10. Don Frederico - Class Action Litigator and Mediator, Former Boston Bar Association President

welcome to episode number 10 with Don Frederico class action litigator and mediator former Boston Bar Association president in this episode Don unpacks his career and life transitions he is highly successful Boston litigator with a specialty in class action defense he also counts pro bono and nonprofit leadership as some of his greatest successes including work with the Boston bar Association and chair of the Board of Trustees for the College of Worcester welcome to Titans of transition featuring real life stories anecdotes and inspiration about pivotal career moments from leaders who have been there join host Joe Miller former scientist and Senior technology leader turned executive coach as he unpacks transitional moments to help Inspire change [Music] hey Don welcome to Titans of transition podcast Joe it's great to be here and it's great to see you of course yeah so full disclosure Don and I are friends going a number of years back in the past we were both in the same high school together played a little guitar together at that time and a few other things we might touch on but we lost track of each other after high schools we went different directions but I was glad oh gosh it's probably about seven or eight years ago now Don I think when we first when I first came back from one of the high school reunions and was able to reconnect with you I think that's about right yeah and then you came down to where I live that's right and um yeah we connected there as well yeah that was great as couples and it was really good to reconnect at that time and our careers went very different directions and so one of the things in this podcast that I hope serves everyone is I'm really looking to bring out transitions as the name implies but I know that a lot of people are having a lot of change thrust on them right now with the covid situation and job losses potentially making quick pivots to work from home and maybe even starting your own side hustle at home those sorts of things but over the course of our careers we lots of times we think things are going going to go in a straight line and they don't often go that way way it's more of a Meandering journey of Discovery and I've had a number of people reach out to me as part of my coaching practice and ask me for help trying to discover what their next move should be so that's why I started the podcast and so although our backgrounds and our professions are much different there's common themes that are coming out through these episodes and Don so I'm sure the people will connect with you even though they may not might not all be attorneys not in the law profession hopefully not there's way too many jokes there's way too many lawyer jokes out there so don why don't you take us back to maybe some influences or some other things that were going on in high school as you started thinking forward in where your career might take you yeah I've thought about this a bit Joe and there was there were a couple moments in high school that I thought were pivotal for me and I thought might be worth talking about and the first had to do with somebody you know and and I know Ruth bear so for the people who don't know Ruth bear you know we had a we had a great theater program in high school and you and I were both part of it Ruth bear was our uh drama director and drama coach and uh we also had Bill white who was an incredible music director and they both were so good at connecting with us young high school students and I remember you know we the musicals were the Highlight every year of of the program I I always was kind of intrigued by that I I liked musicals they were very popular in high school the kids who were in them were had a great time and and uh were also popular in a certain crowd and you know there was just a lot of attraction to being part of these excellent Productions that the high school did I was probably a little more in a shell you know I had never acted uh before and and uh probably was a little bit on the shy side although I also did perform with guitar and and singing and I also did have Parts in in our Coral Productions so I wasn't unused to being on stage but it took me a little bit to actually get up the nerve to try out for one of the Productions so I just remember I have this vivid memory of being in the auditorium when Ruth bear was talking to the students and trying to encourage people to take the risk and try out for a production and uh I remember one line she said and it stuck with me my whole life and it actually propelled me kind of pushed me forward to make take some risks at different times in my life she said if you don't extend yourself you haven't lived wow and that line I just never forgot it and so I had been involved uh in theater only because I did stage crew we did Carousel I think our junior year and uh I still didn't have the nerve to try out then but I did have friends who were on stage crew and as you'll recall Joe we we actually had a carousel on stage yeah we did and and we we moved it with ropes and pulley and we had some uh pretty great guys who led the stage crew I didn't have those skills but it didn't matter I could pull a rope so so I did stage crew backstage for Carousel but then after that session where Ruth said that line I decided okay I'm going to try out and so I think the first time I did I got a a walk- on very quick walk-off role in uh the production we did of archal mcca's JB yeah and then we had tryy outs for George M the musical about George M Cohan and you know for the audition I I got up the Nerf to try out for the audition I brought up my guitar I sang a song on guitar and I ended up getting the second male lead role in the play which was really somewhat transformative for me it really pulled me out of whatever shell I was in and gave me a lot of confidence uh that I don't think I had before I did that production so I'm just going to interject real quick right now because I think this this uh statement that Ruth made to you was really huge because it's really true I mean I think if we lay back and always play it safe don't take any risk we really dampen what our possibilities are and the other side once you get on the other side of it and and you get through it even if it's not perfect it makes such a huge internal deposit into our confidence because we can look back and say I did something I never thought I'd ever do and I'm okay I made it and maybe even it was really good in your case it was really good so I mean I think there's a don't do it and if you don't do it you might go the rest of your life not willing to take risks regret yeah yeah yeah so sorry to interrupt but go ahead keep no no that was good yeah so then I you know I did that production I I I got a good role in the following production which was 12th night by Shakespeare but yeah Ruth bear was influential and and that line just kept coming back to me every time I had a significant decision to make all through my adult life whether to extend myself whether to volunteer for something for example or as you say you know just take a risk yeah so the other thing that happened in high school that made a real difference in my life and and you know I think everybody has these little stories this just happens to be mine but but it was the decision about where to go to college I was first generation College I had an older sister who went to college she went to a big State University in New York but there weren't many people in my family who had gone to college my parents didn't go to college and I really didn't know much about college I knew what interested me and what didn't interest me I I knew that I did not want to study science for example it just wasn't something that particular to me yeah and I was good at math but I didn't want to study math in college I knew that I liked