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Welcome to Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, the podcast where we elevate the stories of the plaintiffs' bar and dive into the key trends shaping the civil justice system today. I'm your host, Ray DeLorenzi, and in each episode we'll bring you insightful interviews with leading attorneys, expert perspectives, and in-depth discussions on the issues that matter most. Now, let's jump in.
[Cold open] Nicole Smith: The first thing is realizing as a new lawyer that the older lawyers don't know everything either. They don't know all the answers to all the questions — that's why they're asking you to do the research on whatever you're researching. An older attorney is going to have more experience, and eventually you get there, but they also don't know everything, and I think that can be very reassuring to someone.
Ray: Hey everyone, welcome to a new episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR. I'm your host, Ray DeLorenzi, and today I'm honored to be joined by Nicole Smith, a partner with Langdon & Emison. She helps manage the firm's mass tort practice and has a really interesting background — starting as a law clerk at the firm, now becoming a partner there. So with that, Nicole, thanks so much for joining the podcast today.
Nicole: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Ray: So you say that now. Let's see how you feel by the end of this.
Nicole: You know, maybe so — hopefully all goes well.
Ray: So your Missouri Lawyer's profile mentions that you were inspired at age 11 to pursue a legal career after acting in a trial of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in school — which seems like an odd thing as an 11-year-old to be acting out in school. I have questions related to that. I always like how people grew up and whether that influenced them in becoming a lawyer. So why don't you tell me a little bit about that?
Nicole: Yeah, so I was in 6th or 7th grade — I'm pretty sure it was 6th grade and that I was 11. We learned about the Lindbergh kidnapping as part of, I'm pretty sure, a language arts class. I was thinking about this yesterday, and I was like, this doesn't quite add up, but I'm pretty sure it's true — I know I did this in school around that age.
We learned about the kidnapping, and then at the end of it we had a mock trial where people were witnesses and attorneys and different things. I had always enjoyed mysteries. I loved Nancy Drew and Harry Potter and things like that. And I think for me it was the first time I really saw: well, what happens after the mystery is solved? How do people get justice? And then of course there are the arguments that there wasn't enough evidence to convict the defendant, so thinking about it from that perspective. That really sparked my interest in the law. I was interested in a lot of things after that, but that's the first time I really understood the justice system.
Ray: Any lawyers in your family, or anyone you could look to as, "oh, this is what a lawyer is"?
Nicole: No. I am the first person in my family to graduate from college. My parents did very well, but I'm the first to graduate from college. I grew up in a small town of about 4,500 people, and we were the county seat. So I did have friends whose parents were lawyers, and that was always something in my mind as a potential profession because I saw that a lot in our community. But yeah, that was probably how it was exposed.
Ray: So you went to William Jewell College, and after graduation you did a quick turn to law school. Was there a moment in undergrad where you said, "this is the path, I'm doing this," or do you feel like you kind of stumbled into it?
Nicole: I've always kind of been a jack-of-all-trades person. I love learning. I had a lot of different ideas about what I wanted to do — I applied to architecture school, to journalism school, I was a teaching major for a short time. So I tried it all out. I was actually doing student teaching and felt like I just couldn't really see myself teaching the same subject again and again every year, because I do like learning. I thought being a lawyer would be something I could pursue where I felt like I was helping people, but also challenged and learning things a lot of the time.
Ray: When you went to law school, did you have a sense of what type of law you wanted to practice?
Nicole: Yes. At that time I wanted to be either a prosecutor or a guardian ad litem specifically for children — probably more so the guardian ad litem part. Much to my dismay, I really didn't realize anything about the different types of law, honestly, and it's really hard to pay back your law school student loans being a guardian ad litem. So that kind of went out the window.
I figured out I did not really like criminal law — it just felt very overwhelming to me to have someone's life in my hands, whether from the prosecution side or the defense side. I actually did a brief clerkship in a Kansas court where I worked on some criminal opinions, and I very quickly was like, this is not for me. So I actually graduated from William Jewell a semester early, and I had worked at a mass torts firm. I ended up going back there in law school, and then clerking at Langdon & Emison. So I kind of stumbled into plaintiff's litigation that way.
