Erin Moriarty ’77 was inspired by a story. She was reading SideBar, the monthly e-newsletter for alumni at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, and saw an article about Kelly Schneider ’96 and her work in creating the Wrongful Conviction Project at the Office of the Ohio Public Defender.

It was the state’s first program accepting cases of convicted criminals who say they’re innocent but lack the DNA evidence to prove it. While a noble cause, the project lacked monetary support. Schneider and her colleagues had hoped to receive a grant from the Department of Justice, but it fell through. Schneider moved forward anyway.

“I loved reading about Kelly because I do as many wrongfully accused stories I can get my hands on for work,” said Moriarty, a CBS News reporter and 48 Hours correspondent.

Among the pieces Moriarty’s brought before a national audience was the case of the West Memphis Three, a story she covered for four years. A trio of teenagers were tried and convicted of the murders of three boys in West Memphis, Ark. during the 1990s despite lack of any physical evidence linking them to the crime scene. Forensic evidence uncovered in 2007 could not be attributed to the three defendants, eventually leading to their release. The case attracted the attention of national media and celebrities, from actor Johnny Depp to grunge rock icon Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam.

“There are far more cases where you’re not going to get the press and celebrities involved. I thought if I really believed strongly in this work, I better put my money where my mouth was,” Moriarty said.

She met with Dean Alan C. Michaels to see if there was a seminar or clinic that could be held with current students who could assist Schneider. Michaels had a better idea: Why not create a fellowship to fund a Moritz graduate’s full-time attention to the work? Moriarty made a pledge to fund a fellow for at least the first three years of the project and tried to drum up support from other alumni.

“I committed to this before we took pay cuts at CBS. But it should be a sacrifice. It should be hard,” Moriarty said. “What I didn’t realize was it would be harder to get my fellow alums involved. Maybe people don’t realize how frequently this happens, but we keep finding it’s more and more.”

Moriarty has taken a personal interest in the fellows and their work. In a conversation from her office in New York City, she talked about the cases being pursued and the difficulty investigators have in finding new evidence when DNA doesn’t exist.

As a woman in television journalism, Moriarty says she has lasted longer than most of her peers because of her Moritz education. She credits Ohio State for affording her the “perfect job,” covering stories tangled with legal complexities.

“I wanted to give back in an area that has given so much to me. Maybe someone would get out of prison for it, and maybe young grads would get jobs. Who could argue with that?” she said. Moriarty hopes the Wrongful Conviction Project lasts more than three years, and she’s spreading the word about it to former classmates and friends whenever possible. “I’m scared it won’t go on after this, and it would be really great if more people stepped up.”

But, he’s never placed a bet. Nor will he anytime soon. He is the deputy executive director and general counsel for the Ohio Casino Control Commission (OCCC).

When Barron started in the position just over a year ago, the agency was new and tasked with implementing the legislation that allowed casinos to open in the state for the first time.

“I joke a lot now about my first day on the job,” Barron said. “It was basically an empty floor with two people. No computers, no copiers, no email, no coffee. … I answered the phones. We didn’t even know where to pick up the mail. It was a bit overwhelming coming from the Ohio Senate, which has decades of resources at its fingertips.”

Since that time, Barron has helped build the agency from the ground up.  He has written and implemented more than 200 new casino regulations, which oversee everything from who can be hired in gaming positions to the type of dice used by the house, licensing requirements, security, the transfer of money, and advertising.

“We can look at other states for guidance, but at the end of the day, this is Ohio – our law, our constitution, and our culture are different than, say, New Jersey,” Barron said. “There really wasn’t any magic solution for getting this done. We had to learn on the job, and we did a lot of research and homework.”

Following the regulations drafted by Barron, casinos are now open in Cleveland, Toledo, and Columbus.  As a law enforcement agency, OCCC employees, including Barron, can flash a badge and gain access to any part of any casino. When they do, it is a safe bet that all eyes are on them as they walk the floor and the underbelly of the casino operations. But, Barron and other OCCC employees are not allowed to step foot in any Ohio casino, or any casino owned by an Ohio casino operator, unless on official business.

While Barron did not have any previous gaming experience, he did have a decade of experience working in public service for the state of Ohio. For nearly four years before  joining OCCC, he was the Senate majority legal counsel in the Ohio Statehouse, where he played a significant role in drafting the casino legislation.

“For the casino legislation, the Ohio House and Ohio Senate drafted different versions that had to be merged together,” Barron said.  At the time the legislation was passed, the Ohio’s legislative bodies were controlled by different parties. “There were similarities to the bills, but we had to get together and make some compromises. It really was a true bipartisan effort.”

While working for the Ohio Senate, Barron often staffed both judiciary committees and a general government oversight committee. However, when any bill was going to the floor, he could be asked a question by a member.

“It is hard to describe a typical day in the Ohio Senate,” Barron said. “If there was testimony going on, there might be questions for legal counsel. It was common for a member to say, ‘Hey John, is this 500-page bill constitutional? Are there any legal problems?’ It is all issue-spotting. I really learned to think on my feet. Also, the longer you are there, the more you learn to anticipate these problems and get ahead of them by meeting with both sides of the issue up front. You’re not doing your job as legal counsel if you don’t tell an elected official that the law, as drafted, doesn’t work.”

Barron’s career started when an internship he secured his third year of law school turned into a full-time position with the Ohio Attorney General. He worked for several sections, including the chief counsel section and provided legal advice to statewide elected officials, including answering many constitutional, ethics, labor, and contracting questions.

“One of the great things for a young attorney working in state government is you have so much responsibility early in your career,” Barron said. “There are also not a lot of places where you get to practice constitutional law.”

After a quick stop in the state auditor’s office, Barron accepted the position of deputy legal counsel for Ohio Gov. Bob Taft.

“As a young attorney, learning to be ready to answer any legal question the governor or his advisors might ask can be intimidating,” Barron said. “There is such a wide variety of questions. I had to learn quickly to be able to give the answer – and make sure it is the right answer. If I didn’t know, I had to say that and go find out the answer. You don’t always have the opportunity to go back and research for three or four hours. If you are in a meeting, and the governor wants to know the answer to a question, you need to be ready.”

