Three years of law school, a judicial clerkship, and five years of law practice as a civil litigator make a long road to a high school classroom, but since my change from law to teaching ten years ago I have never once looked back.

I am thankful to have made the transition successfully. I am thankful for the ability to think like a lawyer. Professional training has occasionally served me well during intellectual combat with ninth graders.

But I am most grateful for the opportunity to have it both ways--to be a high school teacher and a lawyer. Coaching high school mock trial has been a way to combine the two. Thanks to mock trial, I have felt part of the Seattle legal community, and I have seen teenagers form the bonds and memories that come from excelling at the national level.

When I stopped practicing law in 1995, I realized that I had been a “litigator,” not a trial lawyer, a distinction I felt acutely. Every case I had worked on settled, after years of discovery and motions. But high school “mock” trial seemed safe, even for a trial lawyer manquŽ like me. Students seemed to enjoy it as we fumbled through those first few years of competition. Our team had elegant case theories, good evidence objections, and we got hammered annually. After several years, I finally realized that mock trial combines three sets of skills--law, oratory, and acting. To win competitions, a team has to excel in all three, which meant I had to give students the opportunity to learn all three. So I started to ask for help.

Tapping into the Seattle legal community has made it possible for me to have dozens of high school students work with great trial lawyers. The list of attorneys who help my team and other local teams includes some of the best-known lawyers and judges in King County. We have federal judges, state judges, U.S. attorneys, state prosecutors, federal public defenders, state public defenders, civil litigators, appellate commissioners, law professors, plaintiff personal injury lawyers, criminal defense lawyers, NITA instructors, professional actors, and more--they share hours of their time with other people’s children. They teach trial advocacy, they write mock trial problems, they open their courtrooms and offices to us, they judge and rate competition rounds, they even try mock trial cases against students to get us ready for Nationals.

Thanks to them, teenagers see that they can be part of the court system, and they see that those generous lawyers and judges come in both genders, and all shapes and sizes. Every kid sees someone to emulate. A few of the students I teach may go on to be top-notch trial attorneys. Most of them will not, but they will come of age as citizens with first-hand experience of the courtroom and the skilled advocates who make it work. Last year, when we returned from the national competition in Orlando, the team sat around my kitchen table and wrote thank-you notes. Seventy of them. The students and I had a lot of people to thank.

Our mock trial team now has the trappings of success. Two state championship banners hang on the gym wall, right up there with the banners for Seattle Prep’s other recent triumphs in volleyball, basketball, tennis, and cross-country. But a small plaque currently in a dean’s display case means just as much. It is an award from the Florida Bar, recognizing the professionalism of the Washington State team in the 2004 national competition. Maybe that is why the students looked so happy on the Splash Mountain ride on the day before we flew home? n