My career started in a little town called Atascadero, California. I was still in high school, working through a Summer Jobs for Youth program, when the local police department hand-picked me to revamp their investigations files. No computers, no digital systems. Just old-school filing cabinets stuffed with case files, crammed into the tiniest space you can imagine.

I spent my days reading about the realities of the legal system that most people never see. It opened my eyes. Not to becoming a cop—that much I knew immediately. But it made me realize the system was broken. Pieces that didn't connect. Departments that couldn't communicate. Information that got lost because nobody was bridging the gaps. And in a way, every job I took after that kept pulling me toward the same thing: being the connector. The person who helps each piece of the engine understand how to work with the others.

I spent 16 years as a California Court clerk— Five Days a Week in the Courtroom; the room where so many moving parts of the whole come together.  I have sat through thousands of cases documenting and observing Attorneys, litigants, law enforement, court personnel, and spectators. 

It still sticker shocks me of the enormity of how it changed me to be a Court Clerk. I often thought how an attorney might carry 100 cases a year and appear in court for maybe a third of them. But I was expected to handle an average of 120 cases a month on the calendar. Every single one, I had to review the file, understand the procedural posture, and summarize it for the judge before court even started. On any given week, there'd be 30 cases on calendar - an attorney would walk in with five.