“It changed not just the lawyer I became but the person that I am,” he says. “That volunteer work gave me a very real experience in something that we don’t fully teach in law schools: the role of lawyers in standing with, in truly supporting, their clients through terrible situations, the worst moments of their lives.”

As he thinks about those times, he says that two particular clients come to mind.

“One was a woman who was a victim of domestic abuse, whom I helped to get a divorce on favorable terms,” Waterstone recalls. “I remember that she came into the legal aid bureau, and she brought her kids. We were talking, going through things, and at the end, she told me it was her birthday and just how happy she was to be spending it with people whom she trusted in a safe environment. I’ll never forget that.”

The other memorable client sought his counsel in a Social Security case.

“I got him $30,000 in benefits that were due from the government, and that money altered the trajectory of his life because it enabled him to go back to school and put down a down payment or security deposit for stable housing. It was really amazing,” Waterstone continues. “And he said, ‘Michael, I know that you’re flying back and forth to California to see your family a lot. Please let me pay for one of your plane tickets. Let me give you a check for $500 or something, out of the recovery.’ And I remember telling him, ‘I can’t take that. Even if I wanted to, I’m pretty sure I can’t. But do me a favor: Take a picture of the check and give it to me, and any time I’m wondering if I went into the right profession, I want to pull that out and look at it.’ And he did!”

That reminder lives on to this day. “I’ve actually lost the paper photo,” Waterstone says with a wistful smile. “And it’s not like there’s a digital image. But, yeah, it’s there in my brain, for sure.”

‘A forward-looking law school’

As UCLA Law approaches its 75th anniversary in 2024, the entrance of a new dean is an opportunity for everyone in the community to consider how far the institution has come – and to look ahead to its even brighter prospects.

When Waterstone arrived at UCLA Law as dean, he found the institution stronger than ever. Each successive class of students has sturdier academic and professional credentials than the last. The large and dynamic faculty is solidly situated to confront the era’s most pressing issues, and it is globally renowned for its thought leadership on matters including human rights, climate change, business, media, technology, reproductive health, racial equity and election integrity. Experiential education opportunities for students and centers of study for scholars and advocates comprise an abundance that is unmatched in the law school’s history – and that makes for a collective force that is positively impacting communities near and far. And alumni now number more than 22,000 and work in the top law firms, companies, public interest organizations, courts and educational institutions across the country. They are also generous and essential contributors to fundraising efforts that have netted record sums.

One can therefore understand why the new dean emphasizes that the start of his tenure is hardly the beginning of the law school’s “Waterstone era.” Well before he joined UCLA Law, he says, he admired the institution for its remarkable record as an innovator in clinical education, critical race studies, public service and access to a top-notch legal education. And when he came on board, Waterstone finally saw the enterprise’s ongoing success up close — a string of achievements that have been driven by the law school’s outstanding administrators, staff and students; by his immediate predecessors, Dean Jennifer Mnookin and Interim Dean Russell Korobkin; and by the other deans and interim deans who came before him.

So, Waterstone says, he could not be more excited to harness the power of the UCLA Law community to confront challenges that loom on the horizon or have yet to materialize.

“One challenge that we need to keep our eye on is the evolving regulation of legal education,” he notes. “The regulatory barriers that have constrained us, but also probably given us a false sense of comfort, are eroding — whether that’s what, if any, admissions tests are required of applicants, whether that’s restrictions in online education, and so on. But in some ways even more profound are regulatory changes for the whole legal profession. We see a lot brewing at the California level, whether it’s licensing of nonlawyers for some segment of legal practice [or] outside investment into what were previously just law firms or legal entities. There are big changes coming, and truly grappling with the role of technology and how legal products and services are delivered will be so important.”

As Waterstone sees it, technology stands to make a real difference, reaching into areas where legal practice meets increasingly urgent developments in the broader society.

