Valena Beety spent her early career as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C.—until a single funeral changed everything. Meeting an exoneree whose mother had just passed after fighting eighteen years for his freedom, Beety realized she wanted to be part of that grace, not the system that had denied it.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Beety, a professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law and a Lawline faculty member since 2024, whose course tackles the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people. Beety traces her path from federal prosecutor to Mississippi Innocence Project attorney, founding director of the West Virginia Innocence Project, and now educator and author. She unpacks devastating case studies—including a daycare worker sentenced to over a century in prison on flawed child pornography charges tied to her queer identity, and the San Antonio Four, women wrongly convicted amid satanic-panic hysteria. These stories ground the term Beety coined herself: "pink crime," charges rooted fundamentally in gender bias, from stillbirths prosecuted as murder to drag performances treated as criminal acts.

Drawing on her books Manifesting Justice and the newly released Pink Crime, Beety shows how identity-based prosecution persists across decades and how litigators, students, and communities chip away at injustice case by case.

For defense attorneys, civil rights practitioners, and anyone representing vulnerable clients, Beety's work offers a framework for recognizing bias hiding in plain sight within the criminal legal system.

Rebecca Moll Freed knew she wanted to be a lawyer in high school, the moment mock trial replaced a childhood plan to become a pediatrician. A college internship in the Clinton White House sealed the deal, showing her that law, politics, and business could actually intersect for a living.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Freed, a Lawline faculty member since 2016 whose courses have reached more than 6,000 attorneys, about the deliberate path that took her from Georgetown Law to partner at CSG Law.

Freed breaks down "pay-to-play" laws in plain English: rules meant to stop government contracts from going to the highest campaign donor instead of the most qualified bidder, and the murky, high-stakes gray area companies navigate around lobbying, gifts, and procurement to protect their eligibility for that work. She traces her break into the field to a chance pairing with a partner on a New Jersey gubernatorial election and transition, as her first assignment out of law school, and reflects on building a specialized practice while raising two kids who later followed her to Georgetown themselves. Along the way, she pushes back on the idea that getting ahead requires an edge, arguing that kindness and good manners are entirely compatible with ambition.

When a hiring partner warned Gina Nicotera he wouldn't take on someone who didn't know what ERISA stood for, she admitted she'd never heard the term and won the job anyway. Fifteen years later, that willingness to learn on the fly has carried her from a biomedical engineering dropout to a senior labor and employment attorney, where she now helps employers navigate an entirely new set of risks: workplace harassment fueled by AI.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Nicotera about a career shaped by trial, error, and curiosity, from switching majors after a rough semester of multivariable calculus to building a practice representing restaurants, hospitality groups, and manufacturers in employer-side disputes.

Nicotera unpacks how AI is reshaping her caseload: employees weaponizing deepfakes against coworkers, HR screening tools that can inadvertently filter out candidates by race, and the discovery risks of feeding confidential data into open AI systems. Much of her work, she says, amounts to therapy, coaching anxious HR professionals through difficult conversations before they escalate into litigation. She credits her growth to treating every detour, including an abandoned engineering major, as data rather than defeat, and to building a network of mentors along the way.

Eran Kahana uses AI carefully and sparingly, having watched it produce polished text that passes for insight until it doesn’t. An eighteen-year Stanford Law fellow and AI governance partner at Maslon LLP, he treats AI less like a ghostwriter and more like a sparring partner he interrogates and never fully trusts.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Kahana, whose ten Lawline courses on AI governance, copyright, and privacy have logged nearly ten thousand completions, about a career built on "staying hungry." One rejected conference proposal in the late 2000s led, through a chance introduction, to an eighteen-year Stanford fellowship shaping how the law thinks about AI.