literature I knew that I liked the Arts I liked theater I like poetry I lik history to some extent although probably not as much in high school so I went to a college fair and you might have been there I don't remember where it was or who was there but it was our high school brought buses of people I think or maybe we drove to a college fair and there were tables of different colleges I didn't I I knew I kind of wanted the liberal arts I also like you Joe and I don't mean to put you on the spot that's but you know uh there was a strong religious component to my upper bringing and I was interested in finding a college that had a strong religion department so that was important to me and I was at this college fair not really knowing exactly which schools I should be looking at and a friend came up to me and said Don you should go look at the College of Worcester and this is the liberal arts college in Worcester Ohio which was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church at the time and had a very strong religion department but also an excellent liberal arts program and it was about the right size you know about 2,000 students actually was a little smaller then so I went to the table and I I liked what I saw I ended up visiting the college I only applied to two colleges when I was in high school which is today it's kind of unheard of right students apply to 12 or 18 College but back then we didn't do that and I got into both of them and and had a struggled a little bit with the decision but I chose to go to the College of Worcester and it was because of this little brief you know 30 second 20 second conversation I had with a friend who steered me in that direction and it really affected my life in a lot of ways Not only was it a great place to go to college and great education but my son ended up going there and it was also a good experience for him and I also ended up on the Board of Trustees and I'm now in my fourth year as chair of the Board of Trustees but the whole point of this is all of that happened because a friend happened to plant a bug in my ear that carried me in that direction yeah and you know it's interesting because in I have a almost exactly the same kind of story you may might not even know but someone in high school I was trying to figure out where to go and he said well I got accepted here you know this particular school and I ended up applying and going there so it years later I thought was that smart because you wonder it's almost like when you think about meeting your spouse or other decisions like that where you think should I have looked a little bit harder would my life have taken a completely different direction or not I don't know if you roll through these questions in your mind or not but they have gone through mine well it's the road not taken and and we can be very happy with the decisions we made not knowing whether we might have been just as happy with the decisions we chose not to make so yeah we don't get to live all those parallel universes do we that's right all right so you you went to uh now the pron pronunciation I get it confused with the school not far from where you live Wester okay so what happened so drop us in there let's hear a little well so you know again of course like everybody else there were were more to be made right so I went there wanting to maybe major in religion maybe major in English literature I hadn't really started thinking about law very much yet and the reason I was thinking about religion was there was a part of me that thought well I want to go to Seminary and become a Protestant Minister now I grew up Catholic that's kind of interesting so that was what that that's kind of interesting yeah so it was it was different you know and I'm sure if my parents were here they would say they weren't too happy when they heard me talking about that that was what I thought I might have want to do and by the end of sophomore year you had to declare a major and I did some soul searching and I basically said you know I didn't grow up in the Protestant church I'm not sure I'm really cut out to be a minister anyway and I chose to minor in religion and to major in English so then the question became what do you do with an English degree I loved studying literature I I'm sure I learned a lot about writing uh at Worcester both in the English Department and in other courses I took but I also was starting to develop a little more interest in the laws a possible profession now how did that come about so it was always kind of in the back of my mind I mean I still remember when I was if you really want to go back when I was in fifth grade we did a mock presidential election I think I think we were in fifth grade around the 1964 election sounds right hate to a you there Joe but and uh and so our teacher in my class had us do a mock election and I I ended up giving a campaign speech for somebody in my class who was running for president and our parents came our the mothers came I don't think the fathers very many fathers were there but I remember one of my friends mothers coming up to me and saying you should be a lawyer after she heard my speech is this another one of those things where someone said something to you and planted a it's an implant well but that was you know I don't think I took it very serious okay at the time but then you know it's kind of an odd story of how I got more interested in law and it was a lot of different influences I was interested in politics I was interested in American history I was interested in doing something that helped people I mean that was kind of my motivation when I thought I wanted to be a minister and I knew that lawyers could help people so I I studied in one class I read about the sacko vanetti trial in outside of Boston I think it was in the 1930s and that was an interesting story about a trial I think even before high school I read about the Chicago 7 trial and I'm kind of excited that that's now going to be a movie and by the time people see this it will already have come out I had read a book about the scotsboro boys and the the Civil Rights issues arising from that case and uh and then there was this guy that came to our campus named William Stringfellow who was a lawyer Theologian and he had he had come as Theologian in residence for six weeks he was connected to the Baran brothers so they were very much a part of the anti-war movement I think one of them I think it was Philip but it might have been Daniel I don't really remember was a fugitive from Justice and I think Stringfellow was a friend of his you know for his what he did with draft records during the Vietnam war and but Stringfellow had these really interesting ideas about about faith and the Bible and how it all connected to politics and law he had practiced in Harlem after graduating from Harvard Law School to provide services to poor people who couldn't afford lawyers but then I don't know what he did after that he wrote books and uh hung out with barrance but I I met with him uh at one point when he was on campus and he gave me some advice that was helpful I think and and then the other thing that it I laugh and it's strange to think that this motivated me to go to law school but I saw the movie The Paper Chase oh boy that's a which came out I think when we were in college yes absolutely that was a huge movie yeah especially that Professor that Professor what was his name I can't remember oh oh the names were great right the professor was kingsfield and the protagonist the first year law student was heart there was nothing subtle about the names I can still remember that and uh he was the contracts Professor right for people who don't know the story it it it's about the progression of this first year law student at Harvard Law School and his contracts Professor who's the antagonist just this very Prim proper brilliant well-known guy who teaches with the