#013: Tiffany Wright - Civil Rights Lawyer and Clinic Director

This transcript was generated by AI.

Tiffany Wright [00:00:00]:

For me, the mark of good writing. And this is something that I definitely picked up at the Court of Appeals with my judge, Judge Tatel, is if I am reading something and I stop for any reason, I've made a mistake. Something is not clear, something did not flow, and I have to stop. And so clarity, simplicity, and also the narrative, what is the thing that I want readers to walk away with are things that I have aiming for in everything that I write. And my process is geared towards that.

Jonah Perlin [00:00:35]:

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. Today, my guest on the podcast is my Georgetown law classmate Tiffany Wright. Tiffany is the co director at the Howard University Law School's human and Civil Rights clinic. Before coming to Howard this past fall, tiffany worked as an associate at two prominent DC. Law firms, first Wilmer Hill, and more recently at Orwick, Harrington and Sutcliffe LLP, where she remains a managing associate. Tiffany is a graduate of the University of Maryland Goterps and the Georgetown University Law Center, Go Hoyas, where she completed her law degree at night, while also working full time as a law clerk and paralegal at the US. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland. Tiffany started her legal career as a law clerk to three of Washington, D. C's. Most prominent federal judges. Judge Royce Lamberth on the United States District Court for the District of Washington, D. C. Judge David Tatel on the United States Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit and Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the United States Supreme Court. In our conversation, we discussed how Tiffany was able to complete law school at night with a full time job and a young son at home, the many skills she learned as a law clerk, including how to write opinions, in complex and technical areas, the role and strategy behind amicus briefs, including those drafted by her clinic, the power of representation and diversity in our profession and how to best integrate the policy behind the law into written legal advocacy. We started by discussing her remarkable path to becoming a lawyer. That began with a family tragedy, took a detour with some helpful advice from a lawyer who came to her aid as a child and continues today with her role leading the charge, protecting the rights of those who need that protection the most. Here's Tiffany.

Tiffany Wright [00:02:24]:

So it's bittersweet because I am a lawyer, because my childhood was so horrific in some ways, and so I found myself. My father was an army veteran. He was a correctional officer at DC. Jail. I was raised very much to believe in law enforcement and to view them as a safe space because of the respect that my father and my mother had for law enforcement and the military and all forms of law enforcement officers. But I also grew up seeing the real tragedy of poverty. And so my grandmother had escaped a very abusive marriage, moved to DC with her five children. We all lived in the same house. That's me, my mom, and her four sisters and brothers, my cousins and my grandmother. And slowly, as I was a child, I started to see the effects of the poverty that was taking over the area where we lived. And so my grandmother became a heavy drinker. My mother and her sisters all became addicted to some form of drug. I often tell people, if there was a drug in the 80s that existed, somebody in my house did it or sold it. And my uncles became wrapped up in selling drugs, and I just watched how it destroyed them. And then finally, when I was seven, as I'm watching this sort of destruction of my household, my uncles got sent away to prison, and my aunts are struggling heavily with drug addiction and waking up to people with guns in the house and needles everywhere. And it was chaotic and crazy. But it wasn't until I was seven and my father was murdered. Answered the door. Somebody knocked at the door. He answered it, and he was shot to death. And then I saw in the wake of that, I am suffering, I am in pain. And nobody in this community that I was raised to believe in came. No police officer ever came. No prosecutor ever came. Nobody ever came and said, hey, this horrible thing happened. We've looked into it, and this is the outcome, or, we are trying to figure out what happened. There was none of that. And I was so angry and felt like I wanted to do something to change that. I knew something had gone horribly wrong. And it wasn't until maybe about six or seven months after father's funeral, he had life insurance and his military pension and all of that, and it was put into a trust. And there was a lawyer who was managing the trust. His name was Leonard Mccantz. And we go to Mr. Mccantz's office, and the first thing that hit me was, wow, this is somebody who looks like me. He has a whole office, and his name is on the front of it. And his whole staff was black. I had never been exposed to this, and it just changed my life. And it's part of why I am a huge believer in just representation and having people in the legal community that look like me. And that's what Mr. Mccantz was for, so and he was there to help, finally. Nobody had helped. And he was the only person in the aftermath of my father's murder that said, I'm here to help you and your mom work through some of this. And I asked him whatever you are. I didn't even know what a lawyer was, but whatever you are, how do I become that? And he said, Reading a lot and being a good writer. And I said, I can absolutely do that. And I became obsessed with that throughout all of my middle school, high school, and of course, it was a windy road. I had decided that whatever this thing was that an attorney did, that's what I wanted to do. And it took me a while to get there. I had really struggled in undergrad. I am very open because I want students who come from this background to understand that you can struggle and still make it. I have F's on my undergraduate transcript. I'm not ashamed of that. I'm actually quite proud of it now because I nearly dropped out in my sophomore year. And I said, look, like everybody in my family has a job at the mall or at the grocery store. My grandmother was a laundress. She washed clothes and they are fine. I can just go do that. Why am I trying so hard to do this thing that I'm obviously not good at? And thank God. Actually and you know who it was? It was Mr. Mccantz saw me standing at the subway. I hadn't seen him in like years. And he said, Get in the car. And he looked at me, he said, how are you doing in college? And I said, Doing okay, but I don't think I want to do it. And he said, Your father would just be so disappointed to hear you say that. And wow, that changed everything. Because I thought, I can deal with a lot of stuff. I can't deal with my father being disappointed in me. So I got it together. I went back. I never got anything less than an A in undergraduate again. And I stuck with it. And I just again kept working it. It took a long time. After undergraduate, I took a lot of time off. I became a paralegal at a large law firm. Absolutely hated it, don't recommend it. I said I was not going to law school ever. This is the worst. And sort of walked away from it for a while. And then I got to the US attorney's office in Maryland, and that's when it all came back. And I was working with lawyers who were helping people who were me. 20 years before, I remember a young child, victim of a home invasion and being able to look at him and say, the people who did this to you, there will be justice for that. And you are going to be okay because I'm here and I had a similar circumstance. And you are going to be okay because I'm okay. And just seeing the ability to do that, which is something that I had longed for in my own life but didn't get, and then I happened to love the way we did it. The process of preparing for trial and figuring out what the facts were and what the law and how that compared to the law. I fell in love with the law all over again. And it took me back to when I was seven, and I thought, this is what I said I was going to set out to do. And so I applied for law school. Thankfully, I got into some places and I went to Georgetown, and the rest is history. That's my long and windy road to becoming a lawyer.

Jonah Perlin [00:09:17]:

Yeah. And at this point, you're several years out of undergrad, as you said. At that point, I think you'd already had your first child. How did you do law school in that world? How did you find the hours in the day to do law school at night and work full time and have a family?

Tiffany Wright [00:09:31]:

So one of the after effects of losing my dad was for many years I couldn't sleep at night because when I was a child, I was just terrified to sleep at night. And that carried with me into adulthood. I've had lifelong insomnia, and that became a real benefit to me when I was trying to raise I think my son was two or three when I started law school. I kept my job at the US Attorney's office, was working 40, sometimes more hours a week, and it was really hard. And as you know, at Georgetown, they call it the part time program sometimes, but it really isn't because you take all of your first year classes, you just do it at night, right? So it wasn't like I was going half time, like I had full credits, but did it all at night. And so it was very difficult. I really existed on maybe two or 3 hours of sleep. I got up at five to go into the office. I then would leave around 1130 or twelve to go have lunch with my son at his preschool, and then I would go back to the office until about 430 and then head to class. And depending on the day, class was either from five to seven or five to nine. I went home and I studied until one or two, sometimes later, and then I went to sleep and got up and did it all over again. And it was incredibly difficult. Every semester I had a point where I was just like, Screw it, why am I? Like, it was so hard, and I was working all the time, but eventually I made it through. And I also didn't make it easy on myself. I think I did probably far more than I should have. I did moot court and the journal. And I think I did mock trial. If there was something to do at Georgetown, I did it. And that's because I came in feeling like it was such a blessing and it was so unlikely that I would have ever ended up at a place like Georgetown that I didn't want to leave any experience on the table. And so when I left Georgetown, I wanted to be able to say, I did everything that I could have possibly done. The one thing I didn't do was publish a note. And I still beat myself up about that all the time, but that was my approach to law school. It was very hard. Being an evening student is incredibly difficult. I had to be really good at time management and being efficient. And, yeah, I made it through on caffeine and prayers.

