What I did my 1L Summer!

Naomi Stewart: Welcome back to Applying Yourself, a law school admissions podcast brought to you by the admissions team at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. My name is Naomi Stewart. I serve as one of the directors in the JD admissions office at WashU Law, and we have Anna, of course, with us today.

Anna Donovan: Hello. I’m also here — Anna Donovan. I am the Communications Program Manager here at WashU Law in the admissions office. And today we are talking with a current 2L student, Emily Graue. We are so glad to have you with us today, Emily.

Emily Graue: Hi — happy to be here. Thank you.

Naomi Stewart: Yeah. We have Emily on today because she has a really amazing, exciting, fascinating — I think truly, everyone who is interested in legal things would be interested to hear about — what you did your 1L summer. But we’re going to start this conversation jumping back a little bit. Emily, if you just want to tell us a little bit about you, about your background, and what led you to law school.

Emily Graue: Yeah. I am from the suburbs of Chicago, from a little town called Oswego, which is close to Naperville — because no one’s ever heard of Oswego. I grew up there. I did my undergrad at THE Ohio State University. I got a degree in history and a minor in philosophy. After a gap year, I came to WashU for law school.

I have pretty much always known that I wanted to be a lawyer. There was a brief six-month period in high school when I thought I maybe wanted to be a teacher. But then I pretty much instantly bounced right back to law, and I went into college wanting to go to law school. So once I graduated, it was a pretty natural step to go that way.

Anna Donovan: Fantastic. And how did you come to choosing WashU Law?

Emily Graue: Yeah. So my brother actually did his undergrad at WashU. I was kind of looking through the law school rankings, as most prospective students do. I kind of blinked, applied, and came here.

When I was touring — I think WashU is stunning. I’d been to the campus a bunch of times before even applying, to visit my brother. My brother loved his undergrad experience. And then honestly, when I was doing recruitment, I just felt so wanted by WashU. They were emailing, they were calling, they were so interested. We joked that my brother had my phone bugged, because every time I would talk to WashU, he would call me right after and be like, “What’s up today?” And he never calls me.

It ended up being the best financial decision for me, but also — my brother was here, so I had a built-in support system. I really liked the school. They were super supportive. And I just felt like I wanted to go back to Chicago, and this would give me a really good path to do that.

Naomi Stewart: That’s so awesome to hear. We’re glad that you felt wanted, and hopefully you’re enjoying your time. You’re a little more than midway through.

Emily Graue: A little over half.

Naomi Stewart: A little over half through law school. That is so exciting. Tell us a little bit about how your 1L year went.

Emily Graue: Yeah. So 1L is a really hard learning curve. I think pretty much everyone who’s done law school feels that way. But on the first week of school, I met my two best friends. We are still best friends. One of them moved into my building, actually, and we were just really close. Throughout the year, we ended up building a really great friend group. That’s been great.

The professors have all been super supportive. I haven’t had any professors that I was like, “Oh.” And my friends have been great. The support system has been great. But 1L — yeah, I think it was definitely hard. Academically, it was a challenge, for sure. Especially when you go to a top law school, everyone was the top of their class. Now you’re here, and not everyone can be at the top now. So I think that was a curve.

Naomi Stewart: We have to remind ourselves, in admissions, we’re doing our job in admitting candidates that are going to be able to do the academic work, get great jobs, and feel successful — surrounded by other high-achieving students as well. But I think it’s so great that we have you on, because I know our 1Ls right now are in the depths of securing their 1L summer employment, and I think that’s a lot of what we’re here to talk about today.

You had an internship with the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how you got that position, what the interest was there, and — I think for you a little bit of — your interest generally in the public sector?

Emily Graue: Yeah. So I have always loved public interest. In college, I worked at Legal Aid over in Columbus, working on their bankruptcy program, which was great. And then during OCIs — which is on-campus interviews, for people who don’t know — I had already applied to the public defender, and then I took my dog to the dog park, and a border collie started herding him, and the most friendly girl I’ve ever met in my life came over to talk to me. She turned out to be a 2L, now a 3L, named Casey. She was actually interning already at the public defender’s office.

She said, “I’m here with all of the public defenders. Do you want to come meet them?” Thirty-five seconds after meeting me! So she took me over. I met all of them. They were wonderful — just to talk to and hang out with at this dog park. And I actually had an interview already with them the next week. So I’d met them, and I was like, “I love these people. I would love to spend 40 hours a week hanging out with them.”