Socratic method in contracts law which is by the way a great way to teach and it paints this really Grim view of how awful law school is and of course heart goes on to kind of and and overcome all the pressure to that what you have to do is really get the great grade and the great grade will give you a great career and you know he becomes the hero because he transcends all of that by the end of the movie but but it's grim and it made me want to go to law school so go figure I just want to point out I'm hearing through your story deep curiosity propelling you into your Discovery process you know it it it's just something I wanted to point out is and maybe that's a lesson is pay attention and don't be afraid to commit your time and energies into exploring yeah yeah well I've always thought you know it's funny that you say that because I've always thought the curi iOS it is a keyy to success in life and I I see people who aren't curious and I I think they're not really going to do anything very spectacular with their lives and I've always been a very curious person I not sure I've done anything spectacular but I think I've been all right so so what I mean this this uh individual coming on campus seeing the paper chase these things were coming together and you're thinking okay you got something else go ahead well yeah so this is the more pragmatic side of this so I was torn I go on and get a PhD in literature you know and or I go to La school I either become an English Professor or I become a lawyer so I sent away for an application to the graduate program in English at the University of Wisconsin and Madison my professors you know I was at a Midwestern school they some of them had gone there had a great program and they recommended it and the application came back and there was a little piece of paper stapled onto it which said we're advising all of our applicants that our graduates are having trouble finding jobs so I said I guess I'm going to law school was that easy right oh wow yeah so I don't know I don't know that there's any lesson to be learned there except you go where the opportunities are right yeah so how did you get I mean what was the next step in the process in terms of going to law school then how did you even know how to approach that I I took the elsat I did well on the elsat I you know I I was so unserious about it that I didn't begin to prepare for the elsat until the night before it was given but I still did okay and uh I ended up applying to five law schools at the end of the day I got into three of them and I end ended up deciding to go to Cornell uh which was as you know it's Upstate New York we grew up in Rochester it was an hour and a half from home Ivy League school beautiful setting in Ithaca New York and I it just felt like the right fit and I'm still actually involved in in the uh alumni program at Cornell today so that's all I mean it was I I tell people that I wasn't sure I was going to law school until the day I came to campus but I don't know I'm not sure if that's entirely true but that's what I like to say okay does that mean be because you always kind of thought well I can always just take a step back at any time if it turns out to be yeah what I was fearing it was be like or what well there's another thing I mean I really wish I had taken a year or two off I I wasn't ready I had more growing up to do I had begun to question some of my beliefs and my values I really had been in a pretty sheltered setting all my life so I would have benefited from a year or two to mature a little more before I went to Los school but I didn't I just wanted to go straight through get it behind me and move on with my life and that's what I did so when you stepped into it was it like the paper chase was it I had a I had a contracts Professor who taught the same way kingsfield taught what's his name John howman was that what was was that the actor John hman was the actor yeah yeah that's brilliant and I remember Lindsay Wagner was in the movie but I don't I don't know the name of the other actor yeah but anyway yeah so I had a guy named Bob Summers who was a great contracts professor and he was kind of like kingsfield you didn't get any warm feeling nothing no it was really all business and it was all Socratic method and the way the Socratic method works is and I I think a lot of professors still do this but probably not as many as used to the professor will pick on one student on one day of class and Grill that student for the whole 50 minutes or whatever the length of the period is about the issues that come up in the cases that you read you you learn by studying cases and so if you're not prepared and you get called on you're totally humiliated wow so there was a ton of pressure to just constantly prepare for class and Summers I I I wasn't really intending to talk about Bob Summers but he was great at it he was one of the best and and but he was Stern and so you began the year kind of not liking him kind of hating him to something degree at least some of us I suppose and at the end of the year we gave him a standing ovation we loved him so much we learned so much from the way he taught us and we recognize I I think that's true of of people who influence us over our lives that push us to become better than we would have become otherwise or situation whether it's a coach you know a sport or a friend or a parent or you know a professor you know you Rebel in the beginning because you don't want to be pushed you know I think it's human nature but at the end you can look back and say wow we really come a long way so I I think yeah I I can remember you know totally different field right but I can remember it I went to another small uh faith-based College as well and I can remember after the first year or so I was in classes in physics and chemistry that only had a handful of people in them and physics in particular only three and we would hold classes in the student union and let me tell you there's no place to hide when you get up to the board to work a problem so you know I when I got out of school and I was an analytical chemist and started working in the lab I had people who graduated from Top name schools who did well academically on their tests and whatnot and they were smart people don't get me wrong but the Practical applications were missing I think and they would come to me they probably never heard of the school I went to you know so it it being on the spot and being pushed whether it's by someone outside maybe it's this is an outside influence uh kind of question or or whether it's just yourself bringing that forward I think is an extremely valuable lesson so when I went to law school I had not studied pre-law to the extent there was such a thing as pre-law I didn't know many lawyers I didn't know any lawyers well there were no lawyers in my family I didn't really know what I was getting into except what I could glean from the paper chase or from books I read or you know the news and I guess other students who maybe were ahead of me and went to law school a year ahead of me but so I got there and I didn't have a ton of confidence you know I I there were students in my class who when they were called on when it was their day they seemed to do really well or they would raise their hands and ask either ask really good qu what I thought were really good questions or answer the professor's questions and I wouldn't always understand what they were talking about I just assumed these are the smart guys and by the way it was mostly guys back then I mean I think only about a quarter or a third of our class were women it's changed a lot thankfully since then but uh so I I didn't have a whole lot of confidence I I worked hard I tried to keep up with all the reading I didn't want to be embarrassed in class if I was called on and I I kind of expected well I'll get through the first semester and maybe I'll be somewhere