Barron left the governor’s office for the Ohio Department of Development where he was the chief legal counsel and focused on encouraging business to come to Ohio or stay through tax incentives and grant programs. He worked with Ohio’s Third Frontier Program and collaborated with other state agencies. He spent a year at the Delaware County development office before heading to the Ohio Senate.

“Law school really did teach me to think, and to think on my feet,” Barron said. “With the Socratic method, you are sort of shocked when a professor calls on you and is trying to get you further and further out on that branch. Being taught how to respond to that type of questioning has served me well in being able to communicate effectively with the elected and appointed officials whom I have represented.”

Working at a prominent law firm had been a personal goal for Smith. Get through law school, join a firm as an associate and work her way up the ladder — that was the path she planned to take. However, during her time at law school, Smith encountered a road block that she could never have anticipated. She was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic pain condition that sends pain signals from a nerve in the face to the brain, ultimately forcing her to rethink her entire law career.

After undergoing two sinus surgeries during her time at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Smith took a job working for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in Washington, D.C. as an associate. While working for Akin Gump was a dream-come-true for Smith, her medical condition required two neurosurgeries and three intense brain surgeries — all within her first two years as an associate.  The treatments forced her to take extended time off from work and made it difficult for her to serve clients to the best of her ability.

“After a few years, I realized that my particular situation wasn’t really practical for a large-firm career path,” she said. “I decided it was time to figure out what I
could do instead, given the unpredictable nature of my medical condition.”

That’s when Smith met her business partner and co-founder of Alekto, Walter H. Pinson III. Alekto is a credit error prevention service located in Durham, N.C.

The idea for the company started when Pinson, who was refinancing his mortgage, found a small debt on his credit report that he didn’t believe was accurate. To avoid a point on his mortgage rate and thousands of dollars in interest, he paid the debt and assumed the problem would be solved. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

“A couple of years later mortgage rates went down and he went back to refinance and, lo and behold, what’s on his credit report but the same exact debt he had already paid,” Smith explained.

Many consumers pay their bills and assume the creditors will update their credit reports to reflect those payments, however, that is not always the case, she said.  Some research shows that as many as 25 percent of credit reports have errors that would materially affect the credit that consumer is extended, said Smith.

Alekto has developed a patent-pending technology that will allow consumers to pay important bills to creditors while using Alekto’s system to ensure their credit report’s accurately updated, thus avoiding problems like Pinson’s.

“Our innovative method and technology will really help consumers by solving a serious pain point, and that’s something that’s always been important to me — to give back and help other people,” she said. “Especially given the current economy, it’s more important than ever for consumers to be empowered. Consumers deserve accurate credit reports and credit scores, and shouldn’t have to settle for the status quo — which involves lengthy and often futile dispute processes as a result of improper reporting by creditors.”

Alekto officially launched in Maryland in April, but after being given the opportunity to participate in a summer “incubator program” in Durham, Smith and Pinson decided to give the South a shot.  “We thought going down to Durham for a limited time would be a great opportunity to see if we liked it enough to relocate and fully launch the business from North Carolina,” Smith said. The incubator program proved to be an extremely rewarding experience for Alekto.  “When we came down (to Durham) we just really enjoyed the startup and technology community here. Durham is really trying to build a thriving startup scene here in the Southeast. The people are genuinely interested in what you’re doing and helping you succeed,” Smith said.

During their time in the incubator program, Smith and Pinson applied for admission to a venture-backed startup accelerator called Triangle Startup Factory. After multiple rounds of callbacks, Alekto was ultimately one of only six companies to be selected to participate in the accelerator’s fall program. The accelerator gives each portfolio company a small amount of equity funding, provides access to successful entrepreneurs and feedback, and culminates with a Pitch Day in November during which Alekto will pitch its business to angel investors and venture capital funds in hopes of raising a full seed round of funding.

“We were ecstatic about our acceptance into TSF and that made the decision to move to North Carolina an easy one,” Smith said.

While Smith assumed starting a business would be easier than working at a large firm, she soon discovered that it’s no easy feat.

“Founding a startup business is extremely intense and very time-consuming, but the difference (between a startup and law firm life) is that in a startup you’re the boss, you get a say in what’s going on, you’re making critical decisions, and you get to determine the overall strategy behind what you’re working on every day,” Smith said.

Despite the intensity, Smith has come to find that being an entrepreneur is the right path for her unique background and interests.

“I don’t think many people realize how much legal work there is involved in starting a business.  Especially because Alekto provides a financial service, there are many relevant legal issues.  I’ve been learning so much since I’ve been doing this,” she said.

Smith has been told by Pinson that having an attorney on staff as a co-founder has made the startup process run more smoothly and saved them a lot of money.

“Attorneys are expensive, and although we use external counsel for certain projects, having an in-house attorney as one of the co-founders has been exceptionally useful in helping us both understand the strategic and legal implications of our decisions, and determining what’s best for both the business and what we’re trying to accomplish for consumers,” she said.

Smith understands that her situation is unique, but she credits her time at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law to helping her find a career path that was right for her.

She explained that Moritz helped her to be open-minded about different occupations possible with a law degree and broadened her idea of what type of job an attorney “should be” doing.  In fact, Moritz is still helping Smith. Last spring, Alekto became one of the first clients of the College’s new Entrepreneurial Business Law Clinic.

“If you would have asked me a year ago, ‘Would you ever start your own business?’ I would have said, ‘Absolutely not.’ But luckily, my education from Moritz prepared me such that I’ve been able to adapt to my personal circumstances and use my legal training to become an entrepreneur,” said Smith. “I don’t think that would have been possible without the excellent law school education I received at Moritz.”

“Jeni and I are so different that it’s difficult to overstate,” said Lowe, sitting in the office that bears Britton Bauer’s creative spirit and tchotchkes of Lowe’s suit-and-tie past. “Jeni and I are the perfect yin and yang. There is almost nothing she does that overlaps with what I do, and vice versa.”