Ray: When you had your first clerkship at a plaintiff's firm, going into it, what were your expectations? Were you already gravitating toward that, or was it more "let me dabble in this and see"? Where was your head at the time?
Nicole: So my first clerkship was actually at a law firm I'd worked for about nine months between undergrad and law school. It was a complete accident. I knew I wanted to go to law school at that point, and I just applied to a bunch of law firms for legal assistant positions, and that just happened to be where I got hired. Once I was doing the work, I really liked it — I liked feeling like I was helping people. I was working on a lot of settlement brochures, and I loved telling people's stories. So that was really how I got into plaintiff's litigation, just by accident. And then during law school I went back there for my first clerkship.
Ray: Got it. Tell me about clerking at Langdon & Emison, what made you want to have a career there, and also why you think they wanted you to have a career there.
Nicole: There's a lot to that story. I had been doing mass torts plaintiff's litigation, and I wanted to do something a little bit more focused on single clients or single events instead of mass torts. At the time, that was primarily what Langdon & Emison was doing. Langdon & Emison was started in the town that I grew up in, so I had a little bit of a personal connection — that's usually helpful.
I did an interview with them and ended up getting hired. I really loved the work I was doing on the single-event cases, and I wanted to come back after law school, but they didn't hire new grads at the time. So I actually ended up going to work for another attorney who had mentored me over the years and who I had worked for in high school and college, and started my career there.
Ray: Why don't you tell me a bit about your practice today and what you focus on at the firm?
Nicole: Yeah, so I'm actually a little bit in a transition period right now. Langdon & Emison did end up getting into mass torts, and that was the practice area I focused on for the last eight years or so. But we are finding it harder and harder to keep up with the new firms that are specializing in that now. So we're scaling back to more leadership work in those roles. I've started to work on single-event cases again as well — I've helped out with single-event cases over the years, especially with a research-and-writing project or something like that, but now I'm taking on more of those cases. So it's been a really exciting time for me.
Ray: Let's talk about the mass tort world. As you said, there are firms that specialize in it — they collect a lot of cases — and then you have firms that, of course, have cases but are looking to lead them. You've seen both sides of that coin. How do you view the future of mass torts and where the plaintiffs' bar is trending?
Nicole: Oh gosh, I have seen both sides of that coin. I'm personally someone who probably does well with mass torts because I'm very organized — I implemented a lot of trainings and SOPs and things, and I really enjoy more of that business side of practicing law that a lot of lawyers really don't like to do. But I also really like to treat each case, you know, give it the fullest attention, and I feel like that's hard to do in mass torts sometimes.
There are bigger law firms coming up with systems to be able to handle a lot of cases, and I think that's great because you can help a lot of people that way. But we're focusing more on leadership opportunities — working on experts, depositions, briefing that affects the whole litigation. I think the trend is going to be that the majority of mass tort cases are handled by firms specializing in that, and leadership will probably continue to be a hybrid of attorneys from both types of firms.
Ray: You mentioned that when you have so many clients, it's difficult to know them on a one-on-one basis. I sort of had you walk into that, because I want to talk about a law review article you wrote about early vetting. Do you believe that a firm having a lot of cases to manage supports the idea that early vetting may be a good thing? Or do you feel like those things really have nothing to do with each other?
Nicole: So my opinion is that you should be vetting your cases when you're taking them. My issue with the early-vetting rules that have been proposed, and the census rules that have been proposed, is that the information is really no different than what's asked for in a plaintiff fact sheet or plaintiff profile form. At that point you're just — I mean, it's really just creating extra work. You're entering the same information 10 different times in response to 10 different things. It's all the same basic case information that we should be getting anyway.
Ray: What inspired you to write the article? And we'll make sure in the show notes to include a link to it, because it's a hot topic. Hopefully I haven't stepped on too many toes with that one.
Nicole: Yeah, so I was actually working with another attorney at the time. Her name's Tricia Campbell — she's at Wagstaff & Cartmell now, but she used to be at Langdon & Emison. She was asked to write the article and asked me if I'd be interested in co-authoring it with her and helping her out. That's how I got involved. I feel like my career has been a lot of being in the right place at the right time, and connections kind of snowball over the years. But yeah, Tricia got me involved in that, and we did both have similar opinions on it, so it made it really easy to write. I know it is still a little bit controversial — someone did ask me about it probably six months or so ago.
