Right after completing the Colorado Trail, I got in my little truck and hightailed it across the country to New Haven, Connecticut, where I began work as a Legal Assistant at Tom Groth Law PLLC. Tom Groth Law is a small firm focused on real estate transactions and tax matters, but we handle all sorts of cases. I get to work very closely with Attorney Groth, and my time here so far has been a fascinating experience. From being introduced to legal writing and discovery missions, to learning how a single-attorney firm functions as a successful business, I have been able to dive headfirst into the realities of practicing law. Attorney Groth has been a tremendous mentor and allows me full visibility into the inner workings of his law practice. I’ve helped draft deeds and contract riders, I’ve been to land records libraries and sifted through hundred-year-old deed books, and I speak with potential clients and listen to their problems, and then discuss with Attorney Groth how we can help them.

That last one – working with clients to understand their issue and brainstorming ways to help them – is by far my favorite. Along with my father and grandfather, the attorney I’ve always admired most is Atticus Finch, and nothing makes me feel more like a small-town general practitioner lawyer than hearing out the wonderful people that call our office every day with every kind of problem. There are so many people who are getting screwed over by others with more money, more power, and a better understanding of the law and how to abuse it. Listening to them and providing them with a plan of action and hope for justice is incredibly rewarding. I’ve always thought of myself as someone with a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong – for better, and for worse in some situations – and every small victory over an injustice is like a shot of pure joy. Recently, I’ve been dreaming of my own practice, somewhere small, quiet, beautiful and underserved in legal guidance, where I can make a real difference in the lives of my neighbors who want to fight back against the wrongs that are inflicted on good, ordinary people every day.

My partner Sonia and I recently completed a through hike of the Colorado Trail. It’s hard to describe the trail, and pictures can’t do it justice. Literally, it is a 500-mile-long continuous trail switch backing through the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Durango, Colorado. It took us a little over 30 days to cover it completely. Figuratively, the trail is an entire world unto itself, with its own rules (or lack thereof), its own society, and an entirely unique sense of time and space. 

It feels like I lived a life out there. It started just outside of Durango, where I emerged confused but excited, with no preconceptions or understanding of what was awaiting me. My introduction to this new world was wet, and loud, and rugged, with the summer monsoons chasing us up mountain ridge lines and back down into steaming river canyons. Almost everything I knew before lost meaning out here. One of the biggest “rules” of hiking is “don’t hike with wet boots and gear.” We learned immediately that that meant nothing, as it rained nearly non-stop for the first week. Our gear was always wet and we always had to hike, there was no choice. The only real rule on the trail is “adapt.” 

I grew as the miles melted away. I learned what worked, and what didn’t. What I could expect, and that I should always anticipate what I did not expect. I felt the grip of fear, real fear, as lightning rolled in overhead and fast decisions had to be made, and those decisions felt like the most important choices I would ever make. I learned what it means to truly rely on yourself and, especially, on someone else, when you’re scared and cold and you want to just stop, but your partner won’t quit, and you simply cannot. These feelings, fear and the overcoming of fear, are not feelings I have to contend with often in the world outside of The Trail. The Trail offered a constant and almost overwhelming stream of true aliveness. 

“You look like how people are supposed to look,” was the first thing my best friend said to us when we arrived at his house after reaching the northern terminus of our route. We were covered in dirt, I smelled like an unwashed horse, and my beard was long and coarse and unkempt. But our bodies were hardened without a shred of excess weight, our legs like heavily muscled pistons, and my mind was quiet. I think he could tell.

Brewing Beer and LSAT Lessons

Bartender and Logic Game Player, AUG 2023 — JUN 2024

After my time at LEAF VIP, I knew I wanted to take a new step in my career. I want to write, but I want to write with force, and with meaning. I want to better understand the society we’ve created, and I want to be a more useful part of it. I want to create change in some real way for the things I care about, big or small, or both. I have come to believe that realizing these goals requires a set of tools and a way of thinking that law school can help me to develop. Many of the giants in my life have followed this path, including my father and my grandfather. Of course, everything is what you make of it — not every lawyer is Abe Lincoln — but in the best of cases, learning the law seems to impart, or at least enhance, a sense of wisdom and fairness that I have spent my life in admiration of. I only hope that with dedication and determination, some of it will rub off on me. Either way, I see the law as an effective way to bring about change in my areas of interest.

I recently took the LSAT after months of hard studying, and thankfully received a score that I am very happy with. I was lucky enough to find an awesome opportunity working part-time for my favorite brewery in Denver, Cerebral Brewing, which allowed me to study non-stop during the week and spend the weekends talking craft beer with extremely knowledgeable customers and brewers alike. As the lead bartender for the new Aurora Arts brewery, I got to give tours of the production facilities, lead cheese and pastry pairings, brainstorm new events, help bottle and can beers, and really discover the art of brewing from some of the best in the business. Needless to say, my homebrewing has improved tremendously.

LEAF VIP

Lead Copywriter, JAN 2022 — APRIL 2023

There is no better feeling than presenting a story to a client that you’ve created for them — weaving together their brand’s unique personality, philosophy, and history into a compelling narrative — and seeing the excitement on their face. At Leaf VIP, I had an awesome opportunity to work as the lead copywriter for an incredible, unique marketing company, and create exciting content for cannabis industry leaders like Wana, Curaleaf, Cann, Kiva, and more.

Leaf was a true start-up environment — every day was all hands on deck, and you were given as much responsibility as you wanted and could handle. I started as an admin assistant, until someone called in sick and I was asked to write my first script for the creative team. Within a few weeks, I was writing all of the scripts. In the first three months of taking on the role of lead creative copywriter, I increased script production by 300%.

My position at Leaf required a unique set of writing, communication, strategy, and leadership skills. Leaf VIP specializes in connecting cannabis brands with cannabis retail staff, and I worked on behalf of the brands, creating interesting, selling content to distribute to “budtenders”. I lead both creative kick-off meetings and script presentations with clients, working with them from project conception to completion to guarantee that every video we produced captured their brand’s specific voice in an exciting and effective way.

As the creative team at Leaf grew, I developed KPIs to measure and drive our productivity, and tracked them on a quarterly basis. I hired and managed dozens of voiceover actors and freelance writers and edited their work. I also created user surveys to measure our video’s performance and popularity among budtenders — during my time at Leaf, our videos received over 95% positive reviews.

My time at Leaf VIP was exhilarating but unfortunately, the rapidly-declining cannabis market got the better of the company and I, along with many other employees including almost the entire creative team, were laid-off in the Spring of 2023. Still, it was an exciting time and I learned more at Leaf in 14 months than I would have in five years almost anywhere else.

DENVER RESCUE MISSION

Work Readiness Supervisor, AUG 2021 — JAN 2022

Prior to Leaf, I worked at the Denver Rescue Mission as a Work Readiness Supervisor. I’ve never had a job quite like this one before or since — equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking, fun and eye-opening, creative and uniquely institutional.

My role was to help plan, cook, and serve breakfast and lunch to the residents of the Denver Rescue Mission’s 48th Street Shelter, the largest 24-hour shelter in the United States.

Planning the meals was an interesting task: feeding 500 or-so people is no easy feat on its own, but relying on an eclectic assortment of donated ingredients increases the difficulty exponentially. Thankfully, I was working with the best — the head chef, a recovered heroin addict and absolute veteran of the position, was a genius when it came to putting together delicious meals out of seemingly ill-fitting pieces. Carne asada tacos, chocolate chip bread pudding, Thai curries, shwarma; his ability to create something from nothing was inspiring.

Being able to cook in a commercial kitchen was amazing. I love to cook at home and have always been interested in how the pros do it, so getting to participate first hand was a great experience. Without a doubt though, the best part of the job was serving the meals to the residents of the shelter. It was just an awesome experience being able to build relationships with people who are otherwise systematically separated from the rest of society. These relationships forced me to change how I understand houselessness — who is effected and why, how difficult it can be to recover and get back on track, and how cruel people can be to those who they do not understand. My favorite times at Denver Rescue Mission were coming up with riddles for everyone to solve during breakfast and lunch, which quickly became a hit. I forgot to write one once before leaving for a long weekend; when I returned, a man came up to me to tell me that he missed the riddles and looked forward to them each day. I never forgot to write one again.

Riddle: From one into many. You can see me, but you cannot touch me. Some say you can taste me, some try to chase me, but I can’t reward their greed.

BENGAL CAPITAL

Copywriter, JULY 2021

With my experience from the Colorado Governor’s Office, I joined Bengal Capital — a cannabis-based venture capital firm partnered with GTI, 4Front Ventures, Jetty Extracts, and Bloom Farms, among others — as a writer for their cannabis industry newsletter, the Bengal Bite. My work for Bengal included writing an article which was featured in the July 1, 2021 edition of their newsletter. In “What did Cannabis do for Colorado Anyway?” I outline Colorado’s retail and medical marijuana tax system and argue that now, with rapidly expanding legalization and states looking for models to follow, Colorado’s success is worth studying and emulating.

COLORADO OFFICE OF STATE PLANNING AND BUDGETING

Intern Budget Analyst, JAN 2021 — JUNE 2021

After college, I had an incredible opportunity to learn about government affairs, budgeting, and public policy as an intern for the Office of State Planning and Budgeting within the Colorado Governor’s Office. I worked one-on-one with a Senior Budget Analyst to study programs receiving funds from cannabis tax revenue and design and develop a system of tracking these programs and their funding. Together, we created the Marijuana Tax Cash Fund Summaries, a repository of standardized reports and data covering the financial and political history of programs receiving funds from Colorado’s Marijuana Tax Cash Fund (between 60 – 70% of all of Colorado’s marijuana tax revenue). I’ve included an example report for one program on the right.

COLORADO COLLEGE

2016 — 2020

I went to school at Colorado College in beautiful Colorado Springs to study Political Science and Computer Science. 2016 to 2020 was a fascinating time to study politics, for obvious reasons, and I wrote my thesis on party polarization, comparing the political divisions we experience now to those of the 1960’s, another chaotic period of time rife with political hostility and instability. Always looking for a chance to write, I was published in The Catalyst — CC’s student newspaper — and completed a few short stories. I’ve included my thesis, an article from The Catalyst, and a short story for you to check out.