Lowe’s energies since 2009 have focused on building upon the foundation Britton Bauer and her husband, Charly Bauer, created since opening a stall in The North Market in Columbus in 2002. In his first three years, the company has morphed into a brand recognized by shoppers in tony grocery stores on both coasts, by children slurping up scoops of Wildberry Lavender at one of its shops in Tennessee, and, perhaps most exciting to Lowe, at a retailer in Dubai.

“We had to spend time getting the company’s finances in order and building a team that was capable of significant growth,” said Lowe. “During my first year, we got our feet wet trying to build the wholesale business.”

The privately owned company that boasted $2.1 million in sales in 2008 is projected to hit $13 million this year – a growth rate increase of more than 500 percent. Retail stores have increased from four to 10, including a 2011 expansion to East Nashville, Tenn. Thanks to the wholesale business, which was Lowe’s highest priority upon joining the company, pints of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams grace the shelves in 672 grocery stores across the lower-48 today.  “We are still tiny,” said Lowe. “There is a lot we could be doing better. But yes, we are having success. People are responding to Jeni and the ice creams.”

Accolades for the company’s ice cream have rolled in from Food & Wine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Bon Appetit, the Food Network, and countless foodie bloggers. The company’s Lemon Frozen Yogurt was named recently named “Best Dessert” by the Specialty Food Retailers Association, and Britton Bauer received the James Beard Foundation Award for her New York Times bestseller, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home. Among the pages of glowing product reviews the sales team keeps at their fingertips are links to the General Mills’ “The Munchies,” a people’s choice awards competition in which Jeni’s was named Best Ice Cream in America, a video Google made about Jeni’s as America’s Best Ice Cream, and a TIME article with a headline that dares to wonder: “Can the Best Ice Cream in America Be the Biggest?”

It may just yet.

“Jeni and I are incredibly different people, but we share one overriding characteristic: We are both ferociously competitive,” Lowe said.

Lowe was a young attorney at Kegler, Brown, Hill, & Ritter who was trying to pay off his law school loans from The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law when he met Charly Bauer by chance at a Columbus pub one night. The two became close friends, with Bauer eventually storing his version of an engagement ring – an Italian tabletop ice-cream-maker – at Lowe’s apartment in the Short North. The couple later used the piece to make ice cream for Lowe’s rehearsal dinner the night before he wed a lawyer at a competing law firm, Catherine Strauss.

“I set up the company for them in exchange for a pint of salty caramel ice cream and a beer,” Lowe said. “They were in no position to pay the law firm rates at the time. I was helping out my two drinking buddies who had a dream.”

As his dear friends worked toward starting up an ice cream stand in The North Market, Lowe was steadily building upon his successes as a labor and employment attorney at Kegler Brown. He loved working at the Columbus firm, but when GE called, it was too good to pass up.

At the time, GE consistently ranked as America’s Most Admired Company by Fortune Magazine, and its renowned law department was ranked as the World’s Best by Corporate Counsel magazine. “During the recruiting, they showed me the list of former company GCs who went on to run Fortune 500 companies. That seemed pretty far-fetched, until I was inside the company and got to be around the amazing brains and training GE provided. It was as fast-paced and competitive as any environment in the world,” Lowe recalled. “Looking back, I got to do amazing things because of GE.”

After a year and a half at GE, he was named the general counsel for Unison Industries, a $500 million GE subsidiary based in Florida that makes high-tech electronics for jet engines. Lowe then went on to be counsel for global operations, a $14 billion P&L within GE Aviation, and then became general counsel for GE Aviation’s business and general aviation business.

“GE does compliance and legal better than anybody, and they empower their general counsels. At Unison, I was parachuted into a sophisticated executive team. I was learning so much. It was like drinking from a fire hose. Over time, I found myself morphing almost entirely into business leadership and was simply acting as an interpreter between environmental lawyers and business lawyers and the business team. I loved the role,” Lowe said. “There was a high-performance mentality at the core of GE, and it was fun and thrilling. We got to do big things. … I learned so much at GE about leadership and running teams and being around great CEOs that it enabled me to think about roles outside of law.”

While he considered that his trajectory might be like that of other GE general counsels who went on to head those Fortune 500 companies, Lowe was equally comfortable thinking that he could spend the next 30 years at GE. It was a career connected to a very sturdy trunk, and he was climbing near the top at a very young age. There were very few people with whom Lowe would have considered venturing out on the thinnest of limbs. “A handful of college buddies,” Lowe said, “and my old drinking buddies who happen to make the world’s finest ice cream.”

“It was a bigger risk than I wanted to admit at the time because I wanted to do it so bad,” Lowe said of the couple inviting him to join the Jeni’s team in January 2009. “I loved GE. I loved everything I was able to do there and the opportunities. But these were two people I totally believed in and a product I truly thought was world-class.”

He added: “I was able to take that risk because my wife was an accomplished lawyer. If Jeni’s didn’t work out, we could still pay the bills because my wife could go back to practicing law. My wife’s brains and abilities freed me up to give this a try.”

He and Britton Bauer made a 20-year commitment to running the business together. In addition to growing the wholesale and retail business at Jeni’s, Lowe has allowed his creative side to come through in the development of Eat Well Distribution, an affiliate he created that buys dried goods and marshals the ice cream company’s distribution and marketing prowess to help other small food companies get on the shelves of specialty retailers.

For the man who has had little time to decorate his office, there is one sign hanging up that gives a nod to the instincts that brought him here. It reads: “A ship in harbor is safe. But that’s not what ships are built for!”

A legal education provides crucial training and the foundation for one’s career, explained Dean Alan C. Michaels, the Edwin M. Cooperman Professor of Law, but the market increasingly is demanding post-graduate experience and training serving clients. “It’s become apparent that the future increasingly will include a bridge between law school graduation and the long-term job in the profession that consists of an elite, termed training experience,” he said.

