 Hi everyone. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the Director of P20 Initiatives at Northern Illinois University, and we're back with another episode of Career Pathways Virtual Trailheads. If you haven't caught our episodes, they're all available on our blog. That address will be at the end of this video, and they're all on our YouTube channel. So today we're real excited to bring you another Career Pathway, this in the Human and Public Services Pathway. We've got an attorney with us today, and I'm going to turn it over to Arthur to let him introduce himself. Arthur, tell us about yourself. My name is Arthur Mingo. I graduate from Southern Illinois University School of Law. I graduated in the year 2014. I passed a bar in November of 2014. The bar is a three month period after graduation. And I live in Kite Med City, which is a South suburb of Chicago, and I work as a lawyer. So tell us about what there's all kinds of different lawyers, and some of the students watching this may not even know that. They may think all lawyers do everything from go to trial in big corporate cases to help people buy a home or write a last will and testament. Tell us about the kind of law you practice and maybe a little bit about how different lawyers focus on different things. Okay, no problem. The best way to think about what a lawyer does is to think about doctors. And I think a lot of people understand that not all doctors do all things. If you've watched ER or Grey's Nami, you know there are certain doctors that do certain things. They do that one thing very well. And then there are other doctors like your general practitioner, the doctor you may go to for your year checkup, who do a little bit of everything. They're not experts in one field, but they're more of a jack of trades with everything. And that's how lawyers operate. So I myself am a small jack of trades. I have a preference for contract, and that is either a, I will write the contract between my client and another client. We're trying to buy something or someone's trying to buy something from us, or it will be contract disputes. So a contract I have written, or that was written by a previous party, and there's a dispute. The easiest way to think of a contract dispute is, hey, you were supposed to sell me blue widgets, and I opened up the box. The box inside those are green widgets. And then you might say, well, for us, that is considered blue. My client may say no, for us, that's considered green. And we will deal with that issue. I tend not to take my cases to trial, just because I'm very much an economic forward-looking lawyer. Some lawyers like to take their case to trial, and there's nothing wrong with that. Those are litigators, and I believe there's a place to litigate. By the same time, you have to ask yourself how much money are you willing to spend to prove that you're right. So I do those. I sort of run my own firm. I put my foot out there, so I'm taking a little bit of all cases. And that's the reason why I said that contract work is really what I like to do, but I'm a small jack-of-all-trades. So I've done cases including domestic issues, child payments, last-world testments, and some small criminal cases. When you hang your own shingle or you start your own law firm, you have to take what business you can just to keep everything moving forward. And then once you have enough customer base, you can start to say, hey, you know what? Myself, my firm, are really going to focus on one area, and you slowly start to narrow in. Going from more of a general practice lawyer or doctor to a more focused, specialized practitioner. Cool. So let's try and come back to that whole idea of starting your own law firm in a minute. But first, let's go back a little bit earlier in your life and talk about your pathway through school. So you went to high school, you had to go to college to get a four-year degree and a bachelor's degree, and then you go to law school from there. Can you just walk students through what that's like? Because I'm not sure everybody knows about exactly what that process looks like to be an attorney. And then let's finish up by talking about that last hurdle, which is passing the bar. Sure. Not problem. 49 out of the 50 states require you to have a bachelor's degree in order to, I'm sorry, all states require you to have a bachelor's degree to go to law school. I got my bachelor's from the University of Illinois, Springfield, in Springfield, Illinois. My bachelor's was in political science, and I love political science so much being in Springfield, Illinois. And for those of you who may not know, Springfield is our state capital, and our state capital is a very active state capital. Some state capitals are very sleepy, people come in, they do their job and they leave, whereas Springfield is the exact opposite. People are there day in, day out, year in, year out, regardless of the general assembly, which is our legislature is present or not. And so there's a lot of political activity that happens in Springfield year, year round. Because of that, I decided to stay at UIS and get my master's. And so that is the more non-traditional aspect of my educational career because a lot of