Jonah Perlin [00:12:08]:

Any time management advice for those in the market for that, I would say.

Tiffany Wright [00:12:12]:

I calendared everything down to my shower time. I had to be incredibly aggressive about keeping a calendar and making sure that every minute of my day was accounted for. And I think one benefit of having so much going on is I didn't have time to waste. Like, hanging out at the mall or reading for pleasure wasn't something that I had the luxury of doing. And so every minute of my day was accounted for, and I would say, Get a calendar. I use the paper calendar. I still do. And sometimes you think that small things don't matter. Oh, I have a ten minute call. I don't really need to write it down. You do, so that you know that that ten minutes is accounted for. And so that's how I was. Just an aggressive calendar keeper was probably my main. And being willing to give up, it's about, what are you willing to sacrifice? I was willing to sacrifice sleep and anything that was fun for me for four years.

Jonah Perlin [00:13:10]:

I hope you found some fun in the interim, but I have now. Good. Yeah. No, I think that calendaring thing is really important, and I think what you said has also been my experience. And the experience of people that I look up to who are really good at finding time for everything is that you have to put everything down, because if you don't trust that system, or you start saying, well, I put the big things on the calendar, then the calendar no longer has any meaning. So if you're going to do it, you got to put everything down. I think that's a really good reminder for lawyers and law students, especially for people like us, who, at least in the corporate world, are tracking our time in six minute increments.

Tiffany Wright [00:13:47]:

Wright yes, I do not miss that.

Jonah Perlin [00:13:50]:

No. Neither do I. And I think we both ended up in the right place on that score. So I want to talk a little bit about your clerkship. So after you graduated from Georgetown, you were able to have three different clerkships on the District Court, the Court of Appeals, and then ultimately on the Supreme Court. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the differences between those courts and clerking on those courts especially for students who are thinking, where might I end up?

Tiffany Wright [00:14:13]:

Sure. So I remember that this was the hardest question I got during my Supreme Court interview. I was asked, what's your favorite? And I was like, well, what's the right answer here? Thankfully, I landed on what I think is the right answer, which is, I think that the most fun and the most beneficial clerkship actually is the District Court. And I say that because, let's say you're only going to do one, and you don't want to dedicate two or three years of your life to clerking. The District Court will train you in terms of the procedure and what happens every day in a courtroom. It will give you exposure to behind the scenes with judges, how they think. It will also train you to get ready for appeals, because District courts are very concerned about how to avoid being reversed, and most District Court judges are very focused on the law that they are bound by. And so it was a great year for me. It was every day there was something new happening. The issues were fascinating, everything from FOIA, which was not very interesting, but I'm thankful I learned it nonetheless, to the criminal cases. We had two major criminal issues the year that I was clerking to the Title VII work. It's just exposure to everything. And I think in the district court more of everything. But then I think for the Court of Appeals for me, is where things slowed down. But that's where I got an intense one year focus on writing and being the best writer that I could be. And in some ways, I'm blessed. And I'm lucky because I learned something from all three of my judges. And even though I answered District Court clerkship to that question at my interview, the truth is that I wouldn't give up any of them, because that second year on the Court of Appeals is where I really think I became a much better writer. And so my Court of Appeals judge, I think, and I'm biased, but I think he's the best writer on the bench. And the way that he drilled that into us as his clerks is we actually had to read our opinions to him, our draft opinions, out loud and including punctuation marks. And he would edit verbally and ask very difficult questions like, you used the same word three sentences ago. What is it doing differently here than it did there? And just forced me to focus on the power of every word in everything that I write. And if a word is not serving a purpose, then why is it there? Why are you wasting space with it? But then also exposure to very complex areas of law and things that I remember the first time I saw my first FERC administrative law issue, and I remember telling my co clerk, I understand the words that they are using. I do not understand what these sentences mean. I know what bandwidth is, but I don't know what they mean when they say it here. And the process of figuring that out and it was so hard, but so rewarding. But that's the year where I think I became a better writer. And at the Supreme Court, that clerkship is just it leaves me speechless because there's so much packed into that year. I happen to work for the best and just one of the most caring, warm people, and I count myself very lucky to have clerk for Justice Sotomayor. But what she taught me was to never, ever forget the effect these opinions have on the lives of everyday people. And part of my frustration with my background and with the lack of diversity in the Supreme Court bar is a lot of times people treat these cases as just fun intellectual puzzles, right? Like, we're just going to have a fun debate about your right to exist or your right to marry who you want. And it's totally divorced from the effects that these opinions actually have on the lives. Many of them are life or death for people. And so that's what I walked away from that final year on the Supreme Court was just how much the law matters in the lives of everyday people and how to always think about that when you are working on a case or interacting with a client and how much is writing on many of these decisions.