Medical residencies and judicial clerkships fit this model, providing new graduates hands-on training experience and a salary in return for their excellent work. The market will flock to law graduates with this kind of experience, and Moritz is establishing a trend by applying the model in a variety of areas, from corporations’ general counsel offices to federal bankruptcy court.

The first fellowship program model at Moritz emerged from discussions between Michaels and the general counsels of three well-known companies. The Moritz Corporate Fellowship Program, which just launched in 2011, already has grown into a robust program with more than 20 corporate partners. Using the judicial clerkship as a model, fellows are placed within the general counsel’s office of major corporations – jobs that normally are not open to new lawyers – where they learn firsthand how businesses use legal services. The companies benefit from the fellow’s training and hard work, and, in exchange, impart valuable experience and provide mentoring and a salary.

“The vision was for a cutting-edge program that  would be the first of its kind, providing a unique post-graduate experience that would be tremendously valuable to the people involved that would continue and grow,” Michaels said. “We weren’t just trying to get a graduate a job at Nationwide.”

Yet, the program has resulted in actual jobs. The inaugural group of graduates had a 100 percent job placement rate at the end of their fellowships, either with the same company or another legal employer that valued the rare experience the fellow received through the program. In announcing that Joel Lund ’11 had joined Vorys, Sater, Seymour, and Pease LLP, for example, the firm touted his legal fellowship experience with Fifth Third Bancorp in Cincinnati.

Michaels explained that the fellowship program was a natural progression in the College’s efforts to develop more practical experience opportunities for students and graduates, such as the popular Capstone Courses taught by leading practitioners. Other law schools, including those consistently ranked in the top 10 and 25 nationally, have reached out to the College for assistance in developing post-graduate programs similar to the Moritz Corporate Fellowship Program, he said.

Following that success, other opportunities to apply the fellowship model presented themselves with the Wrongful Conviction Project at the Office of the Ohio Public Defender, in pro bono bankruptcy work with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, and the Fellowship Program in Public Service Law.

“On the public interest side, there are a lot of people who want to encourage new lawyers to go into the field for worthy, altruistic reasons,” Michaels said. “The best way to encourage a new lawyer to go into a field is to give them a start.”

The Reinberger Foundation invested in the College’s Fellowship Program in Public Service Law, providing funding for one post-graduate fellowship as a prosecutor and four internships for current students who would go to work in prosecution offices.  Zoe Lamberson ’12, the first fellow, is expected to handle 100 to 200 cases during the course of her fellowship with the Fairfield County Prosecutor’s Office.

In her first three months, Lamberson assisted in drafting a brief to the Ohio Supreme Court, prepared presentations for visual aid in jury trials, completed discovery requests, conducted oral hearings for motions to suppress evidence, and conducted a civil hearing in municipal court regarding a dangerous dog designation appeal, which essentially was a minitrial.

“She has truly been a great asset … and has gained practical experience from her short time in our office,” Prosecutor Gregg Marx ’79 wrote in an early evaluation of the program. “In my opinion, she will be able to provide quality assistance to a county prosecutor’s office. I believe she has a bright future as an assistant prosecutor.”

Work with life-changing impact

As media seized upon stories in which the Innocence Project exonerated wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing, Moritz alumni in Ohio diligently pursued appeals on behalf of those for whom DNA evidence does not exist.

The Wrongful Conviction Project is the state’s first program to focus exclusively on wrongful conviction claims in non-life-sentence cases. Launched in 2009 by Kelly Schneider ’96, the program is run by the Office of the Ohio Public Defender for inmates whose cases meet seven criteria:

• The inmate must be indigent.
• The inmate claims factual innocence of the convictions.
• The inmate did not contribute in any way to the commission of the offense.
• The inmate is serving a lengthy prison sentence.
• The inmate has no prior history of violent crimes or lengthy criminal record.
• The basis for claimed innocence is not outcome-determinative as to DNA evidence.
• The inmate has exhausted the legal process.

Joe Bodenhamer, director of the Wrongful Conviction Project, explained that evidence commonly relied upon at trials – including eyewitness misidentification, invalid forensic evidence, false confessions, and incriminating statements – can be unreliable and lead to an innocent person’s incarceration. To date, there have been nearly 300 post-conviction exonerations in the United States, he said.

“Flawed evidence is not unique to cases in which DNA contributes to exoneration — it is evidence commonly used in criminal cases. Thus, a need exists to examine cases in which DNA is not available to determine whether flawed evidence has resulted in wrongful convictions,” Bodenhamer said.

Two Moritz graduates have had an opportunity to serve that need as fellows of the Wrongful Conviction Project thanks to a fellowship program created by Erin Moriarty ’77, a journalist with CBS News who has covered stories about innocent people locked in prison for crimes they did not commit. She hopes others contribute to the fund so that the work can continue.

“I can find new evidence as a reporter, but someone has to file the motion to get the person out. These fellowships are crucial to get lawyers who not only know how to do appeals but know how to do them properly,” Moriarty said.

Fellow Leon Sinoff ’10, for example, identified cases with challenges to the reliability of evidence, including arson science and shaken baby syndrome. His acquired knowledge of the medical challenges to the traditional theory of shaken baby syndrome allowed him to co-counsel a trial-level case with a senior public defender, Bodenhamer said. Sinoff identified the proper defense expert witness, fully participated in trial preparation, and cross-examined a state’s witness during trial. The defendant in that case was acquitted.

While the fellowship provided Sinoff with the opportunity to invest himself in extremely meaningful work and further his understanding of criminal law, he also viewed the fellowship as a conduit for “tremendous positive change in Ohio … remedying life-altering errors one at a time.” Today, he works in the Ohio Public Defender’s legal division on appellate and post-conviction criminal matters.

“The Wrongful Conviction Project fellowship is enabling the building of a legal system that stands for the principles that justice must ultimately prevail and that the lives of individual citizens matter,” he said.

