“Litigators, YES Litigators: One Attorney's Journey Within and Without the Legal Industry” with Somya Kaushik

Litigators who do other things besides litigate -- you know them. 

Some perform comedy, act on stage or in film, or they are gifted musicians. Some are even drummers. (Drummer joke, if that’s not too edgy.)  One highly acclaimed San Francisco class action litigator is talented on the kit and owns her own drum company. Another Los Angeles-based litigator started his own record label. Another San Francisco litigator left the profession, moved to South Africa, and led people on safari. Others write books, or develop technology solutions to common problems. Still others launch businesses, teach, and back causes.

The point is: Litigators do many things. One job closer to home is when he or she moves from private practice to a corporate legal department. But what about when the company is on the smaller size, with a modest legal department whose members are expected to handle an assortment of matters?  Hiring is an important decision for any company, but when it’s a smaller organization selecting in-house counsel is arguably even more critical. When companies like this aren’t engaged in litigation, one might think a litigator wouldn’t be the first choice.

In this episode we talk about all the things one litigator has done, and the advantages she feels a litigator can bring to a small company – one that isn’t embroiled in litigation and would like to keep it that way.   

 She is Somya Kaushik, in-house counsel, entrepreneur, adjunct law professor, writer, leader, a children’s book author (“You, YES You! Yolki's Journey Within," illustrated by Annie Hagy* and available on Amazon and other fine platforms), and a former litigator. She is senior corporate counsel for Mineral, an HR and corporate compliance company which was recently acquired by Miratech, a tech solutions company for legal, HR, and governance, risk and compliance. Before Mineral she was an intellectual property litigator representing large and small companies, including SaaS and tech firms. In 2013 she founded EsqMe, Inc., a sharing platform where lawyers can exchange legal documents, templates, motions, and forms, where she served as general counsel. She is also an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. Now located in Chicago, for nearly five years Somya was president of the South Asian Bar Association of Oregon. Somya is on the Fastcase 50 list honoring innovators and leaders in the legal industry.  Education: New York Law School, J.D.; George Washington University, B.A., Psychology and Political Science; London School of Economics; and Harvard Business School. 

*Ms. Hagy is the younger daughter of the host of this podcast, which, now that I think about it, could use some illustrations to brighten up the place.

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This podcast is the audio companion to the Journal of Emerging Issues in Litigation. The Journal is a collaborative project between HB Litigation Conferences and the vLex Fastcase legal research family, which includes Full Court Press, Law Street Media, and Docket Alarm.

If you have comments, ideas, or wish to participate, please drop me a note at Editor@LitigationConferences.com.

Tom Hagy
Litigation Enthusiast and
Host of the Emerging Litigation Podcast
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Transcript

Tom: 0:05

Welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast, a co-production of HB Litigation and critical legal content, custom content for law firms and litigation service providers, and the newly formed VLAC's Fast Case, your World of Legal Intelligence and our friends at LawStreetMedia. I'm your host, tom Hagee, litigation Content Producer and enthusiast and an average bongo player. Contact me if you have an idea for an episode. In addition to often being polite, I'm always looking for new twists on the law, whether it's a new regulation, legislation or an important new opinion, or it could be a development in the world that will test existing law or anything you're dying to share with other litigators, organizations or individuals and, if you like what you hear, give us a rating. That always helps. And now here's today's episode. So you've met them, I've met them, we've all met them.

Tom: 1:02

Litigators who also do other things. I've met them ones who do comedy or are talented musicians. Some are even really good drummers, which is a drumming joke. You know musicians. I even know one litigator who started his own record label. I was watching these great videos on I called part of the Playing for Change project, where they take a great song and they have musicians from around the world playing parts of it and they record them, put them all together Awesome. And I looked them up to see who they are and sure enough one of them was discovered by one of my sources in the insurance litigation world who knew Another litigator I know, left the profession and moved to South Africa to run safaris and surf. He's also a talented legal writer. Another, again, a talented drummer. Everyone would know her. I'm not going to say her name, but she's a really good drummer, also Very prominent in the class action world. She owns her own drum company. Did you imagine? Others write novels and children's books, others innovate solutions to common problems and still others back good causes.