Ray: Got it — in a good or bad way? The way you made it sound, it was like they were criticizing you. That's okay. I'm curious, were they on the plaintiff side or the defense side?
Nicole: Plaintiff side, more generally. But they thought the census was a good idea, which is — I don't know — kind of surprising to me.
Ray: You mentioned earlier how a lot of lawyers are not big on practicing the business of law — they can be great lawyers, but you also have to run a law firm like a business, and it seems like that's something you gravitate more toward. What has that looked like at a firm like Langdon & Emison, which has been around for many years but obviously with technology evolving? What role have you played in looking more at the business side?
Nicole: Yeah, so I'd say my business role has really been more limited to the mass tort part of our firm, which is honestly kind of a smaller practice area for us. But of course, working on revenue projections and trying to analyze if a mass tort is going to be profitable in the long run and is worth getting into. As lawyers, we always want to help people, and it can be very exciting whenever a new case comes along, but at the end of the day you are still a business, so you're trying to figure out if it's something you can pursue and actually come out on the upside. A lot of cases have been kicked on Daubert in the mass tort world lately, so that's been really hard — although the Tylenol cases were just revived, so that is very exciting.
So there are the revenue projections, and then of course the personnel and the hiring and all that — making sure your team is working together well. We always try to play to people's strengths: some people are great on the phone, other people are better at more detail-oriented discovery, that sort of thing. I've really enjoyed the operations part of it, and I've liked being exposed to that. I'm not as exposed to our operations as a whole at Langdon & Emison — I'm familiar at a surface level, but not as in-depth.
Ray: Law schools are notorious for not teaching anything relating to running a business or operations. Have you had any mentors to say, "okay, this is how you do a revenue projection"? Or was it just, "I'm going to figure this out"?
Nicole: It was more just, "I'm going to figure this out." I feel like my brain just works that way. A lot of lawyers, they don't like math — and I actually love math, so it's kind of fun for me to have a break, I call it a break, from legal work sometimes to just do something different.
Ray: Law school does not teach you anything about running a law firm. I think a lot of lawyers don't realize until later in their career that running a law firm is like running a business, and you do have to learn marketing and budgeting and all those things. I mean, I guess you don't have to, but it really helps with your success if you're aware of those things.
The other thing I feel like law school doesn't teach well — and obviously there are a lot of lawyers who have figured it out — is that you learn a lot about research and writing in law school, but I don't feel like you learn a lot about actually practicing law. So those first few years of your career are really kind of law school 2.0, and you're just stumbling around trying to figure it out. I want to come back to that point in a second. But I wanted to ask you about the business side: have you ever had to be the bearer of bad news — like there's a lawyer who really wants to pursue a certain mass tort, and you look at it and say the math doesn't math? Or vice versa — have you seen one where you're like, "we can make an impact here," and you need to sell it accordingly?
Nicole: I feel like I've been on both sides of that. I do remember I recommended that we should get into a litigation that did not work out very well. I was younger and did not know the right questions to ask at the time — the medical device at issue had a very, very small market share. It was almost impossible to find cases, and it just didn't really ever go anywhere. Whenever I saw it, I thought it was a great case as far as the device being defective and the failures and things, but it was just very hard to find cases.
I feel like we've also been on the other side. I'm probably more conservative, so there are a lot of cases we've gotten into that I did not think we should get into — and honestly, it's been probably 50-50 as far as success on those. So I do tend to be pretty conservative. And I prefer medical device cases over pharmaceutical cases, just because I think they're easier on a mass tort scale. Pharmaceutical cases can get so hard when you're asking clients about medication they've taken for years, especially if it's available over-the-counter and not just prescription — and you've got the name-brand medications and the generic medications, and they can just get very complicated.
Ray: So does that intersect with the idea of learning about the law versus learning how to practice law? I assume these are some of the things they don't really cover very well in law school.
