Well, I've been meaning to do this for a long time. I finally worked up the motivation after observing the horrific beginnings of the 2016 presidential campaign.
I'm a 66-year-old lawyer who has been practicing law since 1977. I was a "litigator" in Philadelphia for the first three years, where I did insurance defense work including, believe it or not, some maritime law. I got sick of being an associate; of law firm politics; and the drudgery of cleaning up other people's messes; plus, things "weren't working out" with the firm. So in 1980 I became a corporate lawyer with a defense and industrial service corporation headquartered in Northern New Jersey (a pretty famous name in aerospace history, by the way). There I "polished up the handle so carefully" that in 1999 I became the Company's general counsel.
I left corporate life in 2001 after major differences with the incoming CEO. I like to think that I'm the only General Counsel in American corporate history who was fired for winning the big case rather than losing it, but I suppose my former corporate masters would really say that I wasn't subservient enough. (As a fellow GC once told me when I was just starting out in my new role, "What you have to understand about this job is that you're nothing but a high paid flunky for management.")
I did find statement that rather disillusioning after having spent 20 years climbing to the summit of corporate law. Having been ejected from the corporate cocoon, I had to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my career.
I settled on immigration law for variety of reasons. First, almost all of us are immigrants to America in one way or another, and I grew up amid stories of my own Irish immigrant roots going back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It stuck. Second, I wanted to do something that was socially relevant. The importance of immigration couldn't have been underscored more than by 9/11. Third, I really did want to try something new, and immigration law is about as far away as from corporate law as one can get.
Last but not least, after the end of my long first marriage, which coincided with my departure from corporate life, I started dating an "illegal alien" from Russia. I'm happy to say that I was able to "sponsor" her after we got married. We are still together and she is now a naturalized American citizen. So, my practice of immigration law had a personal element that made my clients' concerns very real to me.
One reason I've decided to speak up in this blog is because of the anti-immigrant madness we see infecting the Republican Party and nativist right wing now. The calumnies cast against my clients are so vile and ignorant that I feel compelled to speak out. My hope is that various case studies and "war stories" will show my readership what it's like being an immigration lawyer; and, more importantly, what the people whom I serve are really like.
Finally, you'll get a dose of fairly strong "progressive" politics in these pages. My political transformation mirrors my professional one. I've gone from being a "conservative" Republican preoccupied with national defense to a passionate Democrat who believes that the real threat to our democracy comes from within.
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