As an undergraduate at Ohio University, Joanna Feigenbaum ’11 became aware of the growing problem of wrongful convictions in her social sciences studies. She entered law school with hopes of helping those wrongfully incarcerated and contributing to systemic changes that would prevent innocent people from being convicted in the future.

She is the longest-tenured member of the Wrongful Conviction Project, having started as a law clerk shortly after the program’s creation in 2009, Bodenhamer said. “The meritorious claims that she identified early on in her service now are the lead focus of the project,” he said. “One of these claims currently is being litigated for exoneration by her and a veteran OPD staff attorney.”

Feigenbaum believes everyone should have an interest in strengthening the criminal justice system and taking steps to enhance accuracy and fairness throughout.

“As a fellow with the Wrongful Conviction Project, I feel as though I am working toward that objective every day,” she said. “Further, I feel proud knowing that the work I do may result in grave injustices being corrected and innocent people being returned to their lives and families.”

The fellowship also allowed Feigenbaum to practice law immediately upon passage of the Ohio Bar Exam. She has gained invaluable experience interacting with other attorneys, the courts, clients, and witnesses. “These experiences have enhanced my competency and confidence as a new attorney immensely,” she said.

Bankruptcy program created

Melissa Baker Linville ’11 was drawn to public interest law and had experience working for the Legal Aid Society of Columbus prior to graduating from law school. After graduation, she worked part-time for the Franklin County Public Defender’s Office and conducted legal research for solo practitioners. When a member of the Career Services Office at Moritz shared information about a new United States Bankruptcy Court Pro Bono Project Fellowship, Linville wasn’t sure it would be an exact fit.

“I hadn’t taken any bankruptcy courses before,” she said, “but I really liked the idea of implementing a pro bono program and working closely with legal aid and attorneys interested in volunteering their services.”

The three-part pro bono program received support from bankruptcy court judges in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. They saw an immense need for legal services in the wake of the economic recession and subsequent rise in joblessness.

The program focuses on three areas: a Chapter 7 referral program for low-income clients; providing brief counsel to pro se debtors prior to their appearance at monthly hearings; and creating a training program for lawyers without bankruptcy experience to represent clients in adversary proceedings.

With little experience in bankruptcy herself, Linville studied everything she could find on that area of law and attended proceedings with the Honorable John E. Hoffman Jr. “Judge Hoffman has been a great instructor in the ways of bankruptcy and has helped me to understand what bankruptcy procedure is all about,” Linville said. “I also shadowed different attorneys and trustees early on.”

In its first six months, the Chapter 7 referral program recruited about 50 volunteer attorneys who began handling more than 100 client referrals from Southeastern Ohio Legal Services and the Legal Aid Society of Columbus. In August, Linville was thrilled to report that of the 20 cases filed already, 12 were discharged. She hoped to gain even more ground in the fall, when students from Moritz and Capital University Law School would join the effort to guide clients in the process of collecting the overwhelming amount of documentation needed. “Hopefully it will save the attorney one meeting, and the students will gain experience with client interviewing,” Linville said. “In law school, I always liked any opportunity to do something real.”

When her fellowship ends in February, Linville is confident that the experience will enable her to find work in more places. The new lawyer who lacked bankruptcy experience before is now more experienced in its nuances. “I definitely am interested in practicing bankruptcy law. I was only interested in public interest opportunities before and didn’t have experiences that translated to firms very well,” she said. “I’m excited to have a skill that I can relate to the public and private sectors.”

“In law school, when I gave moot court arguments, my leg would shake when I got nervous,” the alumna of The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law recalled. “You can’t let that happen there. So I had practiced at home with my daughter, who was 11 at the time. She would call the case and make me wait and wait.”

The newest justice to the Ohio Supreme Court said those kinds of experiences have encouraged her to be nice from the bench to lawyers before her. There are moments when any lawyer can find herself struggling or overcoming a case of nerves with an important task at hand. “I don’t ever want to be that justice who belittles an attorney, who makes them feel like they don’t know the answer,” French said. “In those moments where I know the lawyer really needs a drink of water or doesn’t know how to answer a certain question, I try to show kindness or even throw a lifeline, referencing a point made in a brief perhaps.”

French was appointed Dec. 20 by Ohio Gov. John R. Kasich to fill the vacancy left by Ohio Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton ’79, who retired at the end of 2012. French will serve the remainder of Stratton’s term and run for the office in 2014.

“It was important that we picked somebody who in many ways would kind of be in the same mold as Judge Stratton, who’s done a fantastic job over there,” Kasich told Court News Ohio. “She’s going to be a great judge and a great addition, and I also think she’ll be a strong candidate when the time comes for her to run. She’s got a lot of fire in her, and I’m just very excited to do this.”

French most recently served on the 10^th District Court of Appeals, an eight-member court with jurisdiction over civil, criminal, and administrative appeals. She was appointed to that post by then-Ohio Gov. Bob Taft in 2004 and won election to six-year terms in 2004 and 2010. Prior to that, French was the chief counsel to both Taft and former Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery. It was Montgomery who picked French as the attorney to defend the state in the Cleveland school voucher case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in 2002.

“I am so grateful to Betty Montgomery for that experience because she had the confidence in me that I was the right person for the job,” French said. “I learned standing there, at the lectern, that I was the right person. I was a single mom. My daughter was in public school. I had been in public schools my whole life. I really felt like I was the right person, no matter the pressure – and there was a lot of pressure from the outside. That’s a really important lesson for a young lawyer to learn.”

That day, French said, it seemed as if everything was going their way. Even the weather in Washington, D.C. that February morning was beautiful, she said. In the end, the court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the program was not unconstitutional.

French’s career did not start in the public sector, though. After graduating cum laude from Ohio State with a J.D. and a master’s degree in history in 1988, she went to work for Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur LLP. For four years, she focused on environmental permitting, compliance, and enforcement issues before moving on to become corporate counsel of Steelcase Inc.

In 1993, French made the move to the public sector, becoming deputy director for legal affairs at the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. She advised the director and senior management on issues of state and federal environmental law and managed 25 attorneys.

