Lawyers Who Learn

Most companies treat their privacy policy as boilerplate, copying someone else's and posting it on their website. Clara Duffield sees the fallout every day. A privacy policy, she explains, is a promise to customers about what a business actually does with their data, and a borrowed one is neither compliant nor honest. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talk...

When Dr. Allison Muller shares with people in a room she's a toxicologist, it goes quiet. Some people picture her working at a crime scene, others in a laboratory. Neither is the case for her. Her career in toxicology has focused on patient care and teaching. A board-certified clinical toxicologist and pharmacist with more than 30 years of experience, she explains how drugs and poisons affect the...

Thomas Papain grew up surrounded by personal injury law.  While eventually heeding the call to help others, Thomas took the scenic route. He arrived at Fordham planning to become a sports journalist, until a constitutional law class and an internship at the Brooklyn District Attorney's office revealed a career where he could read, write, and help people all at once. In this episode of Lawyers Who...

Erin Applebaum was set on becoming a Brooklyn prosecutor until the 2010 recession froze hiring at the Kings County DA's office. Suddenly she was temping and working as a nanny for twenty dollars an hour. Then the family she nannied for introduced her to a solo aviation lawyer, and a stopgap job became a calling. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with...

Matthew Asbell spent his first two years of medical school putting recording studio time on credit cards, cutting an album one session a month. When the national boards and the record launch collided, he chose the music. He got his songs on radio across the country, then spent roughly a decade managing other artists before realizing the contracts and copyright questions he kept running into belong...

Jordan Fischer graduated law school in 2013, back when privacy wasn't even a course offering. Four years later, she left a stable litigation practice to co-found a data privacy and cybersecurity firm, a move people told her was crazy, since the field barely existed. Today it's one of the fastest-growing areas of legal practice, and Jordan built her career on spotting it early. In this episode of L...

An estimated one million embryos are frozen in labs across the country, and the law is only beginning to catch up with what happens when the people who created them cannot agree on their fate. SJ Chapman has built their trust and estates practice at that intersection, tracking court decisions that are redefining what an embryo legally is. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman,...

Mark Brezzell spent ten years keeping patients alive during open heart surgery, managing over two thousand procedures as the bypass specialist who becomes, in his words, the patient's heart and lungs. Now he brings that same vascular expertise to a different kind of crisis, the chronic stress quietly wearing down lawyers' bodies from the inside. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Sch...

Arlety crossed from Cuba to Miami as a young child during the Mariel boatlift, then built the kind of resume most lawyers only dream of: Yale Law School, seven years as a trusts and estates associate at Cravath, and now seats on four nonprofit boards. But her latest project may be her most unexpected yet, teaching Law students the one skill she says law school never covered: how to manage people....

Brett Tanferani spent 21 years at the FBI chasing espionage and counterterrorism threats. Now he's sounding the alarm on something bigger: Q Day, the moment quantum computing renders modern encryption obsolete, may have just arrived. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Tanferani, a former FBI assistant special agent in charge now working in cybers...

Jennifer McCoy just watched a federal investigation into her client vanish without explanation, the second one this year. It's a small mercy in an unusually turbulent moment for white collar law, one she says she's never seen in her career. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with McCoy, a partner at Troutman Pepper Locke in Dallas whose four Lawline c...

Somewhere in his 40s, Doug Brown made a deliberate decision. He was not going to be the version of himself at 60 who wondered whether he'd ever gotten where he wanted to go. He's 60 now, and the work he does with clients is the work he had to do for himself first. The questioning started much earlier. As an associate under 30, Brown looked at the partners twenty and thirty years ahead of him — tir...

Valena Beety spent her early career as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C.—until a single funeral changed everything. Meeting an exoneree whose mother had just passed after fighting eighteen years for his freedom, Beety realized she wanted to be part of that grace, not the system that had denied it. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn , host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline , talks with Beety...

Rebecca Moll Freed knew she wanted to be a lawyer in high school, the moment mock trial replaced a childhood plan to become a pediatrician. A college internship in the Clinton White House sealed the deal, showing her that law, politics, and business could actually intersect for a living. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn , host David Schnurman , CEO of Lawline , talks with Freed, a Lawline facu...

When a hiring partner warned Gina Nicotera he wouldn't take on someone who didn't know what ERISA stood for, she admitted she'd never heard the term and won the job anyway. Fifteen years later, that willingness to learn on the fly has carried her from a biomedical engineering dropout to a senior labor and employment attorney, where she now helps employers navigate an entirely new set of risks: wor...

Eran Kahana uses AI carefully and sparingly, having watched it produce polished text that passes for insight until it doesn’t. An eighteen-year Stanford Law fellow and AI governance partner at Maslon LLP, he treats AI less like a ghostwriter and more like a sparring partner he interrogates and never fully trusts. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn , host David Schnurman , CEO of Lawline , talks...

Beth wrote a college thesis on affordable housing and voucher programs, then watched her legal career zigzag in the opposite direction—straight into Big Law real estate finance. It took one transaction involving Boston's inclusionary housing rules to reconnect her with the mission she'd nearly left behind, sending her from corporate associate to city government attorney to partner at a firm repres...

Erin Colgan was a 25 year old new prosecutor and seven months pregnant with her first child when she watched the horrific events of 9/11 on a small television from the Richmond County Criminal Courhouse. She explains this as completely surreal, and repeatedly paged her father, a Port Authority Police Inspector and commander of the World Trade Center who had survived the collapse. That morning woul...

Venable didn't have a political law practice when Ron Jacobs started there. Growing up in a blue-collar family in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jacobs once dreamed of public service before law school pulled him toward a career in the law instead. His early years as an associate bounced him between FTC, FCC, international trade work, and nonprofit associations, with campaign finance creeping in little by littl...

Dennis Meador , known to everyone as DM, learned to sell before he learned much else. By 14 he was running his own hustle, subcontracting neighborhood yard work and keeping half the profit. That instinct for building things from scratch carried into his career, including an SEO agency for attorneys he helped scale to $5 million before a five-year partnership ended just months before his wedding. I...

More than twenty-five years ago, Lindsay A. Curcio wasn't chasing entrepreneurship or independence—she was an only child whose father had recently passed away, whose mother needed help, and who realized the only way to be there was to build a practice she could run on her own terms. That decision, made out of necessity rather than ambition, quietly shaped the next two decades of her life. In this...

What if you could say "build me a spaceship" and watch it happen within the hour? Ben Dach , a partner at Pierson Ferdinand , believes that the future isn't as distant as it sounds. A self-described "futurist patent attorney," Ben has spent his career turning ambitious ideas into real products—from surgical robotics that have saved thousands of lives to breakthroughs in nanotechnology, aerospace,...

About one week before every Lawline update, Mark Conrad checks his slides and makes changes, because the law hasn't stopped moving. A 38-year veteran of Fordham's Gabelli School of Business, Conrad has spent the last decade turning the chaos of sports law into some of Lawline's most-watched courses, with nearly 10,000 completions and near-perfect ratings. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn , hos...

When DEI became a political lightning rod, Natalie Holder didn't shut down her business — she renamed it. Quest Diversity Initiatives quietly became Quest Employment Initiatives , a small shift in language that let Holder keep doing the same work for clients suddenly nervous about the label, while the backlash swept through boardrooms around her. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn , host David S...

Angeli Raven Fitch failed the California bar exam five times before finally passing on her sixth attempt—collapsing on a sidewalk in tears when she saw the results. That resilience now fuels a career spanning criminal defense, AI ethics education, competitive storytelling, and caregiving for her mother with advanced dementia. In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn , host David Schnurman , CEO of Law...