in the middle of my class or maybe a little better than that I got good grades the first semester and and they weren't great I mean they weren't I'm sure I wasn't in the top five people in my class or something but but they were good respectable decent grades better than I expected and I I started to learn maybe at that point maybe it was later that the people who were the most vocal weren't necessarily the best students and there were other people like me who maybe were a little quieter who ended up surprising people so I had I came out of first semester with a little more confidence than I had gone into it and then I went to second semester and it was more of the same so one thing that people need to understand about law school at least my law school at the time I went but I think it's probably still very much true there's a lot of grade pressure you're taught very quickly that your success in your profession is going to depend a lot on your grades and especially your first year grade is that Landing a job or just keeping up or I I'm just curious Landing a job Landing a job and and what kind of job you get and you can buy into that or not you know I wasn't mature enough to have a lot of perspective so I bought right into it I'm sure there are people who don't have great grades who do really well in their careers so I don't put as much weight on that today as I used to although when I hire people I still kind of look for the grade sure but so there's a lot of pressure to get the grades and here's the other thing your grade in any course you take was 100% your final exam wow that's very different than other yeah you don't have papers you don't have homework you don't have midterms you don't have quizzes it's all one big ex feels like winning a case or something yeah it's a ton of pressure so so and I again I don't know how much it's changed but I think a lot of it is still like that so spring semester I I had one what I thought was a good thing happen happened I uh had heard of a professor who was pretty well known in his field and well connected who was looking for a a research assistant to help him during the summer so I interviewed with him and he hired me and I thought this is great because my alternative was I was going to go back to Rochester and work in a the same Factory I'd worked the night shift in the summer before and I hated that and I really didn't want to do that I wanted to move ahead towards a career goal which This research assistant job would be good for plus it would have had me in itha in the summer and there's no more beautiful place to be in the summer than itha New York so I was really excited told my parents told my friends just so psyched and then we got into final exams and two days before the contracts exam he called me and said he was giving the job to someone else it was a classmate of mine who was on financial aid and he said it's less money out of my budget to hire somebody on financial aid than to hire you because I wasn't on financial aid I was fortunate enough my father put me through law school and so I was devastated I you know and again maybe if ID grown up a little more before I went to law school it might not have had quite the same impact but he just just pulled the rug out from under me and I was distraught now I had to go back to the factory and that was not how I wanted to spend my summer so I I couldn't focus I was supposed to be getting ready for this important contract exam and I I would open the casebook and I would see the words on the page but nothing would sink in and I just couldn't focus the whole time I was preparing and then I went into the exam and I still couldn't focus you know I I think part of that maybe says something about a weakness in me but I've never had that experience before or after uh it was just this one time and it was horrible so I came out of that exam knowing I had done poorly very poorly and I also knew that I had three days to prepare for my next exam which was constitutional law now contracts was a two credit course that semester and constitutional law was four credits so it was worth twice as much as that contracts exam was in terms of your overall GPA and I I probably spent the rest of the day after that exam just licking my wounds but as soon as the next day came I got up early I had breakfast I sat at my desk with my casebook in front of me and my notes in front of me and I didn't move for 12 hours or no probably like 18 hours you know I would study from from about 7:00 in the morning till midnight or 1: a.m. and I did that 3 days in a row cuz I was determined to have a better experience with con law and I went into the con law exam and got the best grade I'd ever gotten on anything in my life and uh and so that was that turned out to be really I think really important for what happened to the rest of my life so and I what what yeah go ahead no yeah it's just it's I think those are that's a deep experience right even though how many decades that's been and even though you you immediately within days you flipped it into a positive learning story success story it was a deep cut it was it was it was the failure and I I passed the test in contracts so I wasn't technically a failure but it was that was the lowest grade I'd ever gotten con law was the highest grade I'd ever gotten and it was feeling that I had failed in that first experience that propelled me to excel in the second so that's a big lesson I think and I'm sure a lot of us uh who are listening in have had similar lessons but uh never waste those kind of situations right because it would be easy if you just say oh the heck with it I'm done you know I'm just and then sort of sail your way out it would be an open door for a left turn another road traveled if you really let it get to you right although it did stun you for a while you know a couple of days anyway like whoa what how you know it there was that period of time because you were putting so much into going back home not going back home and staying in itha staying at Cornell and and uh having that that position there and I think emotionally you had a lot wrapped around it and so when that outcome was taken out of your control because of the situation that was there's good reasons for those decisions right you can't argue with that but but to you it was like there's nothing I can do here this is right so that happened and then that distracted you and then we heard the rest and and you know and I have talked about this before but you know there's this one writer that I told you about who talks about the importance of suffering yes now this wasn't really suffering it might have been suffering for two days you know not a big deal still counts but but that so much of our growth in life and our development in life depends on having suffered you suffering actually can be a necessary thing to grow grow and this this little incident I had this failure I had on this on this one exam yeah really was key to me turning things around in law school so and and where that led is kind of important so one other story I I'd like to tell you is so the other thing about law school is that every law school has publishes scholarly journals about law they are run by students with a faculty advisor and the students do the editing they do they write some small articles for it but the Articles come from law professors all over the country and it's a lot of work but it's very prestigious to be selected to be on one of these journals every law school has what they call the law review which is the top journal the most prestigious of the journal but there are also other very good journals that are not law review and there are different ways students are selected to be on a journal and the way it worked at Cornell when I was there was some students got onto a journal strictly because their grades were that good that they would be selected on grades and