🎙Episode #071 & #072: Helam Gebremariam (Cravath Litigation) & D. Todd Smith + Jody Sanders (Texas Appellate Lawyers)
👋 Welcome Back to the How I Lawyer Podcast!
This week's newsletter includes not one but two new episodes. The first with Helam Gebremariam and the second with D. Todd Smith & Jody Sanders.
Episode #071: Helam Gebremariam
The first episode, published earlier this month, is with Helam Gebremariam who is a Litigation Partner at Cravath, Swain, & Moore in New York City where her practice focuses on antitrust litigation, contractual disputes, securities and shareholder derivative suits, and investigations. She is also deeply committed to doing pro bono work and serves as an Executive Board Member of the New York University Law Alumni of Color Association, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Immigrant Justice Corps, and on the Board of Trustees of the Vera Institute of Justice. She is the first Black woman litigation partner in the Firm's history.
Helam began her legal career as a law clerk to Judge Robert Patterson, Jr. of the Southern District of New York and then after spending several years as an associate at Cravath worked at the U.S. Department of Justice as Senior Counsel in the DOJ's Office for Access to Justice and then as Senior Counsel to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. She then worked at WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. before rejoining Cravath in 2019 where she was elected to the partnership in 2020. She now serves as partner liaison to the Firm’s African American/Black Affinity Group and as a Member of the Firm’s Pro Bono Committee. She is a first-generation college and law student who graduated from Columbia and NYU Law where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the NYU Law Review.
In our conversation we discussed her path to law as the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants to the United States; her decision to join the government and her time doing policy work as an advisor at the Department of Justice; the reasons why its ok to close doors in your career (they often don't really close) and how new doors can open as a result; why she chose Cravath and her transition from summer associate to senior associate to junior partner; techniques for growth for junior lawyers in the increasingly remote practice of law; her favorite parts of going to trial; how to find a mentor (see her feature from Bloomberg on that topic here); being in a two-lawyer parent family; and what she does everyday as a generalist BigLaw litigator.
🎙Listen Now: Helam Gebremariam
Episode #072: D. Todd Smith & Jody Sanders
In the second episode (published this morning) I speak with not one but two Texas appellate lawyers, Jody Sanders and D. Todd Smith. You may know them as the co-hosts of the Texas Appellate Law Podcast which is a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the appellate process and encourage best practices in litigation and appeals.
But that is just their side hustle. In his day job, Jody Sanders is a Partner at Kelly Hart where he represents clients at all stages of litigation in trial courts throughout Texas, as well as appeals and original proceedings in Texas's intermediate courts of appeals, the Texas Supreme Court, and federal appellate courts. He also frequently assists other litigators in drafting dispositive motions, ensuring error preservation, and handling trial and post-trial proceedings to prepare for a potential appeal. He has handled cases in wide-ranging substantive areas of law.
D. Todd Smith is a civil appellate specialist at Butler Snow LLP in Austin, Texas. Todd moved to Butler Snow after spending 15 years building and managing my own appellate firm. He has extensive experience representing clients as lead appellate counsel and has briefed and argued multiple cases before the Texas Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He also works with trial teams in all phases of civil litigation, often taking the lead on strategic analysis and briefing, jury charges, and potentially dispositive motions, all with a focus on preserving error and positioning cases for appellate review. He is active in legal organizations including the ABA, Texas, State Bar and the Austin Bar Association where he was the past president.
In our conversation we discuss their different paths to becoming appellate practitioners in Texas, the day-to-day life of an appellate attorney in Texas, the value of judicial clerkships (especially in state courts), the power of finding a practice area the matches your skill set, some of the quirks of Texas appellate process, the importance of junior lawyers building relationships with senior lawyers and senior lawyers building relationships with junior lawyers, techniques for effective brief writing including the importance of tables of contents and topic sentences, and what they have learned from their excellent and informative podcast.
🎙Listen Now: D. Todd Smith & Jody Sanders
Thanks for listening and see you next week,
Jonah
These episodes are sponsored, edited, and engineered by LawPods, a professional podcast production company for busy attorneys.