“I always had an interest in government. The Constitution is something that I always have loved to study. So for me, there was sort of a natural progression from being an environmental lawyer to working for a state agency involved in environmental law,” French said. “I am a huge cheerleader for working in the public sector. It’s a wonderful training ground. You get a broad base of experience from talented professionals who could work anywhere they want but choose to work in public service. There also is that layer of public policy that you don’t always get in the private sector.”

French spent her holidays becoming familiar with the cases to be heard the first week of arguments in the new year. She is one of three new justices whose first day on the Ohio Supreme Court bench arrived in January. “Clearly there’s going to be a transition period,” she said, “not only for the three new justices to learn the process but to form collegiality among the group. Then, we’ll have the challenges of producing clear, consistent decisions.”

Soon after the appointment was made, French received a lovely note from one of her most influential professors at Moritz, Lawrence Herman.Because she was earning two degrees, French spent four years at the College, and Herman was her moot court advisor for two of those years.

“To this day, he is one of the toughest questioners I’ve been in front of in a court panel,” she said. “He was a great advisor because he could make you feel confident but guide you with a soft hand toward a different way of thinking about a case. That is really a gift.”

French has maintained ties to the College as a member its National Council. She also serves on the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission and the board of Amethyst Inc., a center for long-term addiction treatment with safe housing for women and their children.

She lives in Central Ohio with her husband, Ed Skeens, a magistrate for the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, and their children Julia, a senior majoring in criminology at Ohio State, and Joseph, a student at Grandview Heights High School.

“I didn’t know what to do with them and foolishly thought if I put them in jail they would get treatment,” she recalled. “That didn’t happen.”

When she examined the issue further, Stratton found the mental health system was not working with the drug and alcohol abuse system, which was not working with the employment system and so on. “The person might never make the first appointment, to get housing for example, much less the following ones to get help with their addiction or other social services they might need,” Stratton said. “I always wanted to do something about it.”

She got her chance after joining the Ohio Supreme Court. In 2001, she founded the Advisory Committee on Mental Illness and the Courts to develop solutions for the revolving door issue of people with mental illness trapped in the criminal justice system. Ohio only had two mental health courts at the time. More than a decade later, the state leads the nation with 38 mental health courts and 144 specialized dockets, which support local courts in developing programs to help specific populations within the court system. Ohio leads the country in training police with Crisis Intervention Teams, with more than 5,600 trained as of June.

As Stratton prepared to leave the Ohio Supreme Court at the end of 2012, her work with mental illness courts and her advocacy for other groups will be part of her lasting legacy, said colleagues and friends.

“I’ve been so honored to have this job. I have just absolutely marvelous colleagues who I will miss dearly. But my heart calls me to go further and work on a lot of the issues in criminal justice reform that are near to my heart,” she said in a farewell statement before the court on Sept. 13.

During a conversation in her chambers on Front Street, she elaborated further. Being an Ohio Supreme Court justice is a demanding job. Justices read, on average, 5 feet of legal briefs every two weeks. Plus, there are ethical restraints on advocacy with which to contend. “The work that I do in mental health and with veterans has become far more important to me,” Stratton said. “I was pretty much doing two full-time jobs, and one had to go. So this one went.”

Former Justice Yvette McGee Brown ’85 has known Stratton since their days serving in the Franklin County Common Pleas Court. She described Stratton as a thoughtful jurist who listened with an open mind to opinions that were different than hers. Stratton was collaborative in her approach and quick in getting out her decisions. But it will be Stratton’s significant contributions to mental health and veterans’ courts and improvements in juvenile justice for which she will be lauded long after leaving the bench, McGee Brown said.

“She has really been the voice around the country on what courts can do to better serve veterans returning with traumatic brain injury or other issues and working with police and judges around Ohio on response to defendants with mental illness,” McGee Brown said. “Justice Stratton works hard and is always willing to help others. She cares very much about the judiciary and how we can make the judicial branch better for judges, lawyers, and the people who access them.”

As Stratton gains a reputation for advocating for the mentally ill and veterans, people sometimes gently tease her for being a conservative Republican working on behalf of traditionally liberal causes. With a glint in her eye, she enjoys retorting: “Well, Republicans can be mentally ill, too!”

Then, with a reflective pause, she adds, “It’s the fault of my missionary parents. They inspired me to do all of this.”

Growing up abroad

In February 1953, Mrs. Corrine Sahlberg took the train from the remote Thai village of Nong Khai to Bangkok. At roughly 385 miles, it was a long, treacherous journey for a woman to make alone – much less pregnant. She needed to get to Bangkok three weeks prior to the arrival of her and her husband’s second child.

The Sahlbergs were working in Thailand with The Christian and Missionary Alliance, spreading the Gospel to people living in remote mountain villages. Stratton has a black-and-white photo of what she likes to call her “Indiana Jones dad,” Elmer, in her chambers. He’s floating down the Mekong River, on a dugout canoe, appearing very much at ease just a few inches above the water, with a chicken next to him. The fowl was his supper for later, as the people he visited would be too poor to provide him a meal. As he shared the Christian faith, his wife taught Bible classes for women and served as a practical nurse.

In Nong Khai, they were the only foreigners except for one Catholic priest. The family lived in a house considered fancy by Thai standards but primitive to Americans. There was no running water, and electricity was available only by day.

Stratton lived there until she was 6 – the age when all missionary children bid their parents farewell and went off to boarding school for four and five months at a time. Without telephones, the Sahlbergs communicated with their children through letters. Stratton recalled being fortunate enough to have parents who wrote faithfully. She said, “Some kids did real well in that environment; some did not. The separation from parents at such a young age was really tough on a lot of kids. I somehow thrived in it.”

Stratton was in boarding school in South Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War. The walks she and her classmates used to be able to take into the mountains as young children became unsafe. Eventually, they could not leave campus at all.

Meanwhile, the school received copies of Newsweek and TIME. Coverage of the war was two and three months out of date. Still, the children gleaned that the war was unpopular in the United States, a place they didn’t quite identify as home. It was infuriating to Stratton.