students who didn't make it on grades would be able to enter a writing competition and then students would be the their writing would be judged by students a year ahead of them who were already on the journal and then they would either be invited to join or not so I remember distinctly this one day when I was back in Rochester it was a Saturday my friend Bob who you also know and uh his friend Dave who was a year or two behind us in high school but they were close friends and Dave by the way was planning to go to law school and did go to a very good school and had a very successful career but they came over to my house and there were the mail was on the counter and and so there was this one letter on top that was from the Cornell International Law Journal now Cornell had a the Cornell Law review but they also had the international law Journal which was slightly less prestigious but it was still an excellent journal and the students who were on the editorial board of the Law Journal International Law Journal also were very good students and and and you know the ones I know had great careers but law review was just a little bit more prestigious so I saw the international law Journal letter and I opened it up and Bob and Dave were right there and I I said oh this is great I made ilj this is wonderful it's not as much work because they only publish two times a year as opposed to six time times a year but I'm really honored that my grades were good enough to get me on and I don't have to go into a writing competition and this will be a great experience and then I noticed another letter and I think it just said Cornell Law School on it and I opened it up and I was invited to law review based on my grades and I was shocked I thought that contract score was going to keep me off but that con law score probably put me over yeah hump wow so again it was and and then I mean I can tell these stories but the end of the day having made law review made a lot of difference in the direction and trajectory of my career again because I buy into that whole grades are important law review is important getting the big job at the big firm is important which is I don't necessarily feel the same way about that today because there are a lot of lawyers who do a lot of great things who were not on law review and uh and some of the things they do are more important to society than what I was doing at Big law firms but that's from but from the Paradigm of that you were in the middle of at that time and the way success was defined exactly that was absolutely true yeah right it's it really is absolutely about how you define success but you know you know as you have some level of Success Through Your Life and and you look back you begin to think well what do I really feel the most positive about is it those you know my first uh Titans interview with was with this guy Bob Tipton and he has this little story where he started working at home after he he he formed his own business he had his home office he was setting his home office up and Bob shout out to you buddy because I think this ties into really kind of tight here I didn't think I was going to talk about this his wife is setting she was an artist and she was setting up her studio and he got his his put up all of his accolades all his Awards all the recognition plaques all those things you know put them up on one wall and he went upstairs and to his wife Debbie's studio and she had some art but she had all these photographs of the family and their children and that was one moment for him where he went he went downstairs and took everything off the wall that he had on the wall because to this point that you're bringing forth you know and that is at that time that's what success looks like but as we get further down the road I know you want to talk about this a little bit so I'm surfacing it up other things are as are more important so anyway Let's uh let's segue unless you have something else to say about that and talk about stepping into go you know going further and lending your first job I along the same Paradigm I'm sure but and how you got into the specific type of practice or area of law that you you ended up going into well I always knew if I went into law that I'd want to be a litigator I mean the rest of it didn't interest me I I just and and the image you always have lawyers on television and everything else is lawyers who go yeah so that was always what I thought I would do there was this cultural sense that you wanted to be when you're at a school like Cornell that the natural thing you gravitate towards if you're able is the big law firm and in in Cornell it was also the big New York law firm New York City there were a lot of you know I don't know the numbers but I would guess half of the students in my class were probably from New York City or maybe not quite that many but and New York was where the Big Wall Street law firms were so those were viewed as the best jobs to get by a lot of us you know some of us were smart enough to know that there were better types of things to be doing with a law degree so I yeah I just fell into that whole current and uh especially now I was on law review it opened a lot of doors I mean firms were really looking for people on law review and again the other Journal also uh those people were in pretty high demand so I ended up getting a job with a New York law firm I still remember going down to New York to interview with this Wall Street firm and I mean they were literally were at one Wall Street and I uh I had the interviews and then they took me to this wonderful lunch and then we went back to the office and they offered me the job for the next summer this would be the summer after second year and I what I did with that was I went to the World Trade Center and for the first time in my life I went to the Top of the World Trade Center and looked over Manhattan and I just thought I'm on top of the world this is great wow right it was kind of cool yeah but so then I I guess the next summer I was in New York working at that firm and the other thing you learn in law school is that it's nice if you can to get a clerkship with a judge for the year or two after you graduate some clerkships are one year some are two years and those are very competitive as well and uh the most in demand ones were uh with federal judges I decided I wanted to be in New York or Washington DC and so I there you weren't supposed to apply before a certain day so I waited and then I sent out my resume to all the judges in the southern district of New York all the judges on the second Circuit Court of Appeals and all the district court and Appel at Federal Appel at judges in Washington DC and I got nothing out of that I mean oh what I got were I got some letters back saying we like two days later saying we've already hired our clerks which I thought well how did that happen because we were told we couldn't apply until two days ago but um so that was another kind of minor failure in life I guess you could call or lack of opport disappointment y disappointment that's the word so so in the middle of the summer in June I guess I reached out to one of my law professors and I saidwell what do I do now I you know I wanted to be in these courts and I'm not going to get that job and he said well there's a judge in Boston named Joe Toro who is a Cornell Alum and he's a fairly young federal district judge and every judge has two clerks and and in Boston it was oneyear clerkships so he always hires one Cornell clerk so I sent a letter to him I sent him my resume I got a call from his secretary who said the judge would like to meet you and uh I went the summer ended I went back to Rochester and then I had the interview with the judge in Boston so I flew out to Boston for the interview it was the first time I'd ever seen Boston Massachusetts I I had this misimpression of it as well if you didn't go to