#010: Juvaria Khan - Founder and Director of the Appellate Project Non-Profit

This transcript was generated by AI.

Juvaria Khan [00:00:00]:

I think a lot of times, appellate work, when it's messaged in law school, is as something that's largely academic or removed from everyday life, where the reality could not be further from the truth. Appellate courts impact almost every aspect of our personal lives, right? How we vote, how we pray, the quality of our education, our criminal justice system. There are so many aspects of our lives where appellate courts are asked to decide, as a matter of law, what our laws mean and how they should apply not just to a specific person, but to broad swaths of the country, sometimes the entire country.

Jonah Perlin [00:00:39]:

Welcome to How I Lawyer, a podcast where I talk to attorneys from throughout the profession about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. Well, I'm your host, Jonah Perlin, a law professor in Washington, DC. Now let's get started. Hello, and welcome back to episode number ten of the How I Lawyer podcast. Yes, you heard that right. We've reached double digits. More than 5000. Listens in. And I'm so grateful to everyone who shared this podcast on social media, left a review on itunes, or even just sent me an email encouraging me to keep going. I'm so excited for today's episode with my friend Juvaria Khan, the founder and director of an amazing nonprofit organization called the Appellate Project, based here in Washington, D. C. Which seeks to diversify the appellate bar. I met Juvaria during her time at Muslim Advocates. She asked me to come run some legal writing workshops for her staff, and I immediately jumped at the opportunity. After all, it's not every day a Muslim advocacy organization asks a Jewish law professor who works at a Catholic law school to offer advice on how to write better briefs. She and I have kept in touch over the years, and she was one of the first people I asked to join the podcast when I started it. She is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Stone Fisk scholar. She then worked at two big law firms in New York City and clerked for a judge on the Federal District Court for the District of Connecticut. She then moved to DC. To work at Muslim advocates and in November 2019 started the appellate project. In our conversation, we talk about her path from big law to impact litigation to founding a nonprofit, the importance of diversifying the appellate bar, the joys and struggles of founding a nonprofit, especially during a time of COVID and so much more. We started our conversation by discussing her path to founding The Appellate Project and what inspired her to become a lawyer in the first place. Here's Juvaria.

Juvaria Khan [00:02:25]:

So it's definitely not something that I set out thinking I would do or had an intention to do, quite frankly, just sort of taking a step back. I grew up in rural Arizona. I came of age during 911. That was a seismic shift for our small Muslim community. How we were treated changed really overnight. How we were perceived suddenly to go from a relatively unknown minority group to a national security threat was pretty jarring and very real. And it made me think a lot about who was creating these laws and had they ever met anyone who comes from one of my communities, because it didn't seem so. And that was a thread that you just start pulling and I just started reading more about history and civil rights and you just start seeing patterns and realizing that so many of the rights I, as a South Asian Muslim American have are built on the rights of people who have worked so hard before me. And I followed that interest into law school and really wanted to do civil rights work. I had no idea what it meant to really be a lawyer. As someone first generation and not knowing any lawyers growing up, law school was a very overwhelming experience. Not so much the coursework itself, but the culture. It was as if everyone was trading in this language and I did not know what they were talking about, for example, during firm recruitment, just conversations that were so over my head. I can't believe so and so would bid for this firm. That's so stupid because why would you do that if you want to go to XYZ place? I mean, how did you know that? How did you know that was the pathway or well, if I don't get this job, I'll just go work at my dad's firm, or well, so and so, my aunt's a judge, so I'll just find plan to do that. And it was like, I feel so overwhelmed and lost. It felt like a lot of bouncing around to try and figure out how to just do the work I wanted, which was impactful work for my community in the civil rights space.

Jonah Perlin [00:04:32]:

One of the things I hear from my students all the time is many of them come to law school to do the kind of work that you're describing and then it gets to sort of their 20 year and they have to make the decision, am I going to go work at a law firm? And I know you ended up making that decision and working at a law firm. And I think some people feel guilty about that or that they're doing the wrong thing. And I think other people feel like they have to do it, they have no other choice. I'd be curious if you could just talk about your thought process sort of doing that work for a period of time.

