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
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 …
Driven
Craig McClellan argues complicated cases for two-minute mindsIt was literally a he said/she said case. In 1999, plaintiff attorney Craig McClellan’s client said she crashed into a concrete barrier alongside the freeway when the defendant’s truck swerved into her lane. The defendant denied he had gone over the line. Witness accounts differed. McClellan knew he had to make a complicated scenario clear for the jury. That’s where the model and photos came in. McClellan had one witness point out the position of the truck and his client’s car on a …
The Lawyer Judges Wish They Could Clone
Rick Watters keeps his focus on the client—and his ego in checkA $5 million settlement offer was on the table. Some attorneys would have scooped it up, but Rick Watters, president of Miles, Sears & Eanni in Fresno, let it sit. His client had suffered severe back and pelvis injuries after his van was rear-ended by a Southern California Edison truck during a snowstorm, and Watters was irritated that Edison had “offered nothing” until the jury was out in the 2011 trial. “I was bothered a gigantic corporation like this can push people around,” he …
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