S3 E11 | Randi McGinn

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Randi McGinn:

And so, when we’re trying to create a story for the court for opening statement, we figure out what point of view is the most powerful. Is it the person who got hurt? Not necessarily. It may be the person who got hurt’s mom who got the call that we all… And you tell the story from… The call comes in that all of us dread, and they tell you someone’s been in this horrible crash.

Luke W Russell:

Welcome to Lawful Good, a show about lawyers and the trials they face inside and outside the courtroom. I’m your host, Luke W. Russell. I’m not a journalist. I’m not an attorney. I’m trained as a coach, I love human connection, and that’s what you’re about to hear. My guest today is Randi McGinn, one of America’s leading trial attorneys. Because of her dad’s position in the military, Randi moved around a lot as a kid. Although she was often jealous of her friends who had permanent homes, her experiences cultivated a unique view of the justice system and how it’s been applied to different people.

Luke W Russell:

As the oldest of four siblings, Randi proudly claims her bossiness. Growing up, her grandmother McGinn had the biggest influence on her life. And in Randi’s own words, she was a pistol who didn’t play by the rules. Randi had powerful female influences, including her mother that inspired her to fearlessly take on any challenge. In today’s episode, Randi and I talk about the intensity of grief after losing your soulmate, giving birth one day before the bar exam, and how she accidentally found her perfect career. So, Randi, can you take me back to the homes of your childhood? I know you started in California before moving to New Mexico in high school.

Randi McGinn:

My dad was in the military, so we traveled all over the place, which is both good and bad, in that you have to go to a new place every couple of years and make all new friends, which is difficult. But the upside of that, of course, is that it teaches you to be thrown into new situations and have to navigate a new situation. And so it teaches you a lot in the interim. Although I’m jealous of my friends who’ve lived in the same place for their whole life. They can to talk about who their friends were in the second grade. And so I don’t have anybody like that, because we moved over and over again every two or three years. So right before we moved to New Mexico, we were in California, and I was a Southern California beach girl for about four or five years until we moved to New Mexico.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. And I believe you said your father was in the air force. Is that right?

Randi McGinn:

Air force. That’s correct.

Luke W Russell:

Did you have much of a relationship with… I know he was pretty busy with being in the service.

Randi McGinn:

He was gone a lot. He was a pilot. The primary relationship of my life was, of course, my mother who had to wrangle five kids between the ages of… within seven years of each other. The five of us usually against her and she had to figure out a way to navigate all of that.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. And you’re the oldest, correct?

Randi McGinn:

I’m the oldest, right.

Luke W Russell:

Did you carry a weight or different responsibilities as the oldest of five?

Randi McGinn:

No, it just made me more bossy, I think. I mean, that’s the truth of it, right? Because you’re the biggest, you get to boss everybody around. We only had one boy, four girls, and so it was just that… And because we moved so much, that core group became your group of friends and people that you could rely on. That’s who we bonded with, was each other, as we moved from place to place. And that bond is still there after all these years.

Luke W Russell:

That’s really beautiful. What was your relationship like with your mother?

Randi McGinn:

She was inspirational in that she grew up at a time when women didn’t get to do the kinds of things that I’ve gotten to do in my life. And she was brilliant, and I get my brains from her. She was one of the first women to graduate with an architecture degree from Rice University, got married the day after she graduated college, and then spent the next 25 years raising us kids. And when she had only two left at home in high school, went back to work for the first time. I mean, not back to work, I mean really went to work for the first time, 25 years after her degree in architecture, went and took her licensing exams and became an architect for the army Corps of Engineers. And when my dad retired from the military, she went to work and he then followed her, as opposed to her following him.

Luke W Russell:

I love that.

Randi McGinn:

Yeah.

Luke W Russell:

What about grandparents? Did you have any of those part of your youth?

Randi McGinn:

Oh, I had all of them, had all four of them. They were terrific. My grandmother McGinn died first, but she was probably the one that had the biggest influence on my life because she was a pistol. I mean, she was just, again, a woman trapped in being a housewife, but who was just a wild woman. I can remember her as an old woman, probably the same age that I am now, or younger than I am now, because she died at 63, taking all of us kids along the beaches in Santa Barbara where she lived and coming to a fence that was blocked off because the Biltmore owned it and just taking out this pair of wire cutters, just cutting through the fence and saying, “Nobody can own a beach.”

Randi McGinn:

That was my grandmother. I mean, she was just… At one point, when she had turned 60, she was driving with my grandfather and they drove by some guy who yelled out, “Hey you old bag,” and she slammed the car into reverse and tried to back over the guy, and my grandfather had to stop her. I mean, that’s the kind of person she was. She was really a lot of fun, and again, didn’t get to do all the things that I’ve gotten to do. And I feel like my life has been doing the kinds of things that my grandmothers would’ve loved to do, and my mother would’ve loved to do from the get go, as opposed to waiting for 25 years.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. It’s interesting too, because you still had to fight your way to the table in your years. And so it’s interesting to look back and see how, even though they weren’t maybe in the same roles that you would end up occupying, they were still setting that powerful female example for you to go out and take life by the horns.

Randi McGinn:

Right, although they just didn’t get the chance. And they could have done extraordinary things. Both of my grandmothers could have done extraordinary things, but were sort of confined to being a housewife. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s a choice that people can make, but they had so much more to offer. They were both just really extraordinary women and just weren’t allowed to be their full selves. And so, I feel lucky every day that I get to do what I get to do.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Now, when you said the story of your grandmother deciding to try to back up over this guy, were you in the car?

Randi McGinn:

No, no, no. My grandfather told me about my grandmother. But she was always doing stuff like that. That’s it. I mean, she was just… That’s the kind of stuff she was doing, which was not acceptable. When she was always getting in trouble for was not acceptable. I mean, great story. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was a child and her grandmother, there were three kids, her grandmother only liked the oldest boy, so she took my grandmother and her youngest brother and put them in an orphanage, and kept the oldest boy.

Randi McGinn:

And finally, her grandmother’s husband, step grandfather said, “You can’t leave those kids in the orphanage,” and they brought him out. But she was miserable to my grandmother her whole life, and told her it’s too bad that she wasn’t pretty like her mom, but that she looked like her dad. I mean, horrible stuff, through her whole life. So when she turned 17, and some guy asked her to marry him, she said yes. And the guy said, “Okay, well I’m going to go off to Florida and I’m going to work and I’m going to make enough money and then I’ll send for you on the train.”

Randi McGinn:

So he was gone for a year and he sends her a ticket for her and her brother to come down to Florida to get married, and she and her brother took the two tickets and they’d never been anywhere really, and they were on their way from Philadelphia down to Florida, got off the train in Washington D.C. and said, “We’ve never seen Washington. This will be our one chance,” and then stayed in a hotel and spent all the money that the guy had sent them. And so they had to then try to hitchhike. They didn’t have any money to get back on the train. They had to cash in their train ticket to pay the hotel bill, had to hitchhike, which