Also, as someone with that interest, I’d never worked in anything criminal, and I was like, “Okay, it would be really interesting just to see what that looks like, versus, you know, bankruptcy or legal aid.” So that’s kind of how I came to that.

Anna Donovan: Awesome. I think that’s very St. Louis — that happening at the dog park, and the people, and a kind of small-town feel. I think Midwesterners in general are just very welcoming and helpful in that respect, which is awesome.

You did have a very interesting experience at the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office. Tell us a little bit about that and the kind of work you found yourself doing — really credited to your passion as well. Tell us about that experience.

Emily Graue: Yeah. So my first week, my attorney was sick, so I met him the second week. He comes in and he goes, “Yeah, so we’re going to be working on, like, the biggest murder trial St. Louis has seen in 20 years. Good luck.” And I was like… “Excuse me?” I was like, “I just finished 1L. Like, what? Am I qualified to be doing this?”

My first assignment was to create a novel legal argument in the state of Missouri to keep cameras out of this murder trial — to keep them from, like, livestreaming it, essentially, which in Missouri state court is usually allowed with proper petitioning and procedure. We really did not want that, because it was a very highly politicized case.

So he was like, “Yeah, just make something up.” I was like, “I’ve literally never written a motion before, and you want me to come up with a novel legal argument?” Yeah. Which I did. I ended up making a Sixth Amendment fair-trial argument about filming and prejudice, which actually was accepted by the 22nd Judicial Circuit.

Anna Donovan: Congratulations. That’s impressive.

Naomi Stewart: That is incredible. Talk about substantive legal work — like, you were doing this in one week.

Emily Graue: It’s like week two.

Naomi Stewart: Yes.

Emily Graue: Yeah. So then I wrote a bunch of motions, went to a bunch of hearings. This was actually about the murder of David Dorn, which happened in the summer of 2020 during the riots that happened after the murder of George Floyd. Our client was the one who was accused of the murder.

So obviously very charged, a lot going on. I went to all the hearings. I spent about four hours a week with Stephan, who is the defendant. That’s kind of what I spent my summer doing — writing these motions, doing discovery work up until the trial, which was in July, which I did go to.

Anna Donovan: Right, right. And from what we understand, it took a little bit of a turn — that the resources that were needed for this and your role in securing resources, if that’s a good characterization. Tell us a little bit more about the progression of how you played into this.

Emily Graue: Yeah. So I started, and obviously everything was leading straight up to the trial, which is kind of crunch time. We joke that I got an intern — her name’s Anna Stewart. I love her to death. She was an undergrad, so they gave the intern an intern, and she would do the work that didn’t require legal knowledge — you know, transcribing, timestamps, that type of thing.

She and I worked really closely together, and that was our team — with Brian Hornier, who was the lead attorney, and Adolfo Ming, who was second chair. And yeah, the public defender does not have phenomenal resources. I think that’s widely known. I got to be very hands-on. I was in all the meetings. My ideas were very heard. Everything I was saying, they were at least willing to hear it and explain if I was wrong, if there was something that I wasn’t right on.

But yeah, I had to get in on that. At trial, I was taking all the notes, sitting at the table, taking notes, doing that type of thing. So very hands-on.

Anna Donovan: Absolutely. And I know part of your work was also reaching out to law firms. Do you want to talk about that and how that folded in?

Emily Graue: Yeah. So at trial, he ended up being found guilty on all counts, which I felt very strongly was not justified. There was no DNA evidence. There were no fingerprints. There was no real forensic evidence other than a co-defendant who flipped two weeks before trial — and a weird ID. I really felt that, one, he was innocent, that he didn’t do it, period. But also that they had not established beyond reasonable doubt in this trial that he had.

So it went beyond just my feeling of innocence. I don’t even think the trial was correct. So post-trial, I had to wait until sentencing, and I decided that I was going to see if I could get a big law firm to pick up the appeal of this trial pro bono.

I ended up going down the Vault list of all of the major firms in Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City that were kind of in the region. I went to their pro bono pages to see — because they list the kinds of pro bono they do — and the ones that listed criminal appeals went on this spreadsheet. I ended up with about 50-ish firms that took direct criminal appeals.

From there, I wrote out a form email that had fill-in-the-blanks for the firm name, so it seemed a little more personalized. I basically laid out: this is the case, these are the facts of the case, this is what I think is wrong with the case, this is why I think you should take the case. When I was making the spreadsheet, a lot of them have their pro bono contacts listed. So I just put those in the spreadsheet too — click, click, click.