“The media painted this very negative picture. It’s like they talked about all the bad things America does and American soldiers do and they never talked about the atrocities committed by the Viet Kong daily,” she said. “We had pastors who were hung upside-down and gutted in front of their children, and that would never make the papers. We spent a lot of time being angry at America and the American government for being critical of our forces.”

With the Tet Offensive in 1968, there became concerns that the missionary school would become a target for terrorism. Stratton’s parents pulled her out a few months before the entire school was evacuated, and the 180 students and teachers were taken to Bangkok, where she rejoined them. Emergency accommodations meant learning in lean-to structures hastily constructed on sidewalks and sleeping in rooms with two triple-bunked beds. “I always was a skinny kid, so I usually got the top bunk,” Stratton said, chuckling.

Finding her calling

At 18, Stratton returned to the United States by herself to attend college. She had $500 and needed to work her way through colleges in Florida and Texas, where she met her first husband, an Ohioan. After getting married, she finished earning her degree in international relations at the University of Akron in 1976.

“Someone said to me, ‘You like to write. You like to act. Why don’t you become a lawyer?’ ” Stratton recalled. She jokes that she had never met a lawyer or seen an episode of Perry Mason, yet she knew she wanted to be a judge from the start of her law school career at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. “I happen to have a fairly religious streak still, and I always thought of it as my calling.”

Working her way through school again, Stratton would study her law books behind the cosmetics counter at Lazarus. She had little time for any carefree moments in law school, saying, “I didn’t get as involved as law students do in the total immersion thing, which I think was good. It kept me grounded.”

Upon graduating in 1979, Stratton worked for a Columbus firm. While her work was valued, it was clear that a woman partner was not welcomed. Friends invited her to join them in creating their own firm – coming in at the partner level. Her practice focused on insurance defense and business law mostly. She started a side practice in adoption that mushroomed.

Yet, Stratton had not given up on her long-term goal of becoming a judge, and the opportunity presented itself nine years out of law school, when she was 34 years old.

The Franklin County Court of Common Pleas had six seats open, and there were five men in the Republican Party prepared to run. They needed a woman, and Stratton received the nod to run. She went up against the only incumbent on the bench. After winning, she immediately ran up against male chauvinism and bureaucracy. She found ways to work around it, though. She and Judge Michael Close conspired to work together so he would present her projects at the judges’ meetings. Issues that would have met a brick wall, had she raised them, sailed through.

Meanwhile, she worked with the state bar association on other issues to keep her energies focused. Stratton was earning a reputation for being very active in working on reforms when Republican Party insiders called her one day to say that Ohio Supreme Court Justice J. Craig Wright was resigning a year early. Could they float her name to then- Gov. George Voinovich ’61?

“I had no political connections or family or money,” Stratton said. The call caught her off guard, but she eventually agreed to the idea. She met with Voinovich prior to her appointment on March 7, 1996. Fellow justices say she is respectful, open-minded, and able to recall specifics of cases heard a decade before when deliberating.

“Eve is a hardworking colleague who is well-prepared and fair. She is an independent thinker and provides valuable insight into case decision-making,” said Justice Terrence O’Donnell. “Her opinions are well-written and well-reasoned. These are the reasons she is so highly valued by her colleagues on the bench and in the bar.”

In addition to finding personal satisfaction with serving in the state’s highest court, Stratton also appreciates the ability she has to work on issues important to her. “This job has so much flexibility with the kinds of projects you can work on that I would never have been able to do at the federal level.”

Advocating for others

Stratton’s passion for certain projects is palpable, including her reform work with mental health courts, juvenile justice, and veterans’ treatment courts.

She helped change the ways juveniles are evaluated for competency and represented in criminal cases. Stratton continues to work on how juveniles are treated once bound over to adult prisons, as well. “There’s a lot of changes we can make there. For example, there’s no child psychologist. The kids in the prison system have the same access to the psychiatrist that the other 50,000 prisoners have,” she said, “but they may not have training in youth issues.”

In establishing mental health courts for adults, Stratton helped spur development of Crisis Intervention Teams for law enforcement officers responding to calls involving mental illness issues. That alone has saved “countless lives at the community level,” said Terry Russell, executive director of Ohio’s National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“This training gives law enforcement officers the tools they need to de-escalate mental health crises in the field.  This has an impact on the safety of both the individuals suffering from mental illness as well as the officers responding to calls,” Russell said. “I have been in the mental health business for 40 years, and no one has had a greater impact on implementing much needed services for the severely mentally disabled than Justice Stratton. She makes it known that as an Ohio Supreme Court justice, she has a ‘bully pulpit.’  When I need to communicate to policymakers, I often ask Justice Stratton to open the door.”

Stratton’s efforts to expand mental health broadened outside of the Buckeye State’s borders when she helped create and co-chair the national Judges’ Criminal Justice/Mental Health Leadership Initiative. In 2008, the initiative received $600,000 in seed money to establish seven, and eventually with more funding, 11 state-level committees to focus on collaboration between parties with an interest in defendants with mental illness – all modeled after the Ohio advisory committee. Officials in Bexar County, Texas reported jail stays were reduced or completely avoided for 1,700 people during their program’s first year. A study of the Maricopa County Comprehensive Mental Health Court in Arizona found the recidivism rate of participants dropped to nearly half the rate of general population offenders.

While at a national conference on housing four years ago, Stratton sat next to a man from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He wanted to create veterans courts, and Stratton recognized her decade of experience in establishing specialty dockets could benefit those who sacrifice greatly for their country. Plus, she had a personal affinity for veterans, with five uncles and a father who served in World War II, a grandfather killed in World War II, two brothers who served in the Vietnam War, and a nephew in the Air Force just back from South Korea.

In addition to creating veterans’ courts in Ohio, she helped start a pro bono project to assist with meeting legal needs of active military and veterans. Stratton also has collaborated with the Veterans Administration on a national liaison program for veterans involved in the court system, and she continues to work on educating judges about the need to ask defendants if they have military experience so they are able to access available services.