Nicole: Oh gosh, yeah — no, they don't cover anything like that in law school. You just have to figure it out: attend whatever webinars and conferences you can, make friends, learn from other people, and eventually it finally starts clicking into place. I do think a lot of lawyers end up in a niche or a specific practice area, and then you can really get more experience with that. I like to tell people who aren't lawyers — they come to me with legal questions and I'm just like, it's like you're asking a hand doctor about a cardiology issue.
Ray: I know you're very involved in the local legal community. You're a graduate of the KCMBA Bar Leadership Academy, and you belong to the AWL of Greater Kansas City. You talked about learning to be a lawyer, and it seems like it's something you care about — helping other lawyers coming up learn how to be lawyers. Tell me a little bit about that work you've done.
Nicole: Yes, I love mentoring new lawyers. I think it honestly comes from feeling like the first few years were very hard for me, and wanting to help other people navigate through that. Currently I'm on the board of the Association for Women Lawyers in Kansas City, and I'm the newsletter chair, so we get to spotlight different members — that's been a nice way to talk to younger attorneys on a regular basis and get to know a little bit more about them.
I'm also on the Missouri Bar's Well-Being and the Profession Committee, and something we've recently talked about is potentially doing some kind of mentorship program. There's a lot of logistics to figure out to see if that would actually work out, but AWL in Kansas City does a fantastic mentorship program that I was part of starting in 2020 as a mentee, and I'm sure in the future I'll also be a mentor. I've done other kinds of informal mentorship things through AWL and the law schools, too.
Ray: I know you recently spoke at the Society of Women Trial Lawyers — my colleague Stephanie Wolf is on the board — and the topic was mom guilt, the internal conflict. If you're comfortable, I'd be curious what was the genesis of that and what you shared with the audience?
Nicole: Yeah, I feel like I probably should have come up with a different title, because we covered a lot of things other than just mom guilt. But really, we talked a lot about work-life balance and the demands of being a lawyer and trying to balance that with also being a parent — or, you know, you don't have to be a parent for this to be applicable. People have parents, family, friends, or just a life and other things they want to do.
I know that can be really hard sometimes, because the work we're doing feels very important — a lot of times you're going to impact someone's life greatly, depending on how successful the litigation you're working on is. There are deadlines that a lot of times you're not in control of, which can be really frustrating whenever it messes up your plans. One of my biggest pieces of advice — and I'm sure there are probably attorneys or law firms who don't appreciate this — is that I generally try to keep my work to our office hours. My to-do list is so long, and it will never be done, ever, until I'm done practicing law. So unless I'm working on something where a motion is due tomorrow or in a few days and we are not where we need to be and I really need to keep working, I usually go home at 5 or 5:30, and I focus on spending the rest of the night with my family. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old and a 14-month-old, and whenever I don't do that, I feel like I just don't see them, and I'm not okay with that.
Ray: Yeah, those are ages when you're in it.
Nicole: So I'm very tired most of the time.
Ray: When young lawyers are struggling professionally — unrelated to potentially being a parent or whatnot — what's the immediate question you ask, or advice you give, that you wish you'd had when you were a young lawyer?
Nicole: Oh gosh, that is a good question. There are a couple of things that come to mind. I think the first thing is realizing, as a new lawyer, that the older lawyers don't know everything either. They don't know all the answers to all the questions — that's why they're asking you to do the research on whatever you're researching. I'm not going to say you're equal — you aren't equal, obviously an older attorney is going to have more experience, and eventually you'll get there — but they also don't know everything, and I think that can be very reassuring to someone.
As far as trying to push yourself and get ahead as a young lawyer, I think just trying to think about the big picture: what is the next step in the case? What needs to happen next? What needs to happen in a couple of weeks? How is what you're working on now going to tie into that? Instead of just waiting to be told what to do, asking "should I work on this next?" — or even just saying, "I'm going to work on this next, let me know if you have different ideas." I think an older attorney really appreciates whenever you can take that initiative and relieve the burden from them. But it usually takes young attorneys a couple of years before they really feel confident doing that.
Ray: So, with that — Nicole Smith of Langdon & Emison in Kansas City, Missouri — thanks so much for joining the podcast. Really appreciate the time.
Nicole: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on today. It was great.
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