Juvaria Khan [00:05:05]:

Yeah, I hope we're moving away from shaming each other for those decisions. It's so unfair. There are so many reasons to go to a firm. First and foremost being financial, and that's just a reality for a lot of people. So I hope we move away from that culture, but it's also great training and experience. I mean, frankly, just the work ethic that gets put in you as a junior associate is something that's transferable regardless of what you're doing. Right. You're demanded excellence in your work, and that is good to learn early on. So I would say if you're a student who wants to do public interest work but you are thinking of going to a firm first, it might make it more challenging in some ways. Sure to make the jump, but you can still make the jump. Just be deliberate and mindful about two things. One is doing pro bono work and continue to grow those skills and demonstrate your interest in the area of work that you want to do. Frankly, for me, it was a great way to try out different types of pro bono cases and figure out what it is I like because I had no idea what any of this actually meant in practice. And number two, keep building your network, which sounds like the worst thing ever. I know, but really, it's just getting to know people, reach out to them, hey, what do you do? This sounds interesting. Can you talk to me about it? Those two things can really help you keep on the path and make that jump.

Jonah Perlin [00:06:27]:

And after you worked at two different law firms and clerked in Connecticut, you ultimately ended up going to Muslim advocates, where you were a senior staff attorney. Can you tell me a little bit more about that transition, especially to a new job in impact litigation?

Juvaria Khan [00:06:40]:

So when I started doing impact litigation full time, I really wanted to go to an organization that was rooted in the issues that had driven me in the first place. So working on behalf of marginalized communities, but specifically the Muslim community, my first understanding of the legal system was through what happened during 911. Right? So I have spent my whole life watching what's happening in the law and seeing how it impacts my family, people around me, my community, my loved ones. And when you're so steeped in those issues your whole life, there's real power in being able to use your legal skills to then advocate for your community on issues you care about so much and in your real life you have experienced. And that was really important to me in thinking about where I wanted to go and the type of impact litigation I wanted to do. The Muslim legal community is still relatively new and coming into itself. Obviously, Muslims have been here since the first slaves were forcibly brought over from Africa. But as a Muslim legal community, that's relatively recent.

Jonah Perlin [00:07:58]:

And then what made you decide to leave and start the appellate project?

Juvaria Khan [00:08:01]:

I was so struck by the lack of other Muslim lawyers that I saw, especially when it came to appellate cases. So as an impact litigator, you are thinking about what's happening in the appellate courts long before you file you're thinking, what's going to happen on appeal? And ten steps down the road, you're watching every other appellate case, because all of it impacts each other. And I was just struck by the fact that there were so many issues impacting the Muslim community, but so few Muslim lawyers who were really at the lead shaping those arguments and being the ones who were arguing them and pushing them forward. That's certainly not unique to the Muslim community. Right. I can count on one hand through my whole career the number of black and Latinx appellate lawyers I have ever come across who are leading these cases. And when you think about the disproportionate impact appellate cases have on those communities, it's a staggering void and disconnect. And so that led me to sort of take a step back and think about what it is that led me to law school in the first place, and was I really achieving that in the best way possible? I could continue litigating individual cases and doing this work? Or were there other ways to think about addressing the systemic barriers that often prevent other law students of color from doing this work, and what would that look like? And that just started my sort of nerdy obsession of thinking of what that could look like. And with anything you're passionate about that you just think about all the time, it's what you're working on. And so at a certain point, I was like, okay, I think if I'm going to do this, I have to make the jump.

Jonah Perlin [00:09:45]:

Fantastic. And can you tell me a little bit about what the Appellate Project is and what the organization does?

Juvaria Khan [00:09:50]:

We are a new nonprofit. We just launched in September of 2020, and our mission is to empower law students of color to thrive in the appellate field. And really what we do is we have programs that provide students resources to address the information and opportunity barriers that law students of color often face when it comes to appellate work. So just taking a step back for a lot of law students, particularly law students of color, they're first generation and often coming from communities where they didn't know any lawyers. So when you enter law school, there's a pretty decent chance you may not know what appellate work is, and you don't know what you don't know. So you miss out on the opportunities and the steps you need to take to position yourself for appellate work after graduation. And we want to change that. We want to make sure that every student has the opportunity and access to do this work. So that's really at the heart of our mission.

Jonah Perlin [00:10:50]:

And how do you execute that mission? What are the kinds of programs that the Appellate Project is doing?