Harvard Law don't bother practicing which was totally wrong but so I had no interest in it but I applied to judge Toro I I met with him in his Chambers it was the last day he was doing interviews the last day he was interviewing for clerkships he told me at the end of the interview he knew I was not going immediately back to Rochester I was meeting a friend for lunch before I flew back he said well before you go to the airport call me me and let me know he he said I want you to know how hard this job is I I expect my clerks to work nights weekends it's it's going to be very very challenging and I don't want to hire somebody who's not willing to make that challenge so he said call think about it and then call me and tell me if if you want me to still consider you for the job so I said okay I knew I wanted the job I had nothing to think about sure I'll work nights and weekends for you judge so I had lunch with a friend and then from quinsey Market in Boston I found a pay phone and I called back and talked to the judge I said yeah I'm still very much interested in the clerkship and he offered it to me on the phone so I went back to Rochester and saw my family and just told them how thrilled I was that now I had this wonderful clerkship and that's what brought me to Boston after I graduated law school and I've been here for more than 40 years now met my wife here we had our kids here amazing my whole career has been in Boston and it was all because the judge I got this clerkship with the judge it was because I didn't give up after getting all those rejections yeah I mean he's it's not like he he would have just just because of the relationship with the school he was just going to go with that I mean no cuz he interviewed other people from Cornell too and you know so so that was going in the junior year is that right am I tracking or was so that was uh the well I'm sorry law school sorry the interview with the judge was between second and third year the clerkship was was after I graduated and I had a summer to play with so I actually worked at a big Chicago Law from the following summer which was also a great experience and then during the clerkship I had to decide I could go back to the New York firm I could go back to the Chicago firm I could I could interview with Boston law firms I saw one Law Firm try a big case in front of the judge and ultimately I interviewed with them decided to stay in Boston they made me an offer and I decided I I liked Boston I loved Boston and I decided to stay and that's where I spent the first eight years of my practice wow wow that's huge if you think back to that transition from you know you had your your your your Paradigm was setting you towards New York and you were going in that direction then you ended up in Boston that's a shift right and then that you're either you're EI you're either a Yankees fan or a Red Sox there's that a lot of Yankees fans of Cornell Law School yeah there's definitely that as you look back on that what would you say were the primary reasons that you ended up in Boston I know that the clerkship came about I know that you had to have the grades and get you know getting in the law review being part of that uh was important but how do you think that transition really came about was it just based upon on your your academic success was there anything else going on there I'm digging a little deep here Don just wonder a decision to go to Boston and not New York yeah because you could have said just don't want to go to Boston yeah and actually I was even thinking of going back to Rochester Joe I had opportunities there as well you know I spent the summer in New York they paid me well as a summer associate but it's not like I was wealthy or anything and and it was I just thought if and well the main issue it wasn't that not having a lot of money in New York is is a bad experience because it's not for a lot of people but it was really the nature of the job in the New York law firms at the time you spent the first three years just or more just doing really uninteresting work and all around the clock it was it was really long long long long hours that's kind of The Stereotype isn't it yeah and the the opportunities for advancement in any big Law Firm were limited and you know it was just kind of a that mentality now when I went to the law firm I went to in Boston that was also one of the best law firms in Boston and they were kind of known at the time for working their young lawyers really really hard and I I guess I was willing to do it because it was wasn't for as you still it wasn't as difficult maybe as the New York law firms but also you were getting better experience you were getting into court a lot more more broad exposure yeah yeah and and the the law firm I went to I mean some of the best trial lawyers in Boston were there and I just learned so much it was such a great experience I also just thought the city was a lot more manageable New York was a little overwhelming I mean I didn't have a car I could never get out of the city so uh Boston was just much more easy to manage so so we've we've really traversed a lot we talked a lot about law right so I know no no I mean I obviously that's your life that's where You' spent your again and just to Circle back to the beginning of this there this might resonate more for folks in this profession but I'm asking listeners to think about some of the things that you're hearing about these Transitions and I'm going to take us back to what uh Ruth bear said to us said to you right because I had this thought when you're talking about Boston that maybe there was a little bit more of a risk there of going there in some sense because it wasn't on the Paradigm everybody was going down to New York right and so for someone who lays back and doesn't dip your toe over the end of the surfboard so to speak and oddly you know you might view yourself as someone that makes that really hard but you've made a couple shifts that have been a little bit on the edge and they paid off yeah I think so yeah so anyway just just a thought so what type of law did you settle into or did you shift around a lot or have you stayed in the same uh I course know the answer well I've always done litigation and a lot of it has been big cases I I've always been interested in the big case although some of my more fun experiences have been with smaller cases that went to trial but so I went to an excellent firm in Boston and I got in my second year put on a huge case well it was I I mean I'll I'll name it I guess because people might be familiar with it if you've ever read the book or seen the movie a civil Act I was on one of the defense teams in that case and it was hard it was it was just a ton of work fascinating it was you know there were I had some emotional reactions at first about getting involved on the defense side of that case but but was this what area again are we talking about litigation what area so this was toxic Tor litigation okay this was a case tragic case where it it was brought by families who had people mostly children who had contracted leukemia and they blamed it on contamination in a couple of Municipal Wells and they blamed the contamination on a couple of companies and we represented one of the companies so when I was first asked to work on the case I thought I don't want to work on that case but you know I I knew I really didn't have much of a choice so I I did and as I got more into it I I began to think wait a minute what our client did didn't cause those leukemias so I feel better about working on the case and it's a long story I won't go into but but I I got to work with uh a lawyer named Jerry faser who was played by Robert Duval in the movie what was the movie the name of the movie civil action civil action okay well I'll put links to the I don't if I yeah I'm in the book but I I I you know it was like they uh if if if you looked at 