I made the title caption of the email like: “High-profile pro bono criminal appeal” — just to get there as much. I wanted them to be like, “Oh my God, who’s this random person emailing me this?” I should have done it in batches, but I thought this was going to be like when you apply to big law jobs, and you’re supposed to just spam everything. So that’s what I did. I sent out about 150 emails — probably to those 50 firms — in about 48 hours. I spent two days back to back, because, like I said, it was fill-in-the-blank. Once you had done it, you got it. I pounded it out, sent it out, and was like, “Okay, let’s see how that goes.”

Expecting maybe a response. And then everyone was so interested. The outpouring was just insane.

Anna Donovan: Wow.

Emily Graue: I had 25 firms actually respond to me directly within a week, and there were 12 that wanted to meet with me about it — to have some type of info session and discuss. Even the firms that couldn’t take it — I got so many emails from these attorneys that were like, “Hey, we can’t take this for jurisdictional reasons, it’s not what we whatever — but I am so moved by this case that I have forwarded it to everyone in my legal inbox to see if they want to take it.” Someone sent me a database that this group of firms uses, and said, “If you can get authorization to post it here, I will personally make sure it is top of the list, and you will find someone.” Even these attorneys that could not take it were working so hard with me to find someone who would.

Anna Donovan: That is so impressive. Taking a little step back — after sentencing, is this something that you went to the public defenders and asked, like, how to proceed, or sort of what you could do? Did you inherently know, “I’m going to reach out to firms”? How did you make that next step?

Emily Graue: Yeah. So I went to see Stephan in the jail about a week and a half after sentencing, and I was still really devastated, and he was devastated. I promised him at the time, “I’m going to do everything in my power to make this right. I’m not giving up on you, and I want you to know that I’m here.” He was like, “Okay,” and he had faith. I spent a lot of time with him. He was wonderful.

I was kind of thinking about it, and I felt like a lot of the issues here — well, one, it’s just a whole thing — but I was like, “I’m kind of new to reach out.” No one told me to. I asked the public defender, because obviously I’m disclosing legal information, and I was like, “Hey, can I do this?” And they were like, “Yeah, I mean, go ahead.”

Naomi Stewart: “It’s your time. Make sure, yeah, right.”

Emily Graue: They were like, “Do whatever you want.” But yeah, it was my idea. I very much thought about it. I think I said something to Stephan, and he was like, “Why would you do that?” And I was like, “There’s a reason OJ Simpson isn’t in jail and you are. So let’s reach out to firms and see what we can do.”

It’s actually McGuireWoods who took it. We can get to that. Sorry, I’m jumping ahead — but they are going to be co-representing with the public defender. So it’s all of the resources together, and everyone can work on it.

Anna Donovan: Yeah, awesome. Do you want to — I hate to say “speed” — but speed us through getting McGuireWoods on, and bringing it together, and where you all are now?

Emily Graue: Yeah. So McGuireWoods was my number-one choice, actually. They have a project called the Appellate Justice Project, which is what took it. They only do direct criminal appeals that have strong social-justice ties — AKA this case. All of the attorneys who work on this project have prior criminal-defense experience. So they’ve worked in criminal courts. They aren’t all civil — which was great, because obviously civil and criminal are so different.

So they reached out, asked for a meeting. I was working at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, and I was booking their conference room to do all these meetings. This was the one, actually, that Anna — my intern — I was like, “You should come to one of these, just to see what this type of advocacy looks like. And also, you’ve been so involved in this, you should see this.”

So she comes, and I’m like, “She’s here.” They asked a bunch of questions. I had sent them our motion for new trial, which has all the claims of error. We were going through it, talking, talking, talking. It was great. It was Greg DeBuff and John Harmon on the call with us.

We hung up, and I FaceTimed Anna immediately afterwards. “Okay, do you have any criticisms for me? What do you think?” She and I were talking — twelve minutes later, my phone starts ringing. It’s a Virginia area code, which is where this project is based out of. Greg had called my personal phone, and he was like, “I just want to let you know — we’re going to take this case. I wanted to be the first one to tell you personally that we’re going to do this.”

Anna’s still on FaceTime on my computer. So she’s hearing all of this. I was like, “This is perfect — that Anna gets to be in on this.” But that was kind of how McGuireWoods came to it. They were one of my meetings. Like I said, they just responded, and he was like, “This seems really well-fitted to our program.” And I was like, “It does — and that’s why I was so excited that you responded.”

