Looking Back

Time for a change

Today seems like a good day to look back on my legal career, since I have finally decided to retire from the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, my place of employment for the last 23 years. Retiring into a war and an uncertain global economy seems like a good idea, right? Not so much, and this is a worry.

But. It is time.

Photo by: Aiden Fraser on Unsplash

I graduated from Columbia in 1979. Because my family and I lived three blocks away from the campus, and we did not have the money for room and board, I lived at home during college. Yes, that sucked, but on the other hand, I got to go to Columbia. I probably should have taken some time between college and law school, but I did not, graduating from Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville in 1982. You might think Nashville was a long way for a New York City kid to go, and you would be right. But that living at home for college thing noted above… let’s just say I needed a new experience and they made me a great offer.

I liked some things about Nashville, but was ready to go back to the City when I finished. I did not love law school, but I did not hate it either, and I did get accepted to the Law Review, and enjoyed that. And I made one great friend - Jay Tobin in Dallas, TX - who had a terrific legal practice life (mostly as in-house counsel), from which he had the eminent sense to retire well before I have from this.

I started my law practice at Patterson, Belknap, Webb, & Tyler, which was a great firm to start at, and it still exists in a similar form and about the same size (200 lawyers). Perhaps the greatest thing about it - to a young lawyer - was that its offices were at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, one of the great office buildings in all of New York. Late one night, I remember getting on the night elevator with Eddie Murphy (SNL is broadcast from 30 Rock). While it remains as one of the few firms of that size that has not merged into another firm (or firms) in the intervening years, it did move its offices over to 6th Avenue, which is unfortunate.

After a few years in New York, I moved to the US Dept. of Justice as a Trial Attorney in the Environmental Enforcement Section. Before I started in D.C., I spent the summer teaching at Phillips Andover in their Summer Session, where I had discovered my love of teaching during the summers while I was still in College. When I got to DOJ, as part of the Superfund hires, I discovered that we were effectively “partners without associates” - that is, we had all the responsibility but no help, and a huge docket of roughly 30 cases each. Actually, we had a little help: .5 of a paralegal - provided that person was not busy on another case. After three + years there, I needed a change, and I went in-house at Price Waterhouse (yes, the accounting firm), which was building a unit of consultants and lawyers to law firms which were facing increasing automation needs at the time. I did some of the earliest AI in Law work in those years - they were called “expert systems” then. That was very interesting and engaging work, but by then, I had married a woman from Denver, and we were eyeing moving out there to be near her parents. In 1990, we did that.

She was a lawyer in a giant law firm’s D.C. office and very unhappy there. I thought it might help her to be home and near her parents. We both got jobs at Denver law firms - at the Rothgerber firm for me (now merged and re-merged into several others). I did more commercial litigation there.

That marriage, sadly, fell apart, and I considered moving back to the east coast, but then met and fell in love with my wife of (now) almost 31 years, who has deep family ties in Colorado and New Mexico. I co-founded an internet startup and did its legal work, sold it, and joined a friend to build a small litigation firm with two partners and three associates. Some of our most interesting work there was representing the Northern Arapahoe tribe in Wyoming in a large and complex case against the federal government that had been pending for 22 years.

About this time, my wife - who sometimes jokingly refers to herself as “Wife 2.0” - and I looked at each other and realized that we were both working very hard, and that well… we had a 6 year-old and a 1 year-old at home. Being away for weeks of depositions in D.C. was not working great for either me, the two of us, or our children.

When I was four, my Dad left home and my parents divorced a year or two later. Custody arrangements were not what they are today, and I only got to see my father once a week for half a day, and for a two week stretch in the summer. Yes, that caused all sorts of problems. Let’s just say therapy is a good thing, and everyone has times in their lives when they need the helpful perspective of an independent third-party professional. I had work to do, and I did that work.

With my two daughters, I realized that the thing I most wanted not to do was continue that cycle. So my goal became finding a job that would allow me to be present for my children’s growing up, but that could still offer a deep intellectual challenge in the law.