Tom: 2:11

And less of a stretch of course is a litigator who goes in house. You're still a lawyer. Picking any talent inside a company is a big deal, but it has to be especially significant when you're hiring in house counsel, given the importance of their projects to the organization. But when a company is on a smaller size with modest legal departments whose members must address an assortment of matters, the decision becomes even more important to the company. While most companies aren't engaged in a complex array of cases in litigation, one might think a litigator wouldn't be at the top of the list of candidates for in house counsel. When a company is of modest size, it has only so many in house lawyers. But in this episode, we're going to talk about the advantages a litigator can bring to a small company that isn't active in litigation and would like to keep it that way.

Tom: 3:00

My guest is Somia Koushuk. She's an attorney, in house counsel, entrepreneur, adjunct law professor, writer, leader, even a children's book author. She is senior corporate counsel for Mineral and HR and corporate compliance company, which was recently acquired by Mira Tech. That's a company that offers tech solutions for legal, hr and governance risk and compliance operations. She's an adjunct professor at Lewis and Clark Law School. Before Mineral, she was an intellectual property litigator representing large and small companies, including SaaS and tech firms. In 2013, she founded Eskimi Law, where she served as general counsel. That's a platform where lawyers can share and find legal documents, templates, motions and forms. Now located in Chicago.

Tom: 3:50

For nearly five years, somia served as president of the South Asian Bar Association of Oregon. She had her JD from New York Law School, ba from George Washington University in psychology and political science. She's attended the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School. Somia is on the Fast Case 50 list that's hosted by our partners at VLAC's Fast Case, an award that honors the law's smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders. You'll also hear me mention Somia's children's book called you yes, you which is how I first became aware of Somia, since my daughter, annie, provided some very sweet and charming illustrations for the book yeah, this is a plug. And speaking of daughters and careers, when my girls were young, I asked them what they wanted to do for a living. Both were pretty clear it was some version of whatever it is you do, dad, I don't want to do that. Fair enough, but enough about me. Here is my interview with Somia Kaushik innovator, in-house counsel, innovator, author and more. I hope you enjoy it. Somia Kaushik, thank you very much for talking to me today.

Somya: 5:06

Thank you, thanks for having me, it's great.

Tom: 5:08

It's great. It's the chance of a lifetime. That's how I took that. The theme of this kind of as I said, when we're warming up is that it's almost the theme is litigators can do many things, and so let's talk about some of that. So can you give me some of your background as a litigator and your path to entrepreneurship and then to in-house counsel?

Somya: 5:29

I think it's somewhat of a roller coaster of a path and maybe not conventional for a lot of lawyers, but I've really enjoyed my career and how I've got to this point and it's taken many different turns, which I've really enjoyed. I went to school law school in New York and I was pretty sure like almost 100% sure I did not want to do litigation when I was in law school. And then I started getting interested in. The first internship I got was in a litigation firm, a small boutique in Manhattan, and I really loved the experience, although it was a bit nerve wracking, just being in court and having to learn all the rules of evidence and being kind of good on your feet and making sure you have that confidence, and so it was a big introduction to litigation for me and I wasn't sure if I wanted to go with that path. But I continued down that path and so it was sort of the coincidental thing that I got into litigation. And then I continued doing some internships and then, after I graduated law school, I joined the firm that I had interned with in Manhattan and it was a small firm. I continued to do litigation and we did mainly public health litigation, medical malpractice, as well as commercial litigation and IP. I got to do both. I got to see some trials in all of those areas of law. I really started to dive more into the commercial litigation and got really intrigued about businesses, the types of disputes that shareholders had or even small businesses and founders had. I also really loved the technology and innovation piece that related to IP. I really was interested in all of the new technology that was emerging and how are we going to protect IP and whose IP is what. That got me really intrigued and I got to do some really great cases when I was in New York, both in the federal courts and state courts, and then was also doing a little bit of pro bono criminal defense work Lots of different practice areas.

Somya: 7:43

But when I was younger I wanted to try as much as I could in litigation and see what I really loved. I think all of them were great experiences but I naturally gravitated a little bit towards the commercial and the business. I think that's where I realized I have that entrepreneurial spirit in me and I wanted to hone those skills in a little bit more. I started doing more trials and getting more time in court and getting that experience and building that confidence and worked at a couple of different firms in New York and then I started my own firm, cauchic Law, in New York. That's where I really was able to take my litigation experience and trial work in commercial and IT and technology and also take my entrepreneurial side. With starting Cauchic Law, I was able to make mesh the two paths and started doing business transactions outside GC work for some companies, also focusing a little bit on litigation as well. That was one of my segues into entrepreneurship.

