TLC Internships

TLC-July 2011 interns (L-R):

• Marcos Rodriguez
• Ike Kaludi
• (Gerry Spence)
• John Maroney
• Franklin Gehres

I arrived at the Trial Lawyers College late in the summer of my second year of law school with a line from The Great Gatsby in my head: "And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow fast in movies. I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
My breezy optimism was not disappointed.
The feeling of renewal, of emerging from the College with an altered perspective and a deeper understanding of the human condition is as much a part of the character of the College as the surrounding mountains and vast skies. For five revealing days and nights I worked intimately with some friends whose spirit and strong moral engagement I will not soon forget. At the Trial Lawyers College, I was embraced by lawyers who had won cases in nearly every state, in both appellate and supreme courts, including one lawyer who had tried over 500 cases and another who had successfully represented a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. From opening statement to voir dire to cross examination, the faculty and the students at the Trial Lawyers College unerringly explored the anatomy of a case and the story the client relies on the attorney to give utterance to with quiet compassion. My week at the College was not only one of the best of my law school career, but of my life, and I returned to the law school in the fall feeling as though I had found a higher purpose and glimpsed a measurable expanse of some secret life, the life whose story we as attorneys both aspiring and established, are privileged to tell.