I cannot prove this, but I might be the longest running currently working “legal writing” teacher in the country. If I am not, it is a pretty short list of folks who have done this for 42 years. (Admittedly, in my case, with two big breaks while I was practicing law).

Because the first time I taught Legal Writing was in the 1984-85 academic year at Cardozo Law in New York. They were starting a writing program and were looking for adjuncts. They hired me, but only - I think - because I had a pulse. My recollection is they gave me a class list and not much else. My class was on Monday at 8:00 a.m., so I spent Sundays working up a lesson plan and grading papers. My students from that era are retiring themselves right about now. I hope they have long ago forgiven me for the many mistakes I am sure I made then. But I loved the experience, and I was hooked on the joy of seeing student light bulbs come on.

With that prior experience, when I moved to Denver five years later, I looked at both Colorado schools to see if either had a similar course that that I could teach as an adjunct to my practice life. Denver had started the Lawyering Process (LP) program the previous year, and when I applied and indicated that I had taught the course before, well… they picked me to join a group of other similarly willing lawyers in the Denver area. That was in 1991, so I have been associated with DU’s program for almost 35 years (which is crazy). I did that for six years, until my practice life became too complicated (such as litigating the N. Arapahoe case noted above). I used to say I was doing the adjunct gig at DU for “beer money” - because the compensation worked out to around a six-pack per week. But that was just a misdirection joke. I was even more hooked on teaching students than I had been before.

In 2000, while I was away, DU Law did a good thing, and professionalized the LP program, hiring full-time faculty members to teach the course. In 2003, while I was looking for a job that would not take me away from my family so much, someone brought me the listing and said: “Didn’t you used to teach this course there?” I am pretty sure I was the only person who applied who had six years of student evaluations in the prior version (adjunct taught) of the course at DU Law.

I have now taught full-time in the LP program for 23 years. So, that adds up to 30 years teaching the course, across 43 years of my professional life. While I loved my practice years, the academic life has offered me many opportunities I would not have otherwise had, and opened up and enriched my life in significant ways.

How about some numbers? Over my teaching career, I have taught LP 28 full years, and two partial years (one semester) during sabbaticals. In addition, I have taught a course of my own design called Discovery Practicum 17 times, as well as 11 other classes, including Administrative Law (once). All of those other courses were on top of my regular teaching load. By my count, the full year course of LP I am currently teaching is my 58th class. Four of those were fully online, and 8 of them were hybrid in some form.

Over those years, I have had 1,057 total students in my classes. I often think they taught me more than I ever taught them. Whether that is true or not, they have always been the heart of this work - they are, after all, why I got hooked on doing it in the first place. Getting to know them and making a difference in their lives (so they say) has been the greatest privilege of my life. Many of my forty-five teaching assistants over those years have literally become a part of my life. I treasure all my students, but particularly my TAs. I could not have delivered what we delivered each year without their help and support. I am deeply in their debt.

I have published four books, something I never expected to do when I was practicing law. Two of those were hybrid textbooks - one for LP and the other for the Discovery course I created. The other two books analyze the role that technology has had - and will continue to have - on the legal education enterprise. Over that time, I also published 22 articles, and have over 8,000 downloads of those articles from SSRN and Digital Commons (combined). One of those articles compiles everything I learned over my years of teaching the course.

I was active in the Legal Writing Institute for many years, serving on several committees and co-chairing conferences, and I served a four-year term on its elected Board.

In total, I hosted or co-chaired 11 national conferences, including the first Law School Assessment conference (in 2011) and the first national conference focused on best practices for online learning in law school - five months before the pandemic hit. I also co-created (with my good and valued friend Cliff Zimmerman at Northwestern) and hosted the first law school Symposium (with published papers) on the role of the Hidden Curriculum in legal education. For all of those conferences, I had the privilege of working with some of the greatest people, colleagues, and friends - all of whom I have been lucky enough to know and to work with over a professional life. They were a lot of work, but they were also a blast.