“We have tools that are way more powerful now than when I was a litigation associate, in terms of generative AI,” he says. “That doesn’t eliminate the need for human involvement, but it certainly changes it, and as it evolves, clients are going to be demanding that legal work be done more efficiently. At the same time, you have a crushing access-to-justice gap — in the state, in our country, in our world — where most people cannot afford to have their basic legal needs met. So, you don’t need to be a futurist to look at those two trends and think that they’re somehow going to intersect. One of my jobs will be to help us answer this question: What is the role of a forward-looking law school in preparing ourselves and our students and our graduates for that future?”

Waterstone’s wisdom is hard-earned. A Los Angeles native and 1995 graduate of UCLA, he taught in two area elementary schools before traveling across the country, for the first time in his life, to attend law school at Harvard. After earning his J.D., he clerked for Judge Richard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Arkansas before returning home to put in several years as a corporate-law attorney at Munger, Tolles & Olson. He then shifted into academia, first with a professorship at the University of Mississippi School of Law and then with 17 total years at Loyola. Along the way, Waterstone made a mark as a disability law scholar who consulted with international organizations and testified before the U.S. Senate, and he earned plaudits for his teaching, including being named Outstanding First Year Professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he was a visiting professor in the year before he started his uncommonly successful run as Loyola’s dean.

“We succeeded in many meaningful ways at Loyola, and there were three [successes] that I look back on and feel really, really good that we accomplished,” he says. “One was the evolution, development and centralization of the clinics. Two was raising more money than we ever had, to support all of the good work that we were already doing or could do. And the third was taking our evening program, which had always been a source of institutional strength but had struggled, and revamping it in pretty major ways to make it an exciting, forward-looking take on legal education. But I didn’t even envision that last accomplishment as a possibility until Year 2. It took time to understand the lay of the land, the tools that we had and how to leverage various parts of the community — because it needs to be a communitywide effort to be durable.”

Thus, at UCLA Law, he has embarked on the steady work of consulting with members of five key constituencies — students, staff, faculty, alumni and partners across UCLA and the University of California — to determine where and how to lead the community to its next cutting-edge achievement. “Ultimately,” he says, “a [dean’s job] is about providing the space for members of the community to flourish and live out their highest potential.”

Bruin family values

Even for the absolute middle of August, it is unseasonably hot on UCLA’s Dickson Court when Waterstone presides over the law school’s 2023 convocation ceremony. Nevertheless, the community has turned out in droves, furiously waving paper fans, to mark the start of a school year and welcome more than 500 incoming J.D. and LL.M. students, plus some of their families and friends.

Dedicated faculty members sit with smiles on the sunny dais. Ashley Kinder ’24, the 3L president of the law school’s Student Bar Association, offers advice for surviving the daunting rigors of law school. Distinguished alumna Kim McLane Wardlaw ’79, who serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, administers the Oath of Professionalism and reminds the students to maintain kindness and integrity in their legal education and practice.

All the while, Waterstone acts as emcee, introducing each speaker and taking a number of pauses to make sure that his audience, the newest students in the law school of which he is the newest dean, are managing well enough in the midafternoon heat.

His words of welcome to UCLA Law are also suitably warm. “What we are going to teach you here is how to listen, reflect and analyze,” he tells the students. “We’re going to intentionally put you in situations where you need to critique someone’s position. That’s OK. But you can do it without questioning their legitimacy, their dignity or their motivation. As a lawyer, your words are going to be most effective if they can inspire and persuade.”

His speech evokes affirming nods and appropriate instances of laughter from the crowd, a constellation of people that happens to include, standing off to one side, a young woman and young man whom one can assume are thoroughly familiar with what drives this dean: Waterstone’s two high-school-age kids have shown up to see how their dad is doing in his new gig. And their thumbs-up are a clear confirmation.

For Waterstone, of course, it all comes back to family.

There is his family of five, with whom he plays sports and watches Ted Lasso from their sofa in Santa Monica; he and his wife, Julie, a vice dean at Southwestern Law School and clinical professor of law, in addition to their two older children, also have a fifth grader. There are his two sisters, both of whom also graduated from UCLA. And there are his late mom, who would have been so proud, and his dad, who is the son of an immigrant from Eastern Europe who passed through Ellis Island not too long ago. And yes, it was with his father, who is also a lawyer, that Waterstone skipped a few law school professorship interviews to attend the game where their beloved Angels won the 2002 World Series. To be sure, any visitor to Waterstone’s office will notice that the law books and personal keepsakes that decorate the main wall all surround a framed photograph of Angel Stadium on the night when he and his dad were in the stands and the team won it all.