Jonah Perlin [00:19:12]:

Can you talk a little bit more about how those clerkships I know you talked about reading aloud, but about writing process. And not just writing process. When you're writing a Supreme Court opinion or a fiery dissent, but just a writing process for your everyday legal motion, what are some of the ways you think about a new writing process for a case?

Tiffany Wright [00:19:32]:

So the first thing for me is, before I start writing, I need to be an expert on whatever I'm writing. Because when you write before you figured it all out, that's when you end up with something that is confusing because your confusion shows in your writing. And so I always spent a great deal of time, and as a law clerk, and when I talk to people who are about to clerk, I tell them that I don't start by reading the party's briefs. As a law clerk, that was not my focus. What was the question before the court? And then I would go through the briefs only to pull out the most cited cases, and then I would read those questions and try to answer the question before the court myself, so that I have now become my own little expert in whatever this case is about. And so then when I read the briefs and I approach whether it's writing a bench memo or writing drafting an opinion, I'm pretty clear about the flow of the law and all of the different nuances in my head. And then I start typically by thinking about if I can only say one thing in this memo or one thing in this brief, what is that and how can I get that across? And for me, the mark of good writing, and this is something that I definitely picked up at the Court of Appeals with my judge, Judge Tatel, is if I am reading something and I stop for any reason, I've made a mistake, something is not clear, something did not flow, and I have to stop. And so clarity, simplicity, and also the narrative, what is the thing that I want readers to walk away with, are things that I have aiming for in everything that I write. And my process is geared towards that. I often try to distill complex things. If I only had two sentences to say this thing, what would those two sentences be? And I play a lot of games with myself that way, just to make sure that I've distilled it down to the most simple part so that it's easier for me to express.

Jonah Perlin [00:21:40]:

And when you're going through those cases, are you keeping everything in your head? Are you taking notes in the margin? I like to sort of nerd down as far as you can. Are you a highlighter? What's your process there?

Tiffany Wright [00:21:52]:

So, it depends. If I am reading electronically, then I am a heavy user of Westlaw folders and so I will highlight. And I have a folder for every tiny issue in the case. And so many times one case can be included in four different folders if the case makes four parts. I also keep a document called Research Clippings, where as I'm reading, I take out the best lines or the best paragraphs or things that really strike me and I put them in a document. And very often that Research Clippings document becomes the thing that I'm writing because I've organized all of the ideas from the cases and then I go through and I build a narrative around that. And so that is a process I stumbled on organically at the US attorney's office, writing briefs there, and it just has stuck with me. So I have a million and one Research Clippings documents on my computer. If I'm reading in paper form, in hard copy, I do not learn well by highlighting. And so I will highlight, but then I actually write the quotes down in my own hand on a separate sheet of paper because for some reason my brain has to do that in order for it to stick with me. And so then I still end up with a Research Clippings document, but it is a handwritten one. And that's what I did in some of my clerkships where we weren't allowed to work on things electronically outside of the court's computer system. So I would print cases and write it out that way.

Jonah Perlin [00:23:28]:

Wow, what a thorough research process. I hope all the law students listening will take that to heart. Certainly. I want to change gears a little and ask you about your current position at the civil rights clinic at Howard. I know you only recently moved to this work, but I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about the clinic, what it does, and more specifically about your role and vision as its co director.