Kahana unpacks the money question underneath every AI copyright fight, how ordinary shopping data becomes health data once AI starts inferring from it, and why he juggles five AI models like a conductor rather than one assistant. His current project, a 37-principle "restatement" of AI's life cycle, exists because he talks to his own framework daily, pushing it to critique him back, guided by a martial arts philosophy: ten thousand changes, no surprises. For lawyers unsettled by AI's pace, his point isn't mastering one tool. It's staying disciplined, curious, and willing to be wrong, a distinction that will only matter more as AI redefines legal expertise.

Beth wrote a college thesis on affordable housing and voucher programs, then watched her legal career zigzag in the opposite direction—straight into Big Law real estate finance. It took one transaction involving Boston's inclusionary housing rules to reconnect her with the mission she'd nearly left behind, sending her from corporate associate to city government attorney to partner at a firm representing lenders who finance affordable housing across New York City.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, sits down with Beth to trace that career arc and unpack what's shaping New York's affordable housing landscape today. Beth breaks down how the city is creatively repurposing public land, speeding up the notoriously slow ULURP approval process, and even mismatching income bands to rent bands so units stay genuinely affordable. She also explains the pressure developers face under proposed rent freezes, why she took a steep pay cut to join NYC's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and how that hands-on government experience became the foundation for the CLE courses she now teaches on Lawline.

The conversation moves beyond policy into what fueled Beth's willingness to take risks: writing down her goals, seeking out mentors willing to teach her, and paying that mentorship forward through teaching. Beth and David also trade book recommendations, from parenting strategies to Barbara Kingsolver novels, rounding out a portrait of a lawyer whose winding career path led her exactly where her college thesis once predicted.

Erin Colgan was a 25 year old new prosecutor and seven months pregnant with her first child when she watched the horrific events of 9/11 on a small television from the Richmond County Criminal Courhouse. She explains this as completely surreal, and repeatedly paged her father, a Port Authority Police Inspector and commander of the World Trade Center who had survived the collapse. That morning would eventually shape a career built around representing police officers and firefighters and their spouses equally, with Erin in a unique position to understand the culture and the issues affecting these families in divorce. Later, she came to understand the importance of their retirement benefits and how best to address them professionally.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Erin Colgan about a wave of NYPD and FDNY retirements now colliding with rising divorce rates among first responders in their 40s and 50s. Erin describes representing these members and their spouses as a calling. As Tier 2 hires from the late 1990s reach retirement, their pensions, often the family's largest asset, become the center of emotionally fraught divorces, especially when disability or line of duty injury is involved. She sees it as imperative that both sides of these cases get precise, complete information about what is actually at stake with regard to their retirement benefits, not just a passing reference to the pension. Erin also breaks down the approaching September 11th certification deadline tied to the 25th anniversary of the attacks, and the stigma that has kept officers and firefighters from calling themselves disabled even as new conditions surface decades later. Ten years ago, she co-founded Northstar QDRO to help attorneys draft the QDROs and DROs courts require.

Erin's path, from assistant DA to solo practitioner to firm partner and entrepreneur, shows how personal history can sharpen professional purpose. She credits a book about forgiveness after tragedy with shaping how she handles even the most contentious negotiations.

For family law attorneys, Erin's story is a reminder that deep expertise grows from lived experience, and that teaching what you know multiplies its impact far beyond the courtroom.

Venable didn't have a political law practice when Ron Jacobs started there. Growing up in a blue-collar family in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jacobs once dreamed of public service before law school pulled him toward a career in the law instead. His early years as an associate bounced him between FTC, FCC, international trade work, and nonprofit associations, with campaign finance creeping in little by little t. By the time Jacobs made senior associate, colleagues were already routing anything political his way. The firm noticed, and let him build a practice around it, a rare move in Big Law.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Jacobs, now at Venable for 25 years, about how that practice came together and everything that's grown out of it since.