There is also, of course, his UCLA family, which includes the lifelong friends he made as an undergrad. During his senior year, he sat with them in the Westwood Village cantina Acapulco to watch Ed O’Bannon and Tyus Edney lead the men’s basketball team to the NCAA championship. And he still shares a block of tickets with them.

“So many of my friends from UCLA are still people I keep in touch with and who are dear to me,” he says of the core folks who represent to him the widely known and admired Bruin spirit of excellence, kindness and collegiality.

“It has been fun getting to talk to them through this experience of coming back to campus. There’s something about walking around the same place that you did when you were 18 that evokes those special, magical feelings of growth, of being out of your comfort zone,” he says.

“Just walking across this campus — it feels magnificent.”

Read more in UCLA Law Magazine Fall 2023

TIMOTHY CASEY
Director of Curricular Administration and Professor from Practice

Tim Casey will teach Professional Responsibility and provide support for the non-senate law faculty. He started his teaching career at Columbia Law School, where he established a Criminal Practice Clinic and received the Presidential Award for teaching. He also held an appointment as a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University. And he received a Fulbright award for research and teaching in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Most recently, Casey served as the director of the STEPPS Program and professor in residence at California Western School of Law, where he oversaw an innovative program in legal ethics and lawyering skills. He also was a visiting professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Before entering legal academia, he practiced law as a public defender in New York City.

Casey is an internationally recognized expert in experiential legal education. His research interests include legal ethics, surveillance and civil liberties, problem-solving courts and experiential pedagogy. He is a co-author of Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law (Carolina Academic Press, Fifth Edition, 2019), and his scholarship has appeared in law reviews including UC Davis Law Review and SMU Law Review. He serves as chair of the Legal Ethics Committee of the San Diego County Bar Association, a board member for local and international non-profit organizations, and a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed Clinical Law Review.

He received his B.A. from Boston College, J.D. from UC Law San Francisco and LL.M. from Columbia Law School.

HANNAH GARRY
Executive Director of the Promise Institute and Professor from Practice

Hannah Garry joins UCLA Law as executive director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and professor from practice. Garry has devoted her legal career to seeking justice and accountability for human rights abuses and atrocity situations across the globe, while making the U.S. a destination for the study and practice of human rights law.

She joins UCLA Law from USC Gould School of Law, where she was clinical professor of law and founding director of the International Human Rights Clinic for 12 years. Her areas of teaching and scholarship include international criminal law, transitional justice, international human rights law and international refugee law. She has supervised student attorneys in the clinic on cases and projects nationally and internationally that address atrocity crimes, refugee rights, fair trial rights, gender justice, human trafficking and systemic racism.

Garry’s career as an international human rights advocate, scholar and teacher took root when she was a graduate student at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. After graduation, she was hired by Oxford as a field researcher visiting refugee camps throughout Uganda and Kenya for two years where she witnessed and documented first-hand the abuses refugees endure in exile while under the protection of the international community.

Garry has held many other academic and expert legal advisor positions, including in international criminal courts and leading human rights organizations, and she has been quoted widely in major media outlets. Last year, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo Law’s PluriCourts Centre in Norway.

Garry earned her J.D. from UC Berkeley and master’s in international affairs from Columbia University.

MELISSA GOODMAN
Executive Director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy

Melissa Goodman joins UCLA Law as the inaugural executive director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy after a five-year tenure as the legal and advocacy director for the ACLU of Southern California. There, Goodman led 60 attorneys across Southern California and oversaw the department’s visioning and strategy, strategic planning, intersectional issue and cross-team collaboration and resource allocation. In doing so, she helped lead statewide legislative, electoral and organizing strategy. She also co- chaired the national ACLU’s Gender Justice Task Force.