Somya: 8:57

Then the other one was I was working at one of the firms in New York as a litigation attorney. I was one of the few associates in the firm and so we are tasked with the idea of working late hours at the office, being the one to do all the research and draft all the memos. I came across this scaffolding case in New York, in Manhattan, which is very common. I was finding myself spending lots of hours doing research and tons of time drafting motions and briefs and stuff. I thought scaffolding case. Someone in New York has got to have done this before.

Tom: 9:40

There's no doubt about that. There's a lot of scaffolding there, yeah.

Somya: 9:44

Tens of scaffolding. I thought what if someone else, if I reached out to them, they could give me their brief or their motion or their research in memo and I would have a place to start besides square one. I wouldn't be wasting so much of our resources and time. I reached out to this litigation listserv, just sent an email out to the listserv and I said does anyone have such and such memo? I would just hope to get a response back. If I did get a response back, the response was always very quid pro quo. It was always like I do have the memo, but what do you have or what am I going to get in return? Right? This happened a couple of times and I realized that there is some reluctance to exchange. Maybe that's because lawyers have a lot of pride in their work product and ownership of their work product, but I saw that there was some exchange happening. That was the impetus for the legal technology startup I started in 2013.

Somya: 10:49

Called Eskimi, eskimi became a platform to basically monetize, commercialize and centralize that document sharing between lawyers across the country. It was a marketplace of documents where you could go and you could say oh, I have a case that I'm doing Prohawk in Illinois and I need some help with from an Illinois attorney. You can reach out to an Illinois attorney and you can ask them for the briefs and the memos and stuff like that. It was the starting point for small and solo practitioners so that they could have resources as big as big law Collectively. Let's make a document database where we could all have the same power as big law and have those resources and save back on our time and our expenses as well. Being a small business, it was crucial to make sure you're using your time wisely and you're operating it in a cost-effective manner.

Tom: 11:49

Yeah, I guess the impetus for Eskimi yeah, that's cool, but I guess the difference between that and, say, just a general document database, is you're looking for very specific types of materials and there's an exchange aspect to it. Is that how you would differentiate that from?

Somya: 12:05

Yeah, and this one was we had general forms but we also had substantive documents.

Somya: 12:10

So we had appellate briefs, we have motions, we've got memos, we've got substantive things that you could download and purchase.

Somya: 12:21

So the marketplace was actually a place where lawyers can make money off of the documents that are exhausted sitting on your desktop or your laptop, and so they get allowed an attorney in a law firm to build a profile and upload their documents, tag their documents according to practice law and certain tags so they could be searched, and then they could also price their documents with whatever they believe their document was worth, so anywhere between $5 and $500. So we had them appellate briefs that were closer towards at $300 and $400. The standard documents would be closer to like $25 or less, and then lawyers would be able to exchange the material that they were working on, make money on that document, and then our company took a transaction fee, so signing up, and there was no like subscription or anything like that. So that's how the model worked and you know it was. It's successful. It's not something I'm currently doing anymore, but it was a great experience and I'm glad to have handed it over and you know, I think that is really my, the launching of my entrepreneurial journey.

Tom: 13:34

Yeah, kind of kind of let that, let that fire, yeah, well, okay, so we're getting into companies. Let's move next into in the spirit of other things litigators do. So certainly large corporations have a variety of attorneys in their legal departments to deal with everything from contracts to employment issues, ip litigation, all these things. But smaller companies may have legal departments with only a handful of staff attorneys, and so when I talk to you about your, about your work inside a company, you feel that a litigator should be, should be, among the staff attorneys at smaller businesses. So I guess the broad question is what's? What skills does a litigator have, or skills or attitude that could benefit small to midsize organizations?

Somya: 14:25

Yeah, you know, I moved in house about two and a half years ago and it was a really great decision and I was lucky that the folks that I worked with understood and could see the value of my litigation skills. I wasn't really sure if my litigation background of 10 years was going to transfer or if they were going to see the value, but luckily they did and it's a conversation we have. When I was interviewing and we still do, you know, multiple times we have good conversations about where we're going to take the legal department and a small, midsize company. You know we have like 300 employees and the legal team is is slim and we're building a legal team. But you know, I think the reason ultimately why I was chosen is because of my litigation background and it's it gives me the ability to see legal issues in a bit of a different perspective.