Greg is the most accomplished human being I’ve ever met in my life. I think his pinky is more competent than me as a person.

Naomi Stewart: You sound very confident.

Emily Graue: Yes.

Naomi Stewart: You should give yourself a lot of credit. A lot of credit.

Emily Graue: Thank you. But he was top of his class at, like, Harvard and Yale. He was Defender of the Year in the military. He did JAG. He’s a Marine veteran of six years. And he recently took one of his pro bono cases through this program to the Supreme Court of the United States. So I’m very, very confident in Greg being absolutely phenomenal.

Naomi Stewart: The biggest question on my mind is: how did you fit all this in with your work and schoolwork and all these other things? You are a full-time student. How did that work itself in? Where did you find the time?

Emily Graue: Yeah. I think I just made time. I definitely did not have the time, but I felt very strongly about this injustice. I’m someone that, when I feel like something is wrong, I can’t sit on it. I have to push through that. So I just fit it. I made it work.

I was up a lot of nights. Like I said, I was renting out the conference room at my job and going between doing legal services stuff, going upstairs, doing these info meetings, coming back down. So I just kind of pushed it. I think I’ve done about 65 pro bono hours on it in the last six months — which is, you know, you push, you just make it happen.

Once the interviews were over, it came down significantly. So that was helpful. But definitely, I did part of it over fall break, which I think helped, too.

Anna Donovan: Yeah — a credit, certainly, to your passion for helping in this case. So this summer, you are going a bit of a different direction, but not so different. I think this is a good example of how big law can work on public-interest cases. Tell us a little bit about your upcoming summer.

Emily Graue: Yeah. So I will be at Reed Smith in Chicago as a summer associate this summer. That’s in big law, obviously — it’s not at the public defender or public interest. And definitely, I’ll say — when I was doing my OCIs, or any type of big law interviewing, they were all really interested in this case. They all really wanted to talk about it. They loved the litigation experience I got through it, and that I had this experience already.

But my tie into big law is that, when I was looking at firms, I was screening for pro bono programs. I wanted to see who had good pro bono programs — who allowed you to take cases where you weren’t just given, you know, five things you could pick from. When I was interviewing with Reed Smith, my first interviewer and my screener said, “Oh, well, I represent our local greyhound rescue, because I love greyhounds and I rescue greyhounds. So I do the legal work for that.” And I was like, “That’s amazing that you have the autonomy to do that.”

So I looked even deeper into their program, and I was like, “I love the pro bono program at Reed Smith, and it would allow me to continue with my passions.” So that’s how I’m going to work my passion into my big law career.

Naomi Stewart: I think that’s extremely inspirational, especially for students we’ve talked to who don’t really know what they want to do — they can get experience with both, but also have this passion for public service. The different areas and capacities that you can get that experience in, working with different organizations, etc., is so awesome.

We may wrap our convo up there. We try to end our podcast on a takeaway, and I know we talked about this a little bit ago — but you have, I think, some very good advice for future law students or current law students if you’d like to wrap it up for us and give some advice to law students or prospective law students.

Emily Graue: Yeah, for sure. I think that the first part of the two-prong is: justice ends when you allow it to end. If you feel something’s unjust, you can try. They might say no, but at least you know in your heart that you did your best. The other part of that is: you don’t have to be exceptional to make change. I’m not in the top third of my law school class, and I’m still here. I’ve done this, and I’m on a podcast now.

I think not having perfect grades should not be a deterrent for you to think that you can’t get the job you want, you can’t do the things you want, you can’t make change. That’s up to you. Put yourself in that position. Take the time. Maybe you have to do pro bono hours when you probably should be studying. And that’s okay.

Naomi Stewart: Yeah, that’s okay — and I think that is something people should definitely take away. That is so fantastic. That is just a great bit of advice and so helpful for students as they’re framing their experience and thinking about the jobs they want to pursue and the pressures of law school — and the passion that brought them to law school in the first place, and continuing that through academic summers and onwards.

Thank you for being on our podcast. This was so wonderful.

Emily Graue: Thank you for having me.

Naomi Stewart: Yeah — Emily Graue, 2L at WashU Law in St. Louis. We are very proud of the work and the passion that you are putting into your work. It is just so great to have a wonderful WashU Law community, and a community of attorneys all over the Midwest and all over the country. It’s just a wonderful profession that is very supportive, and this is a great example of that. Thank you so much for your time today, Emily.

Emily Graue: Thank you.

Anna Donovan: Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.