Goodman previously spent a decade as the ACLU SoCal’s Audrey Irmas Director of the LGBTQ Gender and Reproductive Justice Project, and as a senior litigation and policy counsel for reproductive and LGBTQ rights at the New York Civil Liberties Union. In those roles, she led and participated in reproductive justice, LGBTQ and gender equity litigation, as well as policy advocacy campaigns. Along the way, Goodman led or co-counseled an array of high-profile cases, including those involving pregnant unaccompanied immigrant minors; gay, bisexual and transgender prisoners; and same-gender couples.

Goodman clerked for Judge Frederic Block of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from New York University and her J.D. from NYU School of Law.

EMILY CHURG
Lecturer in Law

Emily Churg teaches Legal Research and Writing. She previously practiced complex commercial litigation at WilmerHale and ran her own bar exam preparation company. She has also taught legal writing at USC Gould School of Law and undergraduate writing at Arizona State University.

She earned her B.A., with honors, from UC Santa Cruz; her Ph.D. in rhetoric, composition and linguistics from Arizona State; and her J.D., Order of the Coif, from UC Davis School of Law. After law school, she clerked for Judge S. James Otero of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

THOMAS WANEBO
Lecturer in Law

Thomas Wanebo teaches Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research for LL.M. students. He currently works as a trial attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, defending low-income families against eviction. He began his career as a litigation associate at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles.

Wanebo earned his B.A. from Colorado State University and his J.D. from UCLA Law, where he was a senior editor of the UCLA Law Review. His publications include the article “Remote Killing and the Fourth Amendment: Updating Constitutional Law to Address Expanded Police Lethality in the Robotic Age,” which appeared in the UCLA Law Review.

MELODI DINCER
UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy Fellow

Melodi Dincer will join UCLA Law in January 2024 as a fellow with the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. Her work focuses on helping social movements fight algorithmic violence and build transformative futures.

She was previously an appellate advocacy fellow with the Electronic Privacy Information Center and has been a legal research fellow and clinical supervising attorney at NYU School of Law, where she earned her J.D. She earned her B.A. from Brown University.

RUTHIE LAZENBY
Shapiro Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy

As the Shapiro Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy for 2023–25, Ruthie Lazenby will be focusing on energy law and regulation. She was previously a staff attorney in the Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School and a legal fellow in the environmental justice program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.

She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Law and Political Economy Blog.

Read more in UCLA Law Magazine Fall 2023

Anna Norkett Kao ’24 was inspired to go to law school because her brother had been incarcerated. When she met Dolovich and learned about the Prison Law and Policy Program, it all clicked.

“I have learned from the greatest professors in this field and developed relationships with classmates who are dedicating their lives to helping those most vulnerable. Daily, I’m surrounded by people who inspire me, challenge me, lament with me, hold me accountable and encourage me to keep going. The opportunities I’ve had to jump into this work even as a student are incredible and will forever shape me as an advocate,” she says.

Norkett Kao has been involved in several initiatives under the umbrella of the program, including the Behind Bars Data Project, the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic and the Incarcerated Persons Pen Pal Project, which she led last year through the Law Students for Decarceration group.

After graduation, she hopes to gain experience in litigation and eventually become a professor of prison law and policy at a law school in Texas.

“I’d like to equip and inspire the next generation of advocates for the incarcerated, as I have been equipped and inspired at UCLA. I’ve watched as a few key professors have shaped dozens— even hundreds—of students over the years into passionate, skilled advocates for the incarcerated, and I would love to bring similar opportunities to students in a different part of the country,” she says.

In 2023, UCLA Law’s Prison Accountability Project, led by a team of student researchers, published a report that details incarcerated individuals’ experiences in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) facilities during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supported by their faculty advisor, Dolovich, the report’s co-authors—third-year students Nora Browning, Joseph Gaylin, Shireen Jalali-Yazdi and Kamilah Mims—and a team of student volunteers transcribed and coded hundreds of calls and letters from people incarcerated in 28 CDCR facilities between April 2020 and April 2021, utilizing data provided by UCI’s PrisonPandemic project.

They identified routine medical abuse and neglect, unsanitary conditions, extreme isolation and physical violence directed at incarcerated individuals, often unreported by official oversight bodies.

