says Minami. Despite that reticence, he sensed a “subtle bitterness” in his father. Years later, Minami would become a voice for the internees, leading a landmark civil rights lawsuit that overturned …
Moving Past Binary
Will Chuchawat cuts to the chaseDon’t blink. You might miss Will Chuchawat. It took him just two years to earn his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (“I was an uber-nerd,” he admits), and it was only a few years after law school that Sheppard Mullin tapped him to establish its Shanghai office. At 31, he was named partner, one of the youngest in Sheppard Mullin’s 90-year history. Now, as chair of the firm’s M&A practice, he bills roughly 3,100 hours a year while closing 30 to 40 deals. How …
The Lawyer Off Main Street
Juanita Brooks knows what to do with "a dry patent case"In 2016, as Juanita Brooks geared up to defend Fresenius Medical Care Holdings over charges it had infringed patents for a dialysis machine from archrival Baxter International, she knew her biggest challenge was getting jurors to give a damn. Two multibillion-dollar companies slugging it out over a tiny part of a complicated medical device? Hardly a riveting issue. So Brooks focused on a more relatable theme: fairness. “It wasn’t covering technology that they actually developed,” says …
The Trial Specialist
Jennifer L. Keller’s path to success came via odd jobs and public defenseJennifer L. Keller was preparing to cross-examine Mattel CEO Robert Eckert in a bet-the-company IP case whose media nickname sounded more like a toy-chest brawl: Barbie v. Bratz. She was representing the maker of the Bratz doll, which Mattel claimed was its intellectual property. “He left Mattel, made some drawings of it while he was living with his parents in Minnesota, then came back to Mattel,” says Keller of her client. “They took the position that, when he came back, everything he …
From the Top
Elizabeth Cabraser tackles Volkswagen, Takata and Exxon—and seldom misses a drumming gigOn a Saturday morning in mid-September 2015, Elizabeth Cabraser was making her yearly pilgrimage to the Monterey Jazz Festival. Cabraser, who considered going into music as a career and still drums with bands on the weekend, was thrown off rhythm by a radio news flash: The Environmental Protection Agency had accused Volkswagen of programming 480,000 diesel-powered cars so that they seemed to perform better on emissions tests than they actually did. A partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & …
Kornberg's Bet
Jessie Kornberg makes connections and pursues justice at Bet TzedekAfter the verdict was rendered in a 2013 trademark infringement case, attorneys on both sides hurried out of the courtroom to quiz jury members about what they liked and what they didn’t—what the attorneys did well, and what they could do better. All except Jessie Kornberg, the co-lead, and winning, attorney for Bird Marella, who rose slowly from her chair. She was eight months pregnant and wasn’t running after anything. Outside the courtroom, though, she found all 12 jurors and two …
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