Somya: 15:23

It's not just let's get the contract signed and drafted and signed so that we can have this partnership where we can sign a new vendor or contract a contractor. It's about let's get the business deal done. You know that's the large objective and the main objective, but let's do it at a play, in a manner that we can really significantly reduce our risk and our liability and go to the table with our vendors and our large partners and come with strong negotiation points that I think a litigation attorney can see and are different than a purely transactional attorney and obviously I have a bit of a bias because I myself litigation attorney, but I think it gives me a different perspective and I know what I what is going to be important in the long term versus what I can let go and the negotiation at the table. I think that's that's done quite a bit for our company and I think it also puts it makes it very clear what is important for a negotiation and what's not. And so you're not wasting your time because you don't have time as a small legal team or a legal team of one.

Somya: 16:37

You are doing everything and you need to be very efficient with your time and you have to know what to prioritize, where you should put your time and effort into. Because if you're negotiating every contract, every single section, because that's contract law and you want to make sure each section looks like contract law says it should look, or you know what the deal should look like, you miss and you spend a lot of time and you miss on opportunities where you could say, ok, we're going to come here. These are the three main points. This is where I think this could go into. You know, the left turn. No one wants to take down the road and that's that's how you shorten that whole deal negotiation.

Tom: 17:20

Yeah, yeah, you know as a litigator how badly things can go.

Somya: 17:24

I guess is the point so yeah, and I teach at the Lewis and Clark Law School and I teach contract law and drafting.

Somya: 17:31

And it's interesting because I always tell my student that litigation gives you a perspective that if you don't have that experience you won't even know that a lot of times your force major clause is the one that's going to get litigated. Or the way that you worded this section it's not the section itself, it's the way it was worded will cause ambiguity or vague, vagueness, issues down the line and there'll be an interpretation issue and I always tell my students that you, as a litigation attorney, you know what the actual issues are going to be and it can make you a better drafter. Also it makes you understand before we. We don't want to have a drafting interpretation issue before the actual issue, you know. So if we can mitigate the drafting and the intent issue, then you know we can't minimize every single, we can't eliminate risk entirely, but when we do have that liability, let's say at least we don't have a drafting and intention issue, you know, and we can go straight to the actual legal issue we're talking about.

Tom: 18:39

Well, tell me, for people who don't know, tell me about your company.

Somya: 18:42

I'm a legal counsel for Mineral, and Mineral is an HR SaaS company that provides small and mid-sized businesses with HR compliance technology, and it's got a suite of services from handbook creation all the way to live advisors that will give you expert HR advice for your business.

Tom: 19:04

Okay, good, and you all just recently went through merger.

Somya: 19:09

We did. We were acquired by Mitra Tech, which is a much larger company in the compliance space, both HR and legal compliance.

Tom: 19:18

Okay, well, do you want to talk about your, your background in compliance and developing solutions there? And and why again, I guess it's obvious, we kind of covered it why litigators a good fit for compliance programs?

Somya: 19:33

Yeah, so in my work with Mineral I actually don't do too much in terms of the HR compliance work.

Somya: 19:39

We've got experts that handle that and we've got a team of attorneys actually that do all of the HR compliance in terms of the services and products we provide. But for compliance, I think litigation is important as well, because not only in our company do we need to do the HR compliance as our offering, but my job focuses on making sure our company is compliant with several different types of laws. The main ones that I've been working on with our privacy and security team that I lead is doing SOC2 compliance making sure our security is up to standards, especially as we grow we partner with these larger enterprises. It's becoming more of an absolute need versus a good to have. Also, making sure that we keep up with all of the privacy compliance. Privacy and data laws are changing so rapidly in America from state to state. One of my hats is to make sure that we keep up with those compliance pieces and make sure that we are making sure our partners and our customers and clients feel safe and secure with the data that they're sharing with us.

Tom: 20:57

So among the things that you're doing, you mentioned that you're also an adjunct professor at Lewis and Clark Law School, and of all the things you've got in your background, why contract law? Why are you teaching that?

Somya: 21:10

I think, because contracts is the basis of all of the legal practice. You know at everyone, whether you're doing public interest or you're doing private, or you're in real estate, or you're in house, or you're doing litigation. You need to understand how to draft a good contract, how to negotiate a good contract and how to foresee where that contract may fall apart. If you're a litigation attorney, you're going to need to understand where that contract fell apart, why it fell apart, and be able to defend and argue appropriately with all of the legal theories and principles. If you're in real estate, you're drafting lethers and contracts all the time and you need to make sure that you understand those basic rules.