“In the absence of rigorous external oversight that centers the experiences of incarcerated people, my hope is that [this project] can provide advocates, lawyers and organizers with accurate information about widespread problems in California carceral institutions,” says Gaylin ’24, co-author of the report and founder of the Prison Accountability Project. Gaylin came to UCLA Law specifically for its Prison Law and Policy Program.

“Everyone is impacted by mass incarceration, whether they realize it or not,” says Brisely Martinez ’24.

Martinez is passionate about seeing more formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people in the legal profession. She is a co-founder and co- president of the Alliance for Formerly Incarcerated and System Impacted Students (AFISIS), a new student-led group at UCLA Law focused on increasing the prison to university pipeline. Alicia Virani, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Director of UCLA Law’s Criminal Justice Program, is the group’s faculty advisor.

Martinez is ‘systems impacted’ herself – that is, she has loved ones who have been impacted by the criminal legal system, mass incarceration and the hyper-criminalization of communities of color.

“For folks who have experienced anything in the criminal legal system, know that we are here; we exist, and we deserve to have access to the privilege of higher education,” she says.

AFISIS aims to help systems-impacted individuals from both the outside and the inside. Their goals include increasing the visibility of systems- impacted law students; creating pathways for formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted students to attend law school; and addressing the ways law schools and the legal profession themselves hinder those pathways.

Martinez is specializing in critical race studies and is a mentor in UCLA Law’s Law Fellows program, of which she is an alumna.

“My community is not just my ethnicity – it’s also people who have experienced the injustices that I have experienced. You don’t often think of diversity this way, but — to me — it is an identity, and to a lot of us it is,” she says. “When law schools talk about diversity, our voices and our community should be included in those conversations.”

Read more in UCLA Law Magazine Fall 2023

When Maria Abesa ’17 was a student at UCLA Law, she was busy. Busy working in the San Bernardino Superior Court. Busy earning a joint J.D. and M.P.P. degree through UCLA’s Law and Public Policy program. Too busy, in fact, to imagine that she would actually land her dream job in just a few years. But she did, and she couldn’t be happier.

The lifelong video game fan (top of her list: the original Xbox release Fable) works as senior counsel at the video game company Square Enix in El Segundo, where the days are jammed but never dull. “There’s nothing routine about it at all,” Abesa says. “I have to take whatever comes across my desk. That can be anything from licensing agreements, marketing things, HR things. It’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades situation, but that’s what makes it fun.”

Through it all, her UCLA Law experience keeps her grounded. “When I’m feeling a little overwhelmed or like I’m in over my head,” she says, “I just remind myself, Hey, you were very well educated by some great professors at one of the best law schools in the world. You’ve got this! You can figure this out.”

One thing she figured out while at UCLA Law is something she places pretty much above everything else in importance: networking. Like any good game, her career story has its twists and turns, but the basic trip took her from the law school’s On-Campus Interview (OCI) process to Sidley Austin in Century City, where she was mentored by Matthew Thompson, a board member of the Ziffren Institute for Media, Entertainment, Technology and Sports Law. At the firm, Abesa was never shy about discussing her love of video games, which led to a key connection at Square Enix and, eventually, to her current job.

Winner!

But for Abesa, who continues to remain connected to people across her journey, that was hardly game over.

Networking, she says, is “a resource you can draw on for a very long time. And you’ll make some friends, which is always cool. … I mean, I’m making video games with my friends for a living. How does it get any better than that?”

TikTok is one of the largest mobile entertainment platforms today, with more than a billion users all over the world. The sheer scale of the platform represents a massive legal challenge for Erich Andersen ’89, general counsel and head of trust and safety for ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.

At ByteDance, Andersen, a Double Bruin, manages the global legal team as well as the corporate social responsibility and trust and safety functions. But his current work is just the latest stop in a more than three-decade career at the intersection of law and technology.

After graduating without a clear career path, Andersen first clerked for two federal judges, then considered becoming a commercial litigator and began working at Davis Wright Tremaine in Seattle in 1991. “I started my law practice during the early days of Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, when Seattle’s vibrant startup community was just getting started,” he says. “I quickly fell in love with the work I was doing for tech companies in the area.”