2,000 hours or 4,000 or 5,000 hours I worked on the case the author found the five minutes where I was at my worst well but just a very minor character in it okay so so then uh you know it was a firm where I was doing well I I had made Junior partner I was expected to make senior partner I was getting very close to that happening and I wasn't happy I was I I just wasn't happy and I knew that there were some things about that firm even though they were wonderful lawyers outstanding lawyers culturally I it wasn't the best fit for me and I I just wasn't that happy there and there were you know there's a lot to that obviously I won't go into but at the same time I was we had just started our family we had our first child and I wasn't home very much because it was a firm where they you had a lot of work and they expected you to work very long hours every evening you were there late and uh I wasn't seeing my kid and so I started thinking about maybe taking a risk and leaving this great place where I seem to have a good future but doing it so that I could have a more Balanced Life and then it didn't seem like that much of a risk because I was uh I I had an opportunity to go work at the Boston office of a big Chicago Law Firm that was every bit as good as the one I was leaving it's just that it was the Boston office it was a small office since it wasn't the main office I see which was a risk but but I I I thought agonized over it for a long time I made pros and cons lists and ultimately I decided to take the jump and I so I did and I was at that law firm for about 17 years and then when I was there because I had worked on that toxic Tor environmental case I really started doing a lot of environmental litigation in one of those cases it was a case against the entire oil industry and we represented One Big Oil Company and it was a class action and I didn't know much about class actions but I we would have meetings of all the lawyers across the country who were representing all the oil companies and I was impressed that how much these guys knew about class actions and and how interesting that whole field was and I decided I think I want to focus my practice on doing class action Defense work and and that's what I've been doing for more than 20 years now so when you made that pivot or started focusing how many years into your profession were you roughly at that point I was about 17 or 18 years in that's quite a bit Yeah I was doing General commercial litigation before that and environmental litigation but yeah yeah so it was recogn and then I had an opportunity that I just seized upon I I had a partner in our Boston office who was representing a a group of pharmaceutical companies in the diet drug litigation fenfen oh yes people might remember that I do and um there were a large number of class actions in in that case it was in a federal court in Philadelphia and we were one of the lead National firms for this one group of pharmaceutical companies and there were class certification hearings coming up and somebody had to AR arue these very important motions and my partner said do you want to do it he knew I wanted to develop an expertise in class actions and I said oh yeah so I ended up being lead National class certification Council for this group of pharmaceutical companies wow which really helped me develop both experience and branding in in my area uh and kind of got me started down that road and then here's where we can take a turn yeah I'm wondering when this other thing might have come about so this is just a professional track right so yeah yeah so I started so that's really been my professional Focus for all these years but the turn is that I also you remember I wanted to go into the ministry to help people right I always had this public interest side to me and so I was interested in the bar associations the Boston Bar Association in particular I had I I had Co chaired one of the Committees with underneath a section and and that was a great experience but it occurred to me that the BBA didn't have a class actions committee and Other Bar associations did so I had a friend who who was head of the litigation section of the BBA that year he had been in my first Law Firm that's how I knew him and I called him up and I said Jack the BBA needs a class actions committee and he said well that's an interesting idea let me take it back to the steering committee and get back to you and he called me back a couple weeks later and said Don we agree we want to have a class actions committee and we want you to chair it and I said great now do you hear Ruth Bear's voice there if you don't extend yourself you haven't that's right so I extended myself and and what that led to was I chaired the class action committee brand new committee then I moved up a step and chaired the litigation section I was asked then to be on the editorial board of the bba's journal the Boston bar Journal I was asked to be the editor and chief of the journal I was asked to be chair of the nominating Committee of the BBA I was asked to be treasurer of the gbba and then finally I was asked to become vice president which meant you go from vice president to president-elect to president pretty much an automatic track to be president of the Boston Bar Association it was all because I made that little phone call to Jack rean I said his last name oh to my friend Jack and and suggested that they needed a class action committee and again I'm sure Ruth bear was talking to me when I made that pH call and that opened up a lot of other relationships and opportunities to meet some really notable leaders in the country and it it did it it you know you you meet with a lot of the judges uh you go to Washington once a year and you meet with your Congressional con group in in Washington so I you know I had a meeting with Senator kry I had a meeting with our Congressman I I don't think I got to meet Senator Kennedy unfortunately but but I've seen him speak in other settings and uh yeah and and you get to contribute to all this good work that the organization does that's the most important thing you you you meet lawyers all over the city of Boston in all different fields not just the big law firms but the real heroes who are representing poor people facing evictions or uh immigrants who are having Visa problems or veterans coming back from the Middle East Wars and and uh who need legal advice that the military isn't going to pay for I got I wasn't doing that work but I got to know the lawyers who were and I got to support the work they were doing and uh that's that's the exciting thing for me in any volunteer opportunity is the people you meet and the way it extends a Network that's not necessarily going to help you professionally or financially but it helps you personally just to know that there are all these good people out there volunteering their time for important causes and and so that's the that's what makes my life Rich yeah I I can hear your passion coming through and and I'm I'm sensing two different threads coming together now finally 20 years in whatever it was when you first we in the bar association when you're seeing the work that they're doing on the pro bono side when you're doing pro bono kind of work and and it's a demanding profession as you said yourself you made some decisions to leave one firm to go to another so you could see your your child and your wife I mean it's a huge impact on your family life you know you think you know it's a challenging profession but you know you can't keep that pace up and great everything's on track professional think going very well but there's still something missing and this is something that comes forth in my conversations is there's something missing so people when they approach me they go I think I need to make a shift I go what's going on in there there's there's something some abrasion there's some unmet something in you now as