Citizens United sits at the center of the conversation: how it reshaped campaign finance law, and why contribution limits keep getting worked around rather than enforced, in Jacobs's view. AI tools like ChatGPT and Harvey are already changing his day-to-day work, a shift Jacobs discusses candidly alongside his years teaching political law courses for Lawline, work rooted in lessons from mentors earlier in his career. Raising three kids while making partner comes up too, along with the books, including White Shoe and The Man to See, that shaped how he thinks about building something that lasts.

Twenty-five years in, Jacobs's path shows what happens when a practice area gets built by one person's persistence rather than handed down.

Dennis Meador, known to everyone as DM, learned to sell before he learned much else. By 14 he was running his own hustle, subcontracting neighborhood yard work and keeping half the profit. That instinct for building things from scratch carried into his career, including an SEO agency for attorneys he helped scale to $5 million before a five-year partnership ended just months before his wedding.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, sits down with DM to trace how that setback launched his current venture: the Legal Podcast Network, or LPN. Starting from zero in May 2024, DM built LPN into a seven-figure business with 250 attorney clients within a year, providing hosts, production, and distribution so solo and small-firm lawyers can build authority without becoming content creators themselves. He breaks down his "revenue first, then simplify, then delegate" philosophy, his pricing model built around jurisdictional exclusivity, and how he's leaning into intent-based algorithms and LLM-driven SEO to help clients get discovered.

DM also shares what it's like running a fast-growing company remotely from Mexico, balancing rapid growth with a baby on the way, and his goal of reaching 2,500 clients and $30 million in revenue within seven years. His story is a grounded look at how resilience and systems-building turned a broken partnership into something bigger.

More than twenty-five years ago, Lindsay A. Curcio wasn't chasing entrepreneurship or independence—she was an only child whose father had recently passed away, whose mother needed help, and who realized the only way to be there was to build a practice she could run on her own terms. That decision, made out of necessity rather than ambition, quietly shaped the next two decades of her life.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Lindsay about the career built around that pivot—and everything it made possible. Approaching her 36th year of practice as an immigration attorney, she traces her path from a formative U.S. Department of Justice internship at a Louisiana detention center during law school in 1989, through a decade working at immigration law firms in Chicago and New York City, to running her own practice while splitting time between New York and Chicago to care for her mother. 

She unpacks why immigration law resists simple explanations, from decades-long immigrant visa waits to the 2003 creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with USCIS, ICE, and CBP taking the place of Legacy INS, and reflects on how teaching at Lawline, a law school, and a university has kept her sharp. 

Beyond the courtroom, Lindsay writes mystery fiction, performs and teaches improv and applied improv, and credits years with the Tibetan Buddhist community for shaping how she treats clients and adversaries alike—she believes kindness is possible and necessary, even in high-stakes work. Her story is a reminder that the most defining career choices aren't always the ones we plan—and that they can still lead somewhere extraordinary.

What if you could say "build me a spaceship" and watch it happen within the hour? Ben Dach, a partner at Pierson Ferdinand, believes that the future isn't as distant as it sounds. A self-described "futurist patent attorney," Ben has spent his career turning ambitious ideas into real products—from surgical robotics that have saved thousands of lives to breakthroughs in nanotechnology, aerospace, and defense.

In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, sits down with Ben to unpack his recent Lawline course, AI and the Future of Patent Law. They discuss why patent approvals have nearly doubled under new USPTO leadership, why AI-related filings keep climbing even as approval standards stay strict, and what quantum computing actually means for the future of innovation, from superposition to real-world use cases already reshaping entire industries.

Ben also traces his own winding path—from biomedical engineering and a chemistry PhD to pharmaceutical patent litigation and law school at night—showing how a "zigzag" career can build genuine expertise. Beyond the science, he shares what teaching means to him: not lecturing from a distance, but building real dialogue with the professionals he trains, treating every course as a two-way conversation rather than a one-sided lecture.

For attorneys navigating an AI-driven legal landscape, Ben's conversation offers a grounded perspective on where patent law is headed, and why staying human matters most as the tools around us get smarter.