Four years later, Andersen started his 24-year tenure as in-house counsel at Microsoft, where he served as deputy general counsel for the Windows and Office businesses, led the legal and government affairs for Microsoft EMEA in Paris and became a corporate vice president and global head of intellectual property. Then, in 2020, he moved over to ByteDance as general counsel.

Andersen certainly benefited from entering the tech world at the start of the internet boom, but he stresses that there are still amazing opportunities for lawyers who are interested.

“Technology is ubiquitous in our world today,” he says. “Retail sellers are tech companies, travel agencies are tech companies, entertainment companies are tech companies, auto companies are tech companies, and governments run on technology. Technology is part of the fabric of our world.”

So how can law students get there? “Commit to learning the foundations of intellectual property and data privacy laws,” he says. “It’s also really helpful to understand the technology and not just the relevant law. Take some computer science and engineering classes, and don’t shy away from learning opportunities once you are in practice. Read about tech, learn about new developments and test the patience of the engineers with questions when the opportunity arises.”

For the first five years of her legal career, Andrea Cheuk ’10 worked in the San Francisco office of Latham & Watkins. Although she was close to Silicon Valley, she didn’t center her practice on technology. Instead, she says, “I focused on building a strong skill set, laying a good foundation and developing my network.”

As she built her connections and professional toolkit, Cheuk’s colleagues and mentors encouraged her to consider in-house jobs at top tech companies. “I did a lot of informal interviewing,” she says. “It was hard to get my foot in the door.”

But her persistence and positive spirit eventually paid off. In 2015, she got a job at Tesla thanks to her “UCLA Law connections, specifically from alumnae who are active in the UCLA LEAD network” – the law school’s alumnae-led network that advances women in law. Back then, she says, “Tesla had a small and scrappy legal department. I got to learn and try everything, from bet-the-company litigation, to commercial disputes, regulatory actions and even privacy and data security issues.”

That on-the-job training has served her well at her current company, Meta, where she has worked since 2018. Now a director and associate general counsel, she advises on an array of legal issues that arise in the course of developing, building and shipping new products and experiences to users. “It’s a very cross-functional role,” she says. “I work with product managers, data scientists, engineers, policy experts and comms teams. I’m really embedded in the business, and that seems to be the best way to provide thoughtful and practical  legal advice. It’s fascinating work.”

So how can lawyers who are interested in technology careers fulfill their promise? Build a strong legal foundation, Cheuk says, including learning about developments in privacy and data protection laws. Well, that, and one more key thing: Connect with fellow UCLA Law alumni.

“At every step of my career, alums have helped me,” she says. Connect with them. Get to know them. Learn about what they do. After all, she adds, “You can find them at most of the top tech companies in the world.”

For double Bruin Josh Green, B.A. ’77, J.D. ’80, a career in the tech sector was not always in sight. “My plan before law school was to go into politics,” he says, “but a summer job during law school in the Bay Area caused me to fall in love with Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship.” Flash forward more than four decades, and Green has become a tech-world fixture as a lawyer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur.

Following a successful decade and a half at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, where he handled high-tech venture financings, IPOs and mergers and acquisitions — some of the most exciting deals in Silicon Valley when the industry was in its early stages of revolution— Green was considering his next act. He recalls, “As a child, I loved to build things, and I realized I wanted to do that with my career as well.”

In 1995, he joined the fledgling Venture Law Group. “VLG was like a startup, and part of our strategy was to do the opposite of what a typical law firm would do,” he says. “For example, we gave a profit interest to every employee, including the receptionists.” The firm also focused “solely on startups with an equity model that ensured our incentives were aligned with entrepreneurs.”

Green eventually moved into venture capital and entrepreneurship, first at Mohr Davidow Ventures, where he focused on cleantech and life sciences investing, and then at Carbon, a 3D printing startup, where he worked as general counsel and in corporate development until 2022.

Now, Green is an advisor to startups as well as a lecturer at UCLA Law School. He looks back on his fruitful career and says that UCLA Law taught him how to discover opportunities and chart his course. “On the very first day, a professor told us, essentially, ‘We are going to rewire your brain and teach you a very different way of thinking,’” he says. “That really stuck with me and enabled me to develop a rigorous approach to problem solving and counseling that has benefited me throughout my career.