Juvaria Khan [00:10:56]:

Yeah, so we have two programs that we've launched so far. The first is a partnership with Howard University School of Law and their civil rights clinic. Our second program is our outreach program. This is a national program, so it's not just limited to Howard students, and it houses a few different projects. The main one is our mentorship program. So this connects law students of color who are interested in appellate practice with appellate practitioners. And throughout the mentorship program we provide additional resources like clerkship support, networking opportunities, substantive skill building opportunities. We just had our first legal writing workshop, just really trying to provide students with the holistic set of tools they need if appellate practice is something they want to do. In addition to that, we do talks at law schools about appellate practice, demystifying what it is, what you need to do if this is something you're interested in, connecting students with appellate practitioners as well so they can learn from them and sort of meet them in a relaxed environment. And we also do under this outreach programming events that are aimed at highlighting issues of significant impact, especially for communities of color. I think a lot of times appellate work, when it's messaged in law school, is as something that's largely academic or removed from everyday life, where the reality could not be further from the truth. Appellate courts impact almost every aspect of our personal lives, right? How we vote, how we pray, the quality of our education, our criminal justice system. There are so many aspects of our lives where appellate courts are asked to decide as a matter of law what our laws mean and how they should apply not just to a specific person, but to broad swaths of the country, sometimes the entire country, right? So there's no juries in this process. It's a deliberative process of judges who are making this determination. Obviously, appellate attorneys shape the arguments and present them and try to convince the judges so they have a huge role as well. And sometimes they often end up becoming judges themselves. But it's really critical that in that process, because you're deciding matters of law, that you have people with diverse lived experiences and perspectives who are informing those decisions. Given the huge impact it has on our everyday lives and the often disproportionate impact on communities of color. You don't see people like yourselves in this space. There are people like you doing this work, and we need more of you. And so we want students to visualize and see themselves in these spaces. So to that end, we did an event, for example, with Ramzi Kassam after his Supreme Court argument in the no Fly list case, Tanzin Vitanver, where we talked about what it was like for him sort of his journey to do that work and end up getting an 80 decision from the Supreme Court. Obviously he's a brilliant attorney, but he never clerked. He has been in public interest his whole career. It's a very atypical path in many ways. But we want students to know there are pathways for people like you. There's not just one way to do that. There are people who look like you doing that. And one thing we try to draw out in these programs also is what is it like to do that work and be from that community yourself, which is something that Ramsey could talk about in that case, given that all of the plaintiffs who are being impacted were Muslims and Muslim men in particular, just like him.

Jonah Perlin [00:14:35]:

Honestly, I think this is such a powerful way to frame this conversation. If we can't make the legal community, and specifically the appellate legal community, more diverse and more representative of the lived experience of those who are most affected, that can just have a devastating effect on the system as a whole. But I guess my next question is it's one thing to identify the problem, but another to fix it. How are you and the Appellate Project working to encourage students of color to pursue these careers and what techniques are you using to try and make that.

Juvaria Khan [00:15:03]:

Happen so they don't know what appellate work is? If you don't know what it is, you miss out on the steps you need to take and you're at a disadvantage to getting those opportunities. Another challenge is just how insular the Appellate Bar can be. So much is based on who you know, right? So how recruiting and hiring gets done. It tends to be a handful of students at a handful of law schools who are connected with the right professors or judges who sort of get their foot in the door. That excludes a ton of highly qualified law students of color who simply are coming in without those networks and don't have and therefore miss out on those opportunities and access. And so it just sort of keeps compounding. I think one other thing I'd add is when you look at a space, whatever space it is, and you don't see people who look like you, the message you receive is I don't belong here. And so I think a lot of students self select out because it's very discouraging to not see anyone from your community in a space and wonder if it's a space where you would actually fit in and be able to thrive. Please consider it because we need you. You bring strength to our system. We want you there. And there are a whole lot of people who also feel the same way. And that's been really amazing is to see the response from the Appellate Bar, just people jumping in on this and wanting to mentor these students and be part of the programming and really just say that there is a space for you here and we need you here because it strengthens our entire system when we have diversity.

Jonah Perlin [00:16:43]:

I think you're so right that one more person doing this work is incredibly powerful. I mean, personal story for me. My mom was one of the first 40 women rabbis in the country and she was also the first woman to have a woman assistant. And she had students, young kids, and one of them went up to her and said, can a man be a rabbi? Because from that student's perspective, they had never seen a male rabbi, despite the thousands of years that men had had a 100% completion rate of that job. So I think it's really powerful. I do want to ask one quick follow up, which is, can you talk a little bit about sort of what appellate works like and maybe what you personally enjoyed about it first?

Juvaria Khan [00:17:25]:

The rhythm of your work is going to be a lot different from trial work. I have spent most of my career doing trial work, and it was only when I got a taste of appellate work, I was like, oh, this is much more suited to my personality.

