I think number one, I enjoy being in the courtroom and I enjoy public speaking. I enjoy the challenge of coming up with persuasive arguments. But now that I’ve become an attorney, I think the main reason I love what I do is I get to help people. I get to relieve anxiety. I get to teach. I get to have people see hope in sometimes a hopeless situation. And it’s not just the client, it’s also the clients’ family. So we’re taking people that are very broken and walking with them in their hour of darkness and trying to walk toward a path and in a path where there is some hope for redemption or hope for total victory.

Obviously, the goal in every case is total victory but we can’t do that in every case and along the way if I can make a client and their family less anxious, make a client and their family feel like they’ve had every fight that they can bring to the case had with maximum passion. If I can make every client and their family feel that their attorney is listening to them and caring deeply about their anxiety, their feelings, and their goals. And lastly, to bring to every client and their family the feeling that in court they had the very best attorney fighting for them every second of the case that’s what brings me satisfaction. We can’t always have the perfect result in every case ‘cause as a criminal defense attorney’s we are often in very difficult situations.

But what we can bring is hope. We can bring teaching. We can bring improvement. We can bring families coming together. And ultimately, hopefully, we can bring surprising victory or expected victory. I like to say often that when we go to court it should not be a dress rehearsal, it should be the final performance. And we try to be extra prepared to give that final perfect performance every time we go to court and that’s what brings me pleasure because in the end I know that the client whether they win or lose knows they had their day in court, they had their voice heard and they had their lawyer fighting for them to the last, last moment.

I think the main advice we give is that clients need to look inside themselves and see what they can do to improve their lives, their character, their situation, their relationships with their spouse, with their kids, with their family because it’s in and of itself good for them and their family, but it’s also excellent for court. Because if we come to court and the client has presented through me or through the client or through the family a long list of accomplishments that the client has achieved from the beginning of the case to the end of the case in terms of counseling, in terms of community service, in terms of improved relations, in terms of books read, in terms of just having a completely different way of looking at problems in life then we have achieved improvement in and of itself but we’ve also impressed the judge and the prosecutor to know that this client is on a path toward redemption.