Tiffany Wright [00:23:47]:

The civil rights clinic at Howard's Law School has been around for quite a while. For a long time. It was a main or flagship clinic for Howard, and it does all of the civil rights advocacy on behalf of the university. And of course, Howard's Law School is a place with a lot of history and civil rights advocacy. It has been called the West Point of the civil rights movement for civil rights lawyers. It's where Thurgood Marshall came from, who trained under Charles Hamilton Houston, and the civil rights clinic has always built on that legacy. And so advocating in the civil rights space, last year, the Appellate Project, which was founded by Juvaria Khan, approached the university about developing an appellate clinic for the university because Howard has never had an appellate focused clinic. And what the university did was they said, well, we will take our civil rights clinic and give it an appellate focus. And so they hired me and my good friend and also a Georgetown alum, Ed Williams, to come in and teach this civil rights clinic that is focused almost entirely on appellate work. And because we were building this thing from the ground up because it hadn't had this appellate focus initially, we decided that for our first semester, we would focus on amicus briefs. And we view our role, given the history of Howard in the civil rights arena, as the keepers of history. And so if you read our amicus briefs, we are very often focused on contextualizing today's legal decisions and legal opinions within the history of civil rights generally. And so that was our practice primarily for last semester. This is our second semester teaching, and this semester we are actually representing real clients, which is going to be new to involve the students in that we will be handling the appeal of a prisoner in the 9th Circuit who is subject to religious discrimination. So that is what we've primarily done at the clinic. We teach every Wednesday morning, which is always a fun and happy time, and outside of that, we work with the students on our cases.

Jonah Perlin [00:26:03]:

I want to ask you a little bit about amicus briefs. I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit about how you see amicus brief practice, what its role in appellate advocacy today is.

Tiffany Wright [00:26:14]:

I think amicus briefs have gotten a bad rap in the sense that there are and to be fair, there are a lot of worthless amicus briefs, to be honest. There are briefs that simply repeat what the parties have said in different words. And so the first thing we teach our students is that we are not in that business. We are not filing what we call to briefs that just say we want to say the same thing, but in different words. And if we are asked to write an amicus brief, we go through a process where we ask ourselves, do we have any? One, do we have an interest that we want to assert? Two, is there anything unique or a different perspective that we can offer? And three, because of our focus on history, is there a historical aspect to this that we think the Court would benefit from? And so I think good amicus briefs do that, right? They bring some unique focus or something that will aid the Court, whether it is a legal doctrine that hasn't been explored by the Court's historical context or some different argument. And if we can't add that, then we will not write the amicus brief. And so that's my view on what makes an effective amicus brief and the view that I have taken to the clinic.

Jonah Perlin [00:27:27]:

And do you feel like amicus briefs do have an impact or have the potential of an impact on the outcome of a case?

Tiffany Wright [00:27:36]:

I do. I can specifically recall, for example, when I was clerking if there was a major civil rights case or if there was a case involving racial discrimination. Very often the question was, where is the LDF brief on this? Because it was a perspective that the courts wanted to hear. And so I don't know that I would go as far as to say it can affect the outcome of a case because who knows what really affects the outcome of what judges decide? But I do think that there is an important role for amicus briefs to play, particularly in areas where the Court might be lacking context. And so I'll just give a quick example. One of the briefs we just did was in a case called Collier, which is a cert petition asking the Supreme Court to decide whether the use of the N word in the workplace is sufficient to create a hostile work environment. Now, the Fifth Circuit writes an opinion and if you read the opinion, you would think that word has no history because the opinion of the Court was like, well, it might be a bad word, but it was just used one time and so it's not that big of a deal. Now, of course, most black Americans would tell you that given the history of that word, particularly the racial terrorism connected to that word, hearing that or seeing that word in the workplace absolutely changes the terms and conditions of your workplace. And so bringing that historical perspective and as a clinic that advocates specifically on behalf of black people, being able to bring that to the Court, I think is incredibly useful.

Jonah Perlin [00:29:10]:

It's funny that you bring that up because I was looking at.

