My First Job

"I come from a long line of attorneys. My grandfather, my father and my sister are all attorneys. Growing up, since about the age of five, if anyone asked me. 'What do you want to be when you grow up,' it was a lawyer.

"Then I hit the teen years and the rebellion set in. I decided I didn't want to be a lawyer and I got a job with the state highway work crew. They were working on I-95 outside of Baltimore. This was construction work-hard, manual labor like nothing I had ever done before. My job was to ride in the back of a pickup truck and put out the barrels to block off the traffic for the work crew. I was to hop in and out of the back of the pickup, grab the big barrels-which were old 55-gallon drums with no tops and a blinker attached-and roll them.

"When I hopped out of the truck to get the first drum, I grabbed it and rolled it, and then not knowing that the top of the drum was really very jagged, I grabbed it- and instantly cut all 10 of my fingers really badly.

"Because I'd never done a construction job before, I didn't know any better and wasn't wearing any gloves. So I was on the job 10 minutes, and then on the way to the hospital.

"After my fingers had started healing, I contacted an attorney, who was able to get me more money than I would have made working all summer. Then I thought, maybe there is something to this lawyer thing, since he took a third of the money and didn't suffer any of the pain. After that I got what you would call 'back on track' and went on to college and then law school.

"I guess you could say I had one of the shortest careers in construction ever. But I did learn the value of safety in the workplace-and the value of knowing a good lawyer." -Interviewed by Katie S. Betz