Jonah Perlin [00:17:38]:

You found your rhythm.

Juvaria Khan [00:17:39]:

I found my rhythm. So it's a lot of thinking deeply about complex legal issues, legal research and writing. And I don't want to say it's not collaborative, you do work with other people, but a lot of the time is going to be alone time and thinking time and writing time. And of course, there's the oral argument aspect of it as well. I think one thing I'd say is this is something that women often tell me in particular who are appellate attorneys is they love the lifestyle of being an appellate litigator because you know your deadlines in advance so you have more control over your schedule. Whereas with litigation, there's often fire drills coming up that you have to put out and unexpected emergencies. So just the rhythm and control of your work is more stable in some ways.

Jonah Perlin [00:18:27]:

Got it. And how many students are you reaching and how many mentors have you secured in the first couple of months?

Juvaria Khan [00:18:32]:

Yeah, so just looking at the mentorship program, for example, I had originally designated, we'd get 30, maximum 50 students. We received about 300 applications, and we had even more attorneys reach out to become mentors. So it was just an amazing response. So we have over 200 students in that inaugural class, and then, of course, the students in the clinic, and then students who we've reached out to through those law school talks and other sort of programming highlighting issues that are happening in the appellate space. A few hundred, I would say, at this point in the last just three months.

Jonah Perlin [00:19:12]:

That's fantastic. And sort of what's the long term goal? What's the next step for the appellate project?

Juvaria Khan [00:19:18]:

What's next for us is making sure that we continue to workshop and improve the programs that we're doing and ensure that they are responsive to what the students are looking for. Continue building these connections between students in the appellate bar. The joy of doing this work is I get to connect amazing people with other amazing people. And when you do that, amazing things happen. Right. So these students are phenomenal and really they're doing the hard work. And once they connect with folks in the Appellate Bar, it's been amazing in just a short amount of time to see what's come out of those connections. So I'm excited to see how that community continues to build, how that network continues to build, these opportunities continue to expand. And my short and long term hope is that truly this is race equity work, that highly qualified students should have equal access and opportunity not dictated by their racial background. And so I think the long term goals is these students enter the appellate space and feel supported as they continue to grow in their careers and hopefully some of them go on to become appellate lawyers and then maybe appellate judges or other prestigious positions. My long term hope with the Appellate Bar is to challenge these long held assumptions about how we think about who is in these spaces, how we recruit, how we hire, who we promote, who we give opportunities to. I think it often feels like this is how the system is, how can we change it? This is how it's always been. But a system is made of individuals and there is immense power that each of us have in our individual decision making process that can change people's entire careers and life just by being a mentor, just by giving them a chance, just by seeing them. So I hope the ripple effects of that, of folks challenging sort of how they've approached this and of course, once they see these students and see how amazing they are, I think they'll want to work with them more.

Jonah Perlin [00:21:19]:

Right.

Juvaria Khan [00:21:19]:

I'm excited to see what can come.

Jonah Perlin [00:21:20]:

I also can't wait to see what's to come. I do want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the nuts and bolts of starting an organization. I know 2020 is not the ideal year to do that, but can you tell me a little bit more about what it's like?

Juvaria Khan [00:21:33]:

Yeah, I struggle with answering that question because there's so many things to it. In many ways, I'm learning from scratch. I'm learning in real time and then applying it and putting it forward. But you know what? For anyone listening who thinks that that sounds crazy, you're doing that in law school already, you're doing that in your jobs. It's the same process of just figuring out your first year associate. What am I doing? I don't know. I just got this assignment. I have no idea what this means. How am I even supposed to start? You figure it out. Right. So it's the same steps of just there's the legal aspect. How do I incorporate, how do I get a 501? What are charitable solicitation requirements? But then you teach yourself, what is development work? How do I do outreach? What's strategic planning? How do I measure the effectiveness of programs? It's building something. It's building a community. And all of that work of building something is exactly the same stuff that I used to do, building cases as a litigator. Right. It's just a different way of doing it. But I found that in many ways it's very transferable, of just being creative and finding the resources you need to make your case.

Jonah Perlin [00:22:41]:

I think it's great to hear that that legal training helped you think through how to try to build this new organization. What were the sort of one or two things you've done in the last year that have had the most value add, but you had to spend a lot of time, I'm sure, on things that you didn't really want to do, right? Figuring out how to become a 501, setting up an email server. What are the choices you made or things you did that had the most value?