Tiffany Wright [00:29:12]:

It.

Jonah Perlin [00:29:13]:

And one of the things that really impressed me about that amicus brief or just that I was kind of candidly in awe of was how effective it made policy arguments. And I teach one else and one of the biggest challenges in teaching new legal writers is they know they want to include the why, right? Policy is the why. They know they want to include it, but they don't know how, they don't know where, and they don't know what it looks like. So do you have any sort of tips for people who are going through this about how to build policy arguments either into an amicus brief, which is geared toward that, or even just towards a merits brief or other kind of brief about how to build the why?

Tiffany Wright [00:29:47]:

In we do so, we teach our students that when we are looking at a case, whether we're going to write the merits brief or the amicus brief, part of what we want to answer is, is there a gap that we can fill? And so is there a place where the court has reached destination C, but we don't know how they got there, and so how can we help the court figure it out? And so looking at Collier, for example, the missing piece was, why is this word significant and how does it answer the legal question, which is whether or not the terms and conditions of your workplace have been changed? And so we think that we can use policy and history to fill that gap, but we train our students to always look for that gap. What is the question or the missing link or the thing that is not apparent on the face of the other briefs or the opinions, and how can we answer it? And if you're not answering that question, then your policy arguments are probably irrelevant, right? And so that is how we train our students to look at cases, is to always look for a gap in the logic, a gap in the doctrine. And does your perspective, does your policy argument fill a gap or answer a question that is left unanswered? And if you are not filling a gap or answering a question, then it's probably not an effective policy argument.

Jonah Perlin [00:31:07]:

That's really helpful. I guess the other question I have is and this is something that people who do what I do have been struggling a lot with recently, is we spend the whole first semester in large parts of the first year teaching students to fit arguments into analogies to cases that have already happened. Right. The challenge of that is then we're stuck with this law that was made at a different time. There's this question of how do we teach people to argue within the legal paradigms that we all expect, but also to sort of change the law or push the law. Do you have other thoughts on sort of ways to do that?

Tiffany Wright [00:31:42]:

Sure. I think the one example that always stands out to me and that I always go back to, because it was just such a moment for me in law school. I remember I was reading the Supreme Court's case about the drug interdiction programs where the police were getting onto Greyhound buses and essentially harassing people into allowing them to search their person and their possessions. And the question before the court was, would a reasonable person feel free to tell that police officer to go away? Now, if you are an old white guy who has never really interacted with the police, you might think that, yeah, of course it's Officer Friendly. I will feel comfortable telling him to go away if you are a black person in this country. And I remember saying this to one of my white colleagues, and it blew their mind. When I get in trouble, my first reaction is not to call the police. It's how can I fix my problem without involving them? And I fundamentally believe that a lot of the opinions we get that are tone deaf is because of lack of exposure. And so this is why I think things like diverse law clerks and diverse lawyers, because I have to believe in order to keep doing this work, that if the justices had been exposed fully to what that means, what that experience is like for a person of color, they may have reached a different outcome. And so I think in answer to your question, the other thing I try to do is think about what do I understand that the judge might not understand, and how is it relevant? And so if I'm looking at a statute, what part of this statute is my experience relevant to, or what part of the Fourth Amendment doctrine as we know it? So here it would fit into what would a reasonable person do? And so, again, it goes back to looking to gaps and then trying to fill it with my own experience or some unique perspective that we're bringing to the table.

Jonah Perlin [00:33:42]:

Yeah, I think that's so powerful and such a great way of thinking about it is you still have to play the game and fit within the rules, but it's finding ways to, as you say, fill the gap, but also bring different perspectives to the table. And if our profession doesn't bring those perspectives to the table, then how are the judges going to get it right? And I think that's powerful.