“People focus way too much on what to think, as opposed to learning how to think,” he adds. “To become a trusted advisor, a consigliere, to your client, you need to immerse yourself in their shoes and understand how to meet their objectives.”

Even though Brian Lee ’96 graduated from UCLA Law and started his career working in tax law in the Los Angeles office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, his long-held interest in technology and the internet led to tremendous success as an entrepreneur – many times over. “I was always looking at the future and what was coming next,” says Lee, a double Bruin. “I can remember getting on the internet in the early 1990s and thinking that it was going to change the world.”

Lee was definitely part of that change. After they graduated, Lee and his UCLA Law classmate Brian Liu ’96 would meet for lunch – Liu was working at Sullivan & Cromwell – and they started exploring ideas for internet businesses. Eventually, they founded LegalZoom in 2001, which transformed how legal services are delivered and made the law more accessible to millions of people.

But the entrepreneurial itch can be persistent, and by 2009, Lee had co-founded ShoeDazzle, a fashion subscription service, with his wife, Mira, and others, including Kim Kardashian. And in 2012, he co-founded the Honest Company, a digital-first retailer of eco-friendly and natural baby products and home goods, with Jessica Alba.

In addition to turning those businesses into immense successes, Lee has shifted to angel investing as a way of, he says, “putting capital back into the entrepreneurial ecosystem.” In 2014, he co-founded BAM Ventures, an early stage investor in consumer companies from beauty brands to gaming tech platforms, where he is managing director.

While Lee admits that he started at UCLA Law not knowing exactly what he wanted to do with his career, “I had heard that a legal education can only help you,” – especially, he notes, at a time when “technology is opening new worlds for enterprises, and creative attorneys can be tremendously helpful in turning opportunities into businesses.”

And it all started with becoming a lawyer. “I learned how to analyze issues and foresee problems. I learned how to articulate my thoughts better, to write better – to communicate better,” he says. “A law degree is terrific preparation for an entrepreneur or a business career. I am really happy I went to UCLA Law!”

One UCLA Law alumnus is using cognitive science together with his knowledge of patent and intellectual property protection to make screen reading easier and more effective. Nick Lum ’07 is the founder and CEO of BeeLine Reader, a venture-stage company that he says uses “a simple cognitive trick — an eye-guiding color gradient — to pull your eyes through long blocks of text.” BeeLine’s proprietary technology helps readers consume text with more speed and focus and less screen fatigue. The company recently earned an award from Hewlett Packard for accelerating digital equity.

Lum had the idea for BeeLine’s technology even before he came to UCLA Law as a student, but it would be several years before he made the jump to being an entrepreneur. After graduating in 2007, he moved to Silicon Valley to do tax law at McDermott, Will & Emery. He had been working on the idea for BeeLine on the side, and he says that “when the iPad caught on, I thought it was time to see if my idea for improving reading on screen had any traction in the real world.”

Relying on his strong legal experience and knowledge of patent law — including a pivotal law school course — he says he “realized that my idea for making reading on screen easier could be something worth patenting and pursuing as a business.”

Lum founded the company in 2013, securing patents for tools and technologies and assembling a small team. In the decade since, BeeLine has expanded its reach and built partnerships that include such education and reading platforms as Blackboard and Perlego, digital publications such as LAist and schools across the country. Today, more than 10 million students around the world have access to BeeLine’s service, which is especially helpful for people with dyslexia, ADHD or visual impairments.

Working as a corporate lawyer for tech firms, Lum says, offers great opportunities to learn about technology. “You develop a good business sense and a good network,” he says. “You get to see the inner workings of some of the most sophisticated companies in the world.”

What’s more, he notes, the proliferation of global technology enterprises calls for adept and engaged lawyers at every turn. “The stakes can be enormous,” he says. “Tech companies need great lawyers when interfacing with corporate partners and customers that are larger and more globally distributed than ever before.”

Read more in UCLA Law Magazine Fall 2023