By Andrew Cohen
Our annual Summer Work Series features Berkeley Law students reflecting on their current job. These first-person accounts detail career-advancing work and skill building in many legal areas, often through opportunities gained in partnership with the Career Development Office.
Rising 3L Vasomnoleak Ly developed a clear sense of purpose while broadening his horizons in various positions before law school. His work included conducting anthropology research in Cambodia on a Fulbright and spending three years at Massachusetts General Hospital helping low-income and immigrant patients navigate social services and the hospital system.
A first-generation American and college student interested in the intersection of technology, healthcare, and employee and consumer rights, Ly is committed to advancing economic and social justice during and after his time at Berkeley Law. He has served as diversity chair for the school’s Plaintiffs’ Law Association, notes editor for the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, senior submissions editor for the Berkeley Journal of International Law, and pro bono student leader of the Queer Justice Project.
Last summer, Ly advocated for LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers as an Equal Justice America Fellow intern at Oasis Legal Services. Below, he describes his current summer work with the plaintiff-side employment firm Bryan Schwartz Law, P.C., gained through a fellowship from the Foundation for Advocacy, Inclusion & Resources.
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My path to law school was eclectic — spanning forays into academia, where I conducted research on refugees and kinship, and public health, where I helped low-income and marginalized patients. Throughout my time at Berkeley, I have gravitated towards opportunities that allowed me to expand the arsenal of tools that lawyers have at their disposal to make the world a little bit more equitable.
This summer, I am expanding the purview of my skills to employment law. Bryan Schwartz Law is a plaintiff-side employment law boutique that handles both individual and class action claims. The firm handles matters ranging from wage and hour violations to whistleblower and federal employees’ rights.
At the firm, I’ve had the opportunity to work on antidiscrimination cases, tying employment law to my passion for civil rights and economic justice. Being at a smaller firm means that I have — since day one — been involved in substantive work, from writing discovery requests, helping draft complaints, and writing motions.
Like with most work, the work of a law clerk ebbs and flows, with lulls and crescendos. A week reviewing discovery can be followed by one filled with depositions and motions practice.
But even the supposed mundane can be interesting — an email chain and policy documents tell a story about a human drama. Your client could be someone who spent decades of their lives building relationships in the workplace, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them when they have to take maternity leave.
Despite our penchant to set up boundaries between work and life, the reality is that we bring ourselves to everywhere we work and open ourselves up to others. Employment law exists because of the recognition that even in a setting where an employee is ostensibly under the control of the employer, the employee is nonetheless a person with dignity.
Meaningful mentorship
Being at a smaller firm where I am the only summer law clerk is also an opportunity for mentorship. I can’t emphasize enough how much I’ve learned through the guidance of my supervising attorney, Renato Flores.
From the beginning, he has not only assigned me projects, but took the time and care to walk me through why I was doing them. When we go to a deposition, he steers my attention to the style of the attorney conducting it. So much of lawyering is an art, and we all have to learn how we best like to hold a brush to a canvas.
In a case, how we ask questions, how we talk to opposing counsel, and how we tell stories to the judge and jury are all our own style, absorbed piecemeal through watching others and trying ourselves. I am reminded of how lawyers were once trained under apprenticeships, rather than in schools.
In a way, I don’t think I could have foreseen where I am today. Like many of the clients the firm has taken, my parents were factory workers. As I sit at a desk, typing away at a legal research question, I am reminded that much of the labor that sustains the world is physically taxing. So many people give their bodies and the best years of their lives to work, sometimes only to be left with the callouses on their fingers and ache in their backs.
Even when the companies that hire them do wrong by workers, very few of those workers can sustain the will to fight back after a long shift. So as I look into case law and try to find analogous facts, I think about how the cases that do make it to trial are just some of the battles in a bigger war.
It has been an interesting time to do employment law this summer, when we just had the world’s first trillionaire. I think what I’ll take away most is that the work I hope to do in the future as a plaintiff-side attorney and litigator is but a small part of a broader struggle to hold Goliath accountable.