you've just gone through I hear the passion I see the connection yeah yeah I mean there's more to life right it's not it shouldn't all be about just putting your head down and doing your work and and making a living there you should be giving back especially if you're fortunate like I've been you should be giving back and and I just think that enriches your life in in ways that can't be measured by dollars and sense and so I've done that you know I the thing I'm proudest about in my career was really in addition to the bar association was a big pro bono case I did I guess uh from the late 90s to the mid 2000s I put in a lot of time on a big pro bono case for a lowincome group in in Boston that had their homes flooded with raw sewage when there was a 100-year storm that caused the sewer system to overflow and they were in a very low R low lying neighborhood with where that could happen and um we brought suit against the sewer agencies that we felt were responsible and and we ended up after years of effort getting them a a good settlement I'm more proud of that than just about anything I've done uh in my in my professional life and then you know I guess the uh the other piece of it is you can give back through your professional activities but you can also give back in other ways and the other place that has really riched me has been my board work at the College of Worcester yeah where I'm supporting uh an institution of higher education and I place a lot of value on education but I'm also working with some amazing people both within the college faculty and administration but also on the board and it's a labor of love you know and and that's that's what makes it all worthwhile for me is being able to do things like that that's great that's great on this has been really good now I think it might be good just to Pivot now a little bit in the conversation and talk about maybe some some themes or some lessons learned and you know those are the kinds of things you might want to thinking back over the conversation and your reflection are things that you would say to yourself as you were starting out with the the benefit of hindsight or someone else who's starting out uh things to keep in mind to in form of maybe a smoother path well I wouldn't want to smooth the path too much because I think having those rough spots can actually help you as long as you're willing to learn from them but you know I guess as I thought about this my my own personal story it did a few things did kind of emerge one is phrase no man is an island or maybe I should say no person is an island I didn't get any SU uccess in life without the help of other people and I didn't get to the places where I I did find joy and satisfaction without help of other people I needed people to help me people who were ahead of me who pulled me up people who were maybe behind me and push me forward people who were alongside me and and joined me in whatever work I was doing so I had the benefit of great teachers in college and law school great teachers in my law firms who trained me and just a lot of good people around me so that that is one lesson is you don't do you don't succeed on your own you succeed because you're part of a team of people and and because you've had help from other people I guess a corollary of that is being open to outside influences you know being open to the person who says go look at that table at the college fair being open to the person who says if you don't extend yourself you haven't lived being open to the law school Professor who says apply to this judge for a clerkship you know you need help making decisions I I got a lot of advice along the way not all of it was good I probably followed the bad advice as much as I followed the good advice but but you need that you can't do it on your own not giving up resilience The Importance of Being resilient I mean that again I don't know where my life would have gone if I hadn't bounced back from that bad experience with that one exam probably it would have gone fine maybe it would have been better I don't know but I know looking back I'm glad that I was able to respond to adversity uh in the way that I did and I think it's it's not you you just can't give up but you know I hear Peter Gabriel singing the song right don't give up yeah exactly um but you can't give up when you face adversity it if you want to move forward it's really important how you respond to it and you can overcome adversity you can overcome failure or disappointment if you are willing to make the effort to do that knowing yourself I mean I left my first law firm knowing that or at least believing knowing that I wasn't happy that there at the time and believing that I probably never would be even if I had stayed and that was just personal to me I know a lot of people who stayed at that law firm who have been very happy and have done very well and again it's a wonderful place in many ways but for me I knew that it wasn't going to be the right place for me long term and I made I was willing to take the risk to get out yeah just wasn't a good cultural fit we call it that and I think that's an important element yeah yeah aome and then giving back you know it it's again the most rewarding experiences of my life have been doing that big pro bono case volunteering my time at the Boston Bar Association volunteering my time with the College of Worcester that people look at me and sometimes they think I'm crazy why would you want to be chair of the board of a college you know that's so much time and you're not what are you getting back from that well I get a lot from that and and uh even if I wasn't the chair just being a member of the board I I got a lot out of that and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world so that's it yeah it's kind of the view of the end end in mind right it's the Steven cvy thing what's your legacy going to be and in my experience Legacy isn't in positions or titles it's not in the kind of car you drive it's it lives in people it lives in and communities and things that you have done to help others so well and that's an important l for people our age too I think and maybe people a little younger than us is a lot of my focus when I was president of the Boston Bar Association was was trying to figure out how to help new lawyers who were coming out of law school at the height of the Great Recession when law firms weren't hiring at all and were actually laying off a lot of people and uh and then trying to help younger lawyers in my firms to develop it's reaching down you know I I benefited from people who reached down to me and now it's my turn to reach down and try to help the people who were still earlier in their careers than I am now kind of the old the we've been talking about movies as kind of the Pay It Forward concept really pretty powerful it is it really is yeah Don this has been great it's been so good I mean I I've you know we've talked you know over the years a little bit but I've never gone this deep with you and it's been uh very rewarding for me to hear hear more about your story I know there's tons more in our preliminary conversation we're trying to think about how how much would we bring in but I think this is going to really serve serve folks well yeah so uh everyone I will leave references that I think would be helpful in the show notes for you to make it a little easier if you to find books movies whatever it might be and uh we'll provide some of these key points that that uh don sharing from his his journey in life and his Transitions and these really important lessons I'll pull those out for you in the show notes so thanks again Don for being on titans of transition thank you Joe my pleasure hey thanks for joining me today on titans of transition I hope you enjoyed the episode please check the show notes for additional information also please like And subscribe to this channel [Music]