Somya: 21:59

And so I thought that if I could give back to students, I would give them a really strong foundation in contract drafting, negotiation and theories.

Somya: 22:11

And so for my class, I do a hypothetical that they'll take throughout the semester and they are either litigation attorneys at a firm that's helping a company start up, get off the ground, and then they hit some bumps in the roads and we've got to help them, or your in-house counsel and you're taking your company through the next wave of strategy and innovation and you need to draft all of these documents and I put them through the live scenario so they understand how contracts play in real life. I feel like one thing I missed in my law school experience was the connecting what I learned in a classroom to the live experience as an attorney, and that's why I chose contract drafting. If I could bridge that gap and make them feel comfortable in a classroom, that they could step out in the real world and say, hey, I've seen this before, I've drafted an operating agreement for a company before, or I know what a licensing agreement looks like and what are the really important parts of a licensing agreement and the licensing terms that I want to negotiate.

Tom: 23:23

Okay, so in addition to litigator, teacher, author, entrepreneur, all of these things you're also a woman, and women in law and women in business obviously face hurdles that others don't, and you were sharing with me some of your experience in securing investment for a legal service, a legal service that you helped found. So tell us about that experience, what you can share with others.

Somya: 23:55

Yeah, this experience shaped a lot of my career and a lot of the mentoring that I wanted to do. But it happened a couple of years ago where I was looking to raise money for Eskmi and I knew some investors and we were speaking on the phone and we had exchanged pitch decks and things like that, and so we were getting to a place where we were going to actually talk about funding and angel investing. And when I showed up, I said, okay, I can answer any questions that you have. I'm really excited to partner. And they said, well, there's two legal tech companies that we'd like to invest in One is yours and one is another one and we are going to invest in the other one because and I can't make this up but they said, because we think you're just going to want to be a mom in the future. And that was striking to me. You know whether you're thinking it or not, which I think is not okay anyways, but to verbalize it and for me to hear was really shocking and I thought, well, so much time, so much of my time has been wasted. Like you knew, I was a woman on the phone and all this and to hear that was the reason was really shocking to me and I was young and I I wasn't, you know, even thinking of that for my life at that point and it made me realize that there are hurdles that we as women will have to face, and men face their own hurdles as well. You know, I don't think that it's only women, I think they're just different hurdles.

Somya: 25:34

I wanted to shed some light in terms of the legal world needs a little more work at that time. I think now it's gotten much better. Even the technology world and the startup world, the investing world, was predominantly male at the time, especially in legal tech. We there was only a handful of legal tech companies at that time. I think we all knew each other. Now the market is so saturated and there's a million amazing companies.

Somya: 26:04

I think times have changed, but I'm really glad that I did the work that I did back then. I did a lot of speaking on gender bias in the law and technology and how I felt that there was a bias, and it was very clear and it was very evident. I spoke to some colleges and universities about how do you overcome, though, Whether you're male or female, whatever hurdle you may get, how do you overcome them? Do you overcome them with getting angry and being upset or letting that bring you down, or do you rise to that occasion and you say, okay, I'm going to make a larger impact, I'm going to believe in myself even more and not let you pull yourself down? I think those experiences were important to me in terms of figuring out what my additional purpose could be in my career Would be to motivate change in the legal world and in the investing and technology world.

Tom: 27:08

Yeah, my personal soapbox on that is, whenever those situations come up, there's always somebody else who knows it's happening, and sometimes that's other men. It's just people who just stay in their seats, sit on their hands, keep their mouth shut. Whatever metaphor you want to use, it just drives me nuts. Because, especially lately, it's obvious in the news that there are a lot of people saying things out loud that they seem to be getting away with or not getting away with, but it's like all along the way, somebody knew that this was happening and didn't say anything.

Somya: 27:51

I think you're right. If you're aware of it, you have a responsibility to stand up and to say something. I think that experience makes me I would hope a better manager and a better people leader, knowing what my team might be going through or what others on different teams in the business are going through. I think those are eye-opening experiences that have really shaped some of my skills in my career today.

Tom: 28:19

The other thing that, in how I first came to know you was, you're also an author of a children's book.

Somya: 28:28

Yeah.

Tom: 28:29

How did that happen? You had an exceptional young artist working on it, which I will actually make that very clear, but how did that come about?