Juvaria Khan [00:23:07]:

I think first and foremost, being clear about our mission. Right. Everything comes from the mission. So anytime I have a question on how to proceed and what's the right course of action? Our mission is to empower law students of color to thrive in the appellate field. That means we are rooted in our law students. We want to make sure they feel seen, encouraged. You just come back to that same mission and what course of action could I take that would help further that? So being clear about the mission at the very beginning, that's been incredibly helpful because there's so many decision points where you could go so many ways. I think the other thing I'd say is just making a decision early on to trust in myself and believe in myself and be gritty enough to see through whatever gets thrown at me. So let me put it another way. Maybe one of the best pieces of advice I got when I was starting out was from another lawyer who left to start her own organization. And she said, you are thinking too much like a lawyer. As a lawyer, everything has to be perfect. You need to have it ready and tight. When you present something, when you start something, you're essentially an entrepreneur, so you're going to mess up and you're going to fail. And that's good because it's teaching you what doesn't work. So you get closer to finding what does. And I think having that mindset, obviously I try to be very thoughtful and deliberate with what we're doing, but it takes some of the feeling, especially, I think as women of color, we feel if everything needs to be perfect before I do anything, that's allowed me grace to continue moving forward and pushing, even when I hit walls or feel discouraged.

Jonah Perlin [00:24:47]:

Right. What's really interesting about the first part of your answer is it almost sounds like the mission statement is like the theory of the case when you're an appellate litigator, right. No matter what fact that gets thrown at you or what piece of law gets thrown at you, if you know your theory of the case. That is a huge grounding influence on every decision that you have to make later. But if you don't have it and you try to find it as you're going, you can go in some really crazy directions.

Juvaria Khan [00:25:14]:

It's a great way to put it. I love that.

Jonah Perlin [00:25:16]:

So now that the organization has started, can you talk about a day or a week in the life of a founder of a brand new nonprofit organization?

Juvaria Khan [00:25:25]:

Yeah. So one of the craziest things of making this jump is that I have to schedule and manage my time entirely myself. Right. When you're clerking or you're at a firm or wherever, so much of your schedule is by litigation deadlines or your colleagues and sort of getting drafts, et cetera. But here's a huge amount of work, and now figure out how to prioritize and structure. It's a learning process. But what I've found is I try to schedule certain days where I have my meetings. These might be folks who are interested in getting more involved with our programs or partnering, or who I have wanted to follow up with and ask about maybe doing an event down the road or mentoring our students, et cetera. I'm an introvert, so I need to kind of put those all together and just rip the Band Aid off. I love people, but I'm with you. I need my recharge time. So I find that it's helpful to schedule those on certain days, and then I try to block out at least one half a day of a week to just do deep dive work on a project that I'm working on. So really, there's so many challenges that come up once you launch something, right. You see how it works in real time. You need time to sit there and workshop and figure it out. So I'll sort of have that time without email or calls or meetings scheduled to think deeply and workshop an issue. There's email time going through my inbox. There's a lot of admin stuff. Right now, I'm the person on staff, so I don't have admin or support for that. So right now I'm doing a lot of that, which I try to just, again, segment my time as best I can so that I'm not overwhelmed that I have to do all the things all at once. So really, it's wearing a lot of different hats. There's the admin side, the legal side, the program side, the outreach side. What I love is that there's such a variety. The work is always changing, and as you build and move on stages, what that looks like always changes. So that's a really fun aspect of it. Always learning and growing and challenging yourself.

Jonah Perlin [00:27:33]:

Right. I'm sure that's the fun aspect, but also the challenging aspect. Right. Trying to balance all of it. It's like that book, right, with all of the man with all the hats, and you're trying to balance all of them on. Top of each other.

Juvaria Khan [00:27:43]:

I joke with my husband sometimes that I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes I just miss those docker view days you're clicking through.

Jonah Perlin [00:27:56]:

Totally. Do you miss Litigating?

Juvaria Khan [00:27:58]:

Good question. I asked myself this. I feel like the two things I enjoyed most about Litigating were the building aspects and working with communities that I care about on issues I care about. I still get to do both of those. I still very much follow legal development. So if I'm being totally honest, I think this new role, as scary and challenging as it is at times, is so much better suited to my personality and the range of things and skills that I get to develop. I really enjoy in a way that I at least don't yet miss Litigating.