people will go to high school, go to undergrad, and then go to law school. So let's step back a little bit and just talk more about your day-to-day job here. Thinking about the fact that a lot of the people who watch this might be middle school or high school students could be some undergrads, students in community colleges, or four-year universities who are kind of exploring what they might want to do. What does a typical day or week look like just in general in a nutshell? Well, a week is a better snapshot than a day. So a typical week, so I work two jobs. I do private, I do private business. And so for my private business, it is first and foremost, if you decide to become a lawyer, I cannot emphasize enough the one skill that every lawyer needs to have. The ability to return phone calls. It may seem like a really weird thing. But here in Illinois, we have an organization called the ARDC. And the ARDC is where people go to complain to the state of Illinois about their lawyer. My lawyer screwed me over. My lawyer did this. My lawyer did that. And the number one complaint people have is, my lawyer never called me back. And so you want to make sure that you return phone calls. I'm not saying you have to return that call the next day, but generally speaking, try to keep your client up to date. So that's one of the main things that I do. I try to make a point of having an open line to my clients. I have a separate phone just for my clients. I care with me. I don't want to say all the time, but the majority of the time. So if you call me, I'll answer or I'll get back to you. The next is legal research. Very rarely, well, a fact pattern. Let me say that not so lawyerly. Very rarely will the same thing happen twice. There will be things like it, but there won't be the exact same thing. And so I spent a lot of my time looking at place places where the court has said, you know, we have these circumstances have happened and we make this decision. But we've had some slightly different circumstances over here happen and we make this decision. And I try to see, okay, my clients in the middle. So if we have to go to trial, which outcome is going to happen? Because this one is really good for my client, but this one is really bad for my client. So I have to make that argument in my head up is our fact pattern a little bit more like this is are the widgets that I talked about earlier? Are they really blue or they really green? So that's part of it. The other thing is taking questions from people who want who want to hire me listening to what they have to talk about or is happening in their particular fact pattern. I have a client he wants to hire me on he he he his wife got divorced. He moved to Texas, his wife stayed here with their child. And he feels like he's not having enough communication with this child. So it's interesting because he's thinking about moving back here, which would be great for me because I can work with my client one on one but also having to look at well what are the responsibilities that she has to her husband or her ex-husband and what was their actual agreement. So it's doing research going to the court pulling up documents because sometimes the client may come in and may not know exactly what they need to bring with them. And so you end up giving your clients homework and like hey I need you to bring me these things so I can work for you. The other thing that I do and I'll be really quick because I see what time it is. I'll be real quick is I do what's known as doc review. So if you ever see like huge class action cases, those cases have lots of lots of documents from either side. So if ACME Inc was being sued by the federal government for selling rockets that don't get Wiley Coyote where they're supposed to go, ACME Inc is going to there's a process called discovery where ACME Inc has to hand over things. Well before they hand over things they want to make sure that anything that they can keep to themselves they do that. And it's my job to go through all their paperwork to go okay the government gets this. This is our rocket design the government they should have that but these are comments about that that ACME Inc had with its lawyers. I'm going to put that to the side ACME Inc has been a hold on to that. And so I do both of those things at the same time. Cool. So what would you say is the most exciting part of your job? The most exciting part of my job has to be when you know you're right. There is very rarely in law field do you get to go, guys, I'm right. I looked at everything. Believe me. I got it. I got the magic case. You know, this is a case from the state of Illinois. So it's our court. It's from our circuit. It's from our division and it's from the judge if you're going in front of it. Very rarely a lot of times you get to go in and you go say hey you know what I'm like 85% confident. But when you have that 100% confidence that is right there. And the only way you get that is through research is looking and looking. Being a lawyer is more like being a librarian than is like being a TV show. And being able to tell your client you're going to be okay. Whether it be a contract dispute or be a family issue. People come to you because