The University gave me its Distinguished Teaching award in 2012, and the law school’s Alumni Association honored me with the Robert B. Yegge Teaching Excellence award in 2025. The latter award committee produced this wonderful movie that captures well my orientation to the work. To have these formal recognitions has meant a great deal to me. They are honors I will always treasure.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing the academic life has offered me was international travel to meet and work with colleagues with similar issues and challenges in their work. I have presented at academic conferences in Montreal, London, and Prague. I have been an invited speaker at conferences in Beijing, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tokyo, and Moscow. These experiences have broadened my life in profound ways that will always be a part of me. To meet a colleague who teaches law on the other side of the world and who has read your work and made changes to their teaching methods because of it? Well, let’s just say I never expected to do anything like that in law practice. Ever.

So why, after all this fun, would I leave? Primarily for three reasons.

First, our financial planner says I can. My wife retired two years ago, and we have been fine (so far). He says we will be fine from here and I trust him. It is terrifying to do this now, when the world seems on fire, but again, he assures me it will be ok. I realize and acknowledge that not everyone has this option. I am grateful that I do. So, it is time for this reason.

Second, without singling anyone out, I have over the years given a side-eye to some of our colleagues who can’t let go, and who continue to collect a large salary and yet contribute not as much. It is hard to leave the confines of the ivory tower - I get it - but of greater concern to me is that doing so holds back younger colleagues with great ideas and drive. Bringing them in keeps the organization healthy and senior folks should step aside and make room for them. I decided many years ago I did not want to keep hanging on, but rather I wanted to make room for the new energy. So, it is time for this reason also.

Third, I am bone deep tired. Tired not so much of the work or the students but tired of the micro aggressions from the tenured class, of which they seem so blissfully unaware. My former colleague Nantiya Ruan (now a fully tenured professor at a higher ranked school with a higher ranked legal writing program) has written about this fully. It just wears you down, and this might be a personal failing of some sort, but I have reached my limit. I might have lasted longer if not for the accumulated years of these petty frustrations. So, it is time for this reason as well.

But. This is not a complaint post. It is a joyous look in the rear view mirror at an engaging and varied law practice, but also the opportunities I have been given at the University of Denver - and all I have been able to do from this modest perch. I hope it offers inspiration to younger colleagues who might read this. Meeting and working with great students has been fantastic - and offered incredibly enriching work that felt like I was giving back to the profession I love. Add in worldwide travel, writing, publishing, making life-long friendships with colleagues far and wide. And, most importantly, being closer to home for my kids’ growing up years.

I am incredibly proud of my two daughters, who have been my greatest gift. They are smart, loving, well-informed citizens of the world who are entering adulthood with an orientation of giving back. I love them more than I can adequately put into words. They amaze me every day. It gives me great joy when they are happy.

I know it is cliché for a man to end such a retrospective with a hat tip to his wife. But none of this would have been possible without her in my life. It was a lucky day for me when we met (on a blind date!) and fell in love. Early on we determined to become - and we have become - a good team. She earned a Masters degree at the law school, which enabled her to work in the Law Department at Allstate for the final 18 of her 37 years with the company. I have regularly relied on her perspective and advice. I absolutely adore her. She makes me laugh. We support each other and take joy in doing so.

This retrospective turned out to be longer than I intended. But I have wanted to take a snapshot in the rear view mirror as I take this next step. If you have read this far, thank you. I hope it has been fun to see what a career trajectory in law practice and law teaching could look like for you.

Finally, to my students over the years:

• Thank you for joining in the teaching and learning journeys we went on together.

• I know you will continue to do great things, and I am cheering you on.

• I ask your forgiveness for the mistakes I am sure I made along the way.

• Please continue to stay in touch, as many of you have over the years. (I am told that my email address at the University will remain active).

For now, I leave you with this excerpt from a poem by Anne Morrow Lindbergh -

Already I have shed the leaves of youth,

stripped by the wind of time down to the truth

of winter branches. Linear and alone

I stand, a lens for lives beyond my own,

a frame through which another’s fire may glow…

Photo by Mihály Köles on Unsplash