Somya: 28:43

Yeah, again, I think that's the entrepreneurial spirit that I have. It's threads and weaves throughout my life in very different ways. I started from Kaushik Law and asked me which are legal and technology? Then I focused on my law practice. I moved from Manhattan to Portland, oregon. I married my husband. We lived in Portland for a while and then we had our first child, sian. He's our now three-year-old son, but I was working at a law firm in Portland and he was.

Somya: 29:17

When he was born, I was on maternity leave, which was, by the way, like six weeks. That's a whole nother conversation. I was on my maternity leave and I was just looking at him and I thought I have so much that I want to share with you. It's all about giving you the empowerment to be yourself, giving you courage and being brave to be yourself in this world. Be your unique self, because it doesn't help to conform, it doesn't help to crumble under the pressure of what society thinks you should be or what you should say or whatever it is. If there was anything I wanted to impart to my children was be brave, to stand up for yourself, be who you are, believe in yourself always and stand up for others when you see something. So I was just rocking him to sleep and I sort of had this moment where I came up with a somewhat of a poem and I wrote it down on my notes on my phone. It was like in the afternoon, a really odd time and then I said, wow, I really like this. It really captured in a childlike way some very serious not serious, but some larger abstract concepts in life. I felt like it's actually could be a great children's book.

Somya: 30:44

My husband, he, came home and I said hey, what do you think about this? I wrote this and he said this looks, this sounds like an amazing book. This sounds like you should make this happen. So I said okay, fine, let me. I don't even know where to begin. I'm not in the publishing industry, never have dabbled in it in any way, and I've never been an author before, and so that was an interesting and really fun experience to navigate. And I was working at the firm at the time and Annie was working at the firm at the same time, and so I sent a message to the attorneys and the legal staff and paralegals and I said does anyone know publishing company or artists? I'm putting together a children's book? And Annie reached out and she knocked on my office door and she said, hey, I've been really interested. And I said let's do it. She's a beautiful artist. I have the book here and she did the whole thing and it's wonderful.

Tom: 31:37

You, yes, you, available on Amazon.

Somya: 31:40

Yeah, thank you. And she, you know, I had this, this idea in my mind that I wanted to be really artistic and really this beautiful watercolor. And she said I do watercolor. And I said, okay, here's some inspiration images. And she just came up with it on her own. We had very little involvement, except for picking the characters and some few changes here and there.

Somya: 32:05

It did an exceptional job and it turned out amazing. So it was a really fun experience for both of us. And then we got I got it published and it's on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and yeah, it's a children's book and it's really a reminder for everyone, children and adults Like she was so excited to do it. Yeah, it really was awesome and she was. She was great to work with.

Tom: 32:26

She was very careful not to show us any of her work in advance.

Somya: 32:31

We both were.

Tom: 32:33

She wouldn't show. She wouldn't show us because we're obviously we're very curious as to what she does. She flashed a couple of things to us on her phone once, but she wouldn't send us anything. I'm like, okay, all right.

Somya: 32:43

She follows rules.

Tom: 32:45

So your son is turning three or has turned three, and you were talking about rocking him to sleep, and Annie just turned 30 and I vividly remember rocking her to sleep and wanting to cry myself sometimes, because she wasn't always, she wasn't always easy about that, but anyway, so it was. It was a great thing. Well, somia, thank you very much for talking with me about all this today. It just shows all the diverse paths that lawyers can take. I have a sister who's a lawyer and she she wasn't a litigator. She went into other things, working for a board of medical examiners in Ohio, making sure that doctors were, you know, on the straight and narrow and if they worked recommending they'd lose licenses, and she'd also argue that they should get them back too when appropriate. And another lawyer I worked with, she was doing antitrust work in California and she picked up one day and decided that she was going to go to South Africa and run safaris.

Tom: 33:54

And so and then, while she was doing that, she was doing legal writing for a publisher. Oh for fat, for fast case in fact, in fact, okay, so, yeah. So it's just interesting to see what all lawyers can do with their backgrounds. So thank you very much for talking to me.

Somya: 34:10

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been really great to be back on some podcasts, so thank you.

Tom: 34:16

That concludes this episode of the Emerging Litigation Podcast, the co-production of HB Litigation, critical Legal Content, vlex, fast Case and our friends at LostG Media. I'm Tom Higgy, your host, which would explain why I'm talking. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have ideas for a future episode and don't hesitate to share this with clients, colleagues, friends, animals you may have left at home, teenagers you irresponsibly left unsupervised, and certain classifications of fruits and vegetables, and if you feel so moved, please give us a rating. Those always help. Thank you for listening.