they're scared and they're nervous and they don't know what to do. And typically speaking the most you can tell a client is we're going to do our best. But saying that doesn't always make you feel comfortable. It doesn't happen often but it's a lot more comforting to a client when I can tell that client. Not only am I going to do my best but you're going to win. And I've only been able to say that twice and five years twice because it doesn't happen that often. But when it does happen it's great because you can see the burden being lifted off your client. And then relaxing and enjoying whatever it is that brought them to you. So you talked a few minutes ago about how important it is to return phone calls. And you just made the great comment of being a lawyer in the real world is more like being a librarian than what you see on TV. And so what would you say are the skills that are most important for an attorney to have to be successful in their work? Truth be told being argumentive or being someone who likes to be an argument is not going to be the best skill you need to be a lawyer. It's just not. And I am going to answer a question but I'm going to make one quick aside and I'll jump right into it. Law school is not designed to teach you the law. People think that law school you're going to go in there and you're going to learn the Constitution. You're going to learn Buckley v. Vallejo. You're going to learn Dred Scott. And you are going to learn about these famous cases. But that's not what law school is there. Law school is there to teach you how to think like a lawyer. One of the most famous examples that I can think of of getting people to learn to think like a lawyer is if I were to ask you. Here's a trick you can play your friends. Ask a friend. Do you know what time it is? And it's something that I do with my clients. And if I ask you do you know what time it is? People will say it's 311. And that's when I get to be the smart out lawyer and say I did not ask you what time it is. I asked you do you know what time it is? Do you know what time it is is a yes or no question. And then people go see that's why I don't like lawyers. They want to play these words. And the being a lawyer is all about word games. Is there a skill that you can bring with you that helps you to be a lawyer to be a lawyer to the best of your ability? When it comes to the thinking like a lawyer not so much. But when it comes to putting your thoughts down on paper. Yes, you need to understand the English language. There are for public record lawyers who have written briefs and motions that make no sense. They're just very, very poorly written. You need to know how to write. I'm not saying that you need to be the next great American wit. I'm not saying that you need to be able to write for comic book movies or you need to write for Martin Scorsese. But I am saying that you need to be able to put a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb together in a way where your judge doesn't have to read it five times. Because if they have to read what you're saying multiple times you're going to lose them and they're going to get mad at you for saying, Why are you here? You can't write. So the actual art, the brain work of being a lawyer, there's not a lot that you can do to prepare yourself. But you can prepare yourself and it's time for you to put that down in writing by being able, by being a competent lawyer. You don't have to be the best but just be competent. So what would be the one thing in your work that attorneys typically have to do that either people may not know they have to do. It might be research. I might be answering my own question here or that attorneys do and they may not like doing and people don't know about that. There are two things that attorneys don't like to do. But they do it anyway because the job requires and the first is research. You're right. It's a part. It's just it is what it is. And the other part may seem so controversial depending on whom you ask. And I'm going to say it's billable hours. For those of you who don't know what billable hours are, lawyers aren't like most professions where you start your work day at 9am, you're done at 5.30. You put in eight hours worth of work because you have a half hour lunch there. And then you just tell your boss, Hey, I worked eight hours a day, pay me. That's not how lawyers work. We have to assign our work. Well, that's not how majority of lawyers work. For lawyers who do billable hours, you don't just walk in and start the clock. You walk in, you get ready, you get settled. So you may start your day at 9, but after you're ready to work work, it's 9.30. So that first half an hour, you're not paid. Once you start working, you have to account for all of your time to your clients. So if you're researching a case for your client, you have to put down, I worked 1.2 hours for my clients. And if you spent the rest of the day talking to friends, walking to the printer, waiting on a coffee or whatnot, all you've made that day is 1.2 hours. And it's that tedious keeping track of work. So the average lawyer will have 40 billable hours per week. But we'll actually end up working 60 to 70 hours per week because you can't