Jonah Perlin [00:28:35]:

And if someone is listening and thinking, this sounds great, maybe I'd like to start my own organization, what would you say they should be asking themselves before they take that leap?

Juvaria Khan [00:28:42]:

You have to be a little crazy. You should definitely be passionate about what it is you're doing and know that you are willing to see it through no matter what. You have to accept that you will fail many times and hit a lot of walls and that it will be hard. But you have to care enough about whatever it is that's driving you. That's I think the most important thing because it can be very discouraging and very hard. And so you have to have that grit and passion. I think as far as skill sets gosh, hard work ethic, like ability to work independently. One thing that I think, regardless of what you do in your legal career, just work well with others. In law school, we're just set up to be we're all competing against each other, our rank and what activities we're doing. And it feels very competitive. But really just being kind to your colleagues wherever it is that you work, will get you much farther than being unpleasant.

Jonah Perlin [00:29:41]:

I totally agree. As one boss used to always say to me, a rising tide raises all ships. And I think we in the legal profession too often forget that. I guess my other follow up is were you ever afraid that this wasn't going to work? Or maybe to put it a different way, what advice would you give to lawyer who do ultimately decide to take this leap?

Juvaria Khan [00:30:01]:

When thinking about making the jump to starting this organization, it was very scary and it felt like jumping off a cliff in many ways. I think in the legal profession we don't really have a culture of entrepreneurship or starting new things in this way. Right. There's sort of a typical path or traditional path, I should say, that we follow and that people respect and value. What do you do? Oh, you do that thing. I understand it, I respect it, I value it. But what really helped me was looking at women who were brave enough and confident enough in themselves, especially women of color, to just bake the jump in whatever it is they were doing. And I would say from watching and observing that for the students, and especially for women of color, I would say we are often taught over and over again that we're not the right people to do something right. We're not experienced enough. I've been told point blank in starting this, I'm not experienced enough, or the right person or whatever it is, and it's easy to internalize that, but don't listen to it because you are exactly the right person. And I feel that way in the work I do, which is not to say someone else couldn't do it, but I feel like all of the uncertainty and feeling lost through law school and my legal career is what helps inform the work I'm doing now. I couldn't do it if I hadn't had those experiences. So whatever it is you want to do, don't count yourself out because you felt uncertain or anxious or whatever it is in the past. That's often your biggest strength.

Jonah Perlin [00:31:45]:

So what is one thing you wish you knew the day you graduated law school? That you know now?

Juvaria Khan [00:31:51]:

Your career is long and is going to take many unexpected paths and twists and turns, and it's okay. You don't have to know everything right now, and you're not going to, and it's still going to work out, so just relax.

Jonah Perlin [00:32:03]:

And how do you relax?

Juvaria Khan [00:32:05]:

I enjoy painting. I enjoy art. And I think bringing a creative aspect has helped me think outside the box in many ways when it comes to the issues that we work on. It's such a Zen way for me to relax and just kind of detach. I love running, reading, as you can see the introvert theme.

Jonah Perlin [00:32:25]:

Yeah, right.

Juvaria Khan [00:32:26]:

In a non pandemic world, much of my time revolves around eating and finding food and just eating. I could talk about food and eat food all the time.

Jonah Perlin [00:32:36]:

And I guess my last question before we end, I always like to ask guests what the best piece of advice they ever received was or a piece of advice that they'd want to share with others.

Juvaria Khan [00:32:46]:

I think received, I would say from my parents, from my dad. It's the one thing nobody can take from you is your education. So work hard, study hard. From my mom, it would be, don't get so consumed by what you're doing that you forget the joy in what you do. I think advice that I would give to students is there are so many qualities that you're told as a law student are required to make you succeed. But whatever you do, I think, at least for me, I found the single most important quality is grit. Just being gritty. Don't give up. You're going to hit walls. Keep going. You'll find another path. The world is never ending. Just keep going.

Jonah Perlin [00:33:31]:

Again. That was Juvaria Khan, founder and director of the appellate project. If you want to learn more about her or the organization, you can find more information on the web theappelletproject.org. I think what I appreciated most was the way that she described the importance of representation in the profession and the power that empowering even one person has in strengthening the system over time. If you enjoyed this interview, I encourage you to check out the previous episodes and subscribe to the How I Lawyer podcast. Wherever you get your podcast, as always, you can reach me at howilawyer@gmail.com or at Jonah Perlin on Twitter. Thanks again to Julie Maria. Thanks for listening and have a great week.