THE CLAY AWARDS

• Today is a big day in my life, although I am not home to experience it for myself due to this trip.
• California Lawyer is the magazine of The State Bar of California.  Each year, they select lawyers from the different areas of practice for “Lawyer of the Year” (thus, the acronym, CLAY – California Lawyer’s Attorneys of the Year).  Well, I found out after we left Florida that I was selected, along with my co-counsel in a big case that we won, as the two Attorneys of the Year in family law.
• It’s a great honor and a welcome surprise, of course.  The closest I’d gotten prior to this was semi-finalist for San Diego family law attorney of the year; this is a statewide award, and I actually won.  I’d also previously received the State Bar’s award for my pro bono work (voluntary provision of legal services to the poor).
• Tonight, March 20th, the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court hands out the awards at a ceremony in San Francisco.  Since I could not be there, my brother (Bob) and his wife (Leslie) graciously agreed to accept the award on my behalf.  They are enjoying a romantic visit to that fabulous city as well.
• Hopefully, Bob will send me some photos, which I can add to this page when they are received.

• IF you’re interested . . . my legal career spans some 31 years at this point.  Having started school at age 4, I graduated at age 17 and have been self-supporting ever since.  I worked as a legal secretary from 1980 to 1988, and as a paralegal for the next 8 years.  I’ve been a lawyer since 1996 (15+ years now).
• I was one of only two admittees to enter my law school without a bachelor’s degree.  I was the only one to graduate – and ended up #11 in my class, which placed me in the top 7%.  During law school, I externed for one of the most respected justices of the California Court of Appeal.  While awaiting my Bar results, I externed for the man who is now the Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
• Within three (3) months of being sworn into the Bar, I made law with an appellate case that was published.  In the case, I took on the nation’s then largest ($72 billion) mortgage company, which was trying to rid itself of loans on properties damaged in the Northridge Earthquake by falsely declaring defaults in an effort to get HUD to pay off on the mortgage insurance.
• During my first year out of law school, I clerked for the L.A. Superior Court in the Family Law Department.  I was assigned to six of the eleven judicial officers and gained extremely valuable experience.  It’s also how I got into family law.
• From there, I worked for a large family law firm in L.A.  I returned to San Diego in 1999, with one client and $15,000 in borrowed funds.  I worked out of a bedroom in my brother’s house.  Within one year, I had a bustling practice and managed to get my own place.
• I made law again in San Diego, when I challenged the constitutionality of a local rule by which certain bench officers were refusing to read the papers that had been filed unless one first jumped through a bunch of procedural hoops.  The real problem was that one refused to read the papers even after being asked to do so.  He insisted on ruling based on an “educated guess”.  The case effected positive change in the way family law cases were processed in San Diego County.
• One lawyer involved in that case referred another case to me, knowing I wasn’t fearful of “suing the government”.  It was the big civil rights case that we tried before a jury in 2007.  The trial took seven (7) weeks, during which time I lived out of my RV in Orange County.  Orange County’s Child Protective Services had become so “corrupt” (the Appellate Court’s word, not mine) that its supervisors and administrators were protecting their own from allegations of wrongdoing at the expense of children and families.  In our case, a worker lied to a Juvenile Dependency Referee to cover-up her own misconduct, accusing the mother of doing the thing the worker had in fact done.  Based on the social worker’s lie, the Referee pulled the mother’s two daughters from her care and put them in a home, and then foster care.  The worker told the mother she better “submit” to her, or she would never see her kids again.  The County backed up its worker all the way.  It would take the mother six years and cost her about $500K before she finally regained shared physical custody of her two little girls, who were now pre-teens.  A family was destroyed to cover up a social worker’s lie.  By the time the County was done appealing to the CA Court of Appeal, CA Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court, interest and additional attorney fees had accumulated, and the County ended up writing a check for just under $10 million.  I had offered to settle the case for $500,000 – but their lawyer kept telling me it was “way too much”.
• Most recently, I made law in a case involving a court’s retroactive modification of a support order.  Not sexy, but it meant parties could rely on existing support orders rather than fearing that they will be retroactively “gutted” by the court down the road.  . . . But . . . just as I was leaving for this trip, I sensed a new effort to make an end-run around this law . . . meaning more work to be done when I return!
• So there’s a quick bio.  I think everyone deserves a break every 30 or so years in their career, so I’m taking a 4-month break now.  Everything I do at home is serious, so I’ve set out for some fun and frivolity – to relax and enjoy myself.  Soon enough, I’ll get back to changing the world . . . for now, I’m seeing it!