bill for everything that you're doing. And that's annoying. That is a great example. And I certainly in my experience have heard many attorneys comment on the frustration of billable hours. So thank you for bringing that up. Just a couple last questions here, but really important ones. This one, how does your job have a positive impact on the world? Our job as a being a lawyer has a positive impact on the world because once you graduate law school, and so a certain extent, even if you do decide to actually become a lawyer, because again, just because you graduate law school does not mean you are a lawyer. You have a very unique way of looking at the world. And if you decide to take the bar and you pass and you become a lawyer, you still have that mentality that law school gave you. So you have the opportunity to settle disputes to sort of calm the waters and that is a positive. So the positive is not so much all lawyers reduce tax property. It's all lawyers have the ability to help out almost anywhere. You can take your, once you become a lawyer, you can go ahead and join the Navy and you can help them. So you can make a positive aspect even in the military life after becoming a lawyer. You can be helpful a lot of places. So then finishing up, what advice would you have for a sixth grader, a tenth grader, maybe a recent high school graduate or a college student, just in thinking about what they want to do with their life to help them kind of figure that out? Okay. If you're in sixth grade or 10th grade and you think about being a lawyer, I would say just make sure you understand how to write. Read a lot of books. Get that keen eye for pattern recognition. You know, if the classic SAT question, if this then that you need to sort of get that mentality down. If you are in late high school or you're in college and you're thinking about being a lawyer, I would honestly say the best thing I can tell you is to go and meet with lawyers. We are not reclusive. We are very open. If there is someone in your family or a friend's parent, whether it be their mom or their dad, is a lawyer, talk with them, shadow them for a day. If you really, really, really want to be a lawyer after doing all that, I wish you the best of luck. But I will honestly say just make sure that you know what you're getting yourself into. SIU is one of the cheaper law schools in the state. And even then I still gave up a lot of money to SIU. I have friends and I'm not going to say name of the school who went to law school and after three years, they were in debt $200,000. That amount may seem very abstract to you right now. It's not very abstract when Sally Mae, Freddie Mae, Freddie Mac and the other student loan organizations start taking $1,213 every month for your student loan payments. So you have to look at that aspect and also ask yourself, is the lifestyle of a lawyer something that you truly want? Being a lawyer is not what it looks like in suits. You're not just walking from one pretty room to the next pretty room, throwing a hand down, Harvey does something and you walk right back out. There's a lot of work that takes place prior to that. And just go with your eyes wide open. If there is anyone that is around you that has went to law school that is a lawyer, you need to talk to them and you need to sort of get their perspective. And if you can do more than one person because the more you understand what you're getting yourself into, the more informed choice you can make because I had a class that started out at 110 and by the end of the first year it was down to 102. That means eight people left. Now they may have left for various reasons, but I know that at least two guys left because this wasn't for them. And I'm thinking if you're going to law school to be a lawyer, one of the things you should do is research. Research thing you're going to do before you do it. So I don't want people to leave at the end of third year going, Oh my God, what that is doing myself on top of the fact that you've lost time, but you've also lost some money. Well, that's exactly why we want all students in Illinois to be able to explore the career pathways while they're in high school and even in middle school and certainly be able to start narrowing down those things that they're interested in doing. And while careers may change and passions and interests and skills will definitely change over the course of one's lifetime. We do want to empower students with that. So today, Arthur, you've been really helpful at giving students this window into the world of an attorney. We really, really appreciate that for students who are watching. Remember, if you or teachers, if you have ideas for occupations or people or questions that you'd like us to ask in our career pathways virtual trailhead series, please let us know on Twitter. Our Twitter account is at p20p20network at p20network is how you can connect with us on Twitter. And we look forward to bringing you more episodes of career pathways virtual trailheads moving forward. So we can take advantage of these opportunities to learn about work while we're learning at home. Arthur, thanks so much for joining us today. It was great having you. Thank you for having me.