Tiffany Wright [00:34:01]:

And we also have to train our students, because our students live with this history. We just wrote it. We filed another brief dealing with this prosecutor in Mississippi who was made famous in Flowers versus Mississippi. The prosecutor who tried this man six times for a set of murders that he did not commit has been found to have discriminated purposely against black prospective jurors by both the Mississippi Supreme Court and the US. Supreme Court. And yet he still says, I didn't do anything wrong. So we were writing an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit in a 1983 challenge bought by a branch of the NAACP to enjoin this prosecutor from striking black jurors. And I had a student who gave me a draft that said, the government of Mississippi has always existed for white men and has enforced that with violence. And I had to tell him that he grew up in the south. You know that to be fact, but you are writing to an audience that will not accept that as fact. And so instead of telling them that, you need to show them that. So you need to explain that Mississippi is one of the lynching capitals in the United States, and that Mississippi has always displayed this very same trait that we see in this prosecutor, this sort of deliberate refusal to recognize civil rights of black people, that this is something that is endemic to the government and the political structure in Mississippi. You have to do the hard work of explaining that and let the reader reach that conclusion. But you saying that even though you know it to be fact, because you grew up there and it's in your bones is not effective. And so that's another thing we try to get across to our students.

Jonah Perlin [00:35:48]:

I know you worked in private law firms on briefs, and increasingly that's done on a team. Have you gained any experience being the head of the team now, as opposed to the junior person that you think is helpful in terms of brief writing or other legal writing?

Tiffany Wright [00:36:03]:

So I think I feel free. I don't know if this answers your question, but what I really feel when you are again and this goes back to this lack of diversity in the space where I have operated in a pilot practice, I was very often in the position of where I just described my student, knowing something to be true and being the only member on the team who could really see it, and fighting for a place for my perspective in that brief. Very frustrating. The clinic has been a sea change because the question is not does my perspective deserve to be said? Has it earned a right on the page in the brief? The question is that's taken as a given right, like my perspective matters, and we're going to write about this issue from the perspective of black and brown people. The question now is how to most effectively say that. And what helped me right is what I learned from my experience in law firms is how to make that point to people who are not like me. Because again, I was often on teams where I'm fighting for my perspective to be included. And so I have a lot of experience of explaining these issues in ways that people who are not like me can understand. And I think that's where my ability to pass that on to my students has come in, but it has definitely been a change going from a member of a team to being the leader of the team. And thankfully, I have a great co leader who I can bounce things off of, and we often end up in the same place. But it's definitely been an adjustment. But the one thing I appreciate is, again, my perspective being part of this narrative is taken as a given.

Jonah Perlin [00:37:46]:

I guess my last question that I always ask in these is what advice you would give to somebody who's thinking about joining the profession or just starting out? And that could be something that someone's told you or that you like to tell other folks who are joining us.

Tiffany Wright [00:37:59]:

As lawyers, never lose the reason why you decided to do this in the first place. And so sometimes for me, I got into this with a general goal. I want to be a lawyer who helps people like me. How? When I came to law school, I thought that meant I was going to be a prosecutor. And then in law school, I determined that even though I enjoyed the feeling I got from helping victims, I didn't, at the end of my career, want to look back on it and feel like I had contributed to mass incarceration and things like that in the aggregate. And so while I still think the world of the work that I was able to do, it's now shifted into direct representation of everyday people in the civil rights space. And so, even though my specific goal has changed, I have never lost sight of the reason why I came to this work in the first place. And sometimes that's easy to do because for financial reasons or other reasons, you find yourself at a firm or doing something that you never set out to do. But in order to keep it up, to get through the grueling years of law school, to get through difficult years in practice, you have to keep in the front of your mind the reason why you're doing this. And if you don't have a good reason why you're doing this, then you shouldn't be doing it. It's far too much money and far too much effort to waste if you're just doing it because you don't know what else to do with your life, because your mom is a lawyer, or any of these types of reasons, it takes more than that in order for you to do this and do it well.

Jonah Perlin [00:39:55]:

Again. That was Tiffany Wright. I'm so grateful that Tiffany agreed to speak with me on the podcast, not only about her legal career and how to be a better advocate and writer, but also about her path to the profession. Tiffany truly is an inspiration to so many about the importance of a legal education and for using that education to fight for what's right. As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe at howilawyer.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're willing, it would mean a lot if you could share the podcast with a friend or colleague or on social media. You can always find me at howilawyer@gmail.com or at Jonah Perlin on Twitter. Thanks again to Tiffany. Thanks for listening, and have a great week.