“Just as we have learned from our mental health court programs, incarcerating our veterans and throwing away the key is neither the smartest nor the most cost-effective solution,” she co-wrote in a 2010 report on The Ohio Veterans WrapAround Project. “Since they have given so much for our country and our safety, we need to wrap our arms around our veterans and help them in their time of need.”

As Stratton prepared to leave one full-time job to dedicate herself fully to the other – that of an advocate – she was clearly optimistic about the changes she can affect: “These criminal justice issues occupy a place of growing importance in my life, and I have decided to dedicate myself to them even more so not only here in Ohio but also on a national level.”

Evelyn Stratton on…

The death penalty: “It’s not a deterrent one wit. Nobody thinks, ‘I’m not going to kill this person because I might get the death penalty.’ They’re in the throes of something, and they’re not thinking about that. I would much favor going to life without parole, if I were a legislator.”

Lifetime appointments: “Not a good idea. I think they should be accountable to people. I think when you get lifetime appointments, there’s a danger to lose contact with reality, with the public, with being practical. There’s the god complex that sometimes comes in.”

Judges having to run for election vs. being appointed: “The appointive system is secretive. It’s not open. Nobody knows about the person being appointed. Nobody has input about the person being appointed. When I ran for office, I gave more than 50 interviews, including media interviews. I filled out hundreds of questionnaires. The public had input and the ability to influence the election. If you can elect your governor, you can elect your judge. Politics is every bit as much in the appointive system; it’s just secret instead of open.”

Mayor’s courts: “I’m mixed on that. I think some of them are abused, and some of them are misused as cash cows. But I think there’s some value to getting rid of the little cases at the local level with a human touch rather than bringing them to the big city.”

Ohio Constitution Rewriting: “I think it’s a good thing to take a look at it and see if there’s some tweaking that is needed. The Constitutional Convention, I think, is a very good idea. What I do fear is the referendum process that hijacks an issue that’s paid for by an outside party that has a lot of money to fund it and get it on the ballot. California is constantly passing a mandate of some sort that has no funding, and that’s part of the reason they’re in crisis. The casino is the perfect example of a business hijacking the constitution for its own selfish gain.”

Her nickname “The Velvet Hammer”: “When I was a trial judge, I was known for being very respectful and polite. Some of these defendants had no dignity left and no family in the courtroom. I tried to treat them as human beings should be treated. I also was known for being a very tough sentencer, especially when it came to white collar crime. You stole for greed, and this person stole because they were desperate and poor. A prosecutor gave me that name fairly early on, and it stuck. It ended up being wonderful for advertising. When I ran for the Supreme Court, my story was easy to tell in 15 seconds: Missionary kid. Velvet Hammer. That’s it.”

Employment laws have not caught up with technology – and are unlikely to do so anytime soon, offered L. Camille Hébert, the Carter C. Kissell Professor of Law at Moritz who has written a treatise on employee privacy law.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that workers can expect a degree of privacy in their private offices. For example, employers generally have to respect boundaries when it comes to physical space, such as not rifling through an employee’s desk drawers or filing cabinets, even if the desk or filing cabinet is company property. There must be either a reasonable suspicion that the employee has violated workplace policies or a noninvestigatory need for the search. Additionally, employers normally cannot listen in on a personal call as it’s taking place on a work-issued landline.

“This is my filing cabinet,” Hébert said, tapping a drawer behind her desk in Drinko Hall. Then, motioning toward her computer monitor, she added: “This is my electronic filing cabinet because I never delete anything. Yet, the courts have had a lot of difficulty trying to decide whether employees have an expectation of privacy in their computers and their use of email and the Internet.”

Ownership often is at the heart of lower court rulings in cases involving computers and digital data, such as emails, computer files, and Internet search histories. Employers who publish policies warning employees about the employer’s intent to access equipment, monitor systems, and review data are supported by the courts routinely. The Supreme Court skirted the issue when deciding a case in 2010 involving a SWAT sergeant using a work-issued pager to send an enormous number of messages to his wife and mistress. The court took great effort to avoid setting precedent relating to the reasonability of searches, indicating that technological changes and social norms are evolving too rapidly to keep pace.

“The judiciary risks error by elaborating too fully on the Fourth Amendment implications of emerging technology before its role in society has become clear,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. “Prudence counsels caution before the facts in the instant case are used to establish far-reaching premises that define the existence, and extent, of privacy expectations enjoyed by employees when using employer-provided communication devices.”

Hébert said employees’ privacy may be vulnerable when it comes to their personal devices as well. Personal laptops used in conjunction with a workplace wireless network, computers at home used to access work servers and webmail, and even a smartphone brought to the workplace could be the next areas in which privacy challenges arise. While courts are correct to defend the right of employers to ensure that time at work was spent on work, but devices are teeming with personal information that most people may not want to share with their employers, Hébert said.

“If you really thought about what employers can do, you’d be paralyzed,” she said. “Fortunately, most employers are not interested in looking through your passwords or personal data. They realize it would be detrimental for employee morale.”

Still, there always will be those who push for greater access. When media reports surfaced in 2012 of job applicants being asked for social media account information and passwords, legislators in a number of states, including California, Maryland, and Illinois, got to work on crafting laws prohibiting such intrusion. In the nation’s capital, Sens. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called for probes into whether the practice violates federal law.

Facebook executives argued employers who requested such information of job applicants opened themselves up to risk of discrimination claims. Gender, race, religion, age, and more can be found on a profile.

Some companies that did not directly ask for social media account information
took other steps, such as asking an applicant to “friend” a human resources manager. Third-party applications, marketed as a way to help job-seekers network, can be used by potential employers to access personal profiles and wall messages. Job applicants also reported being asked to log on to a site during the interview or required to sign nondisparagement agreements banning negative talk about the employer once hired.

“Probably the safest way to use Facebook is to not have any ‘friends’ at all,” Hébert said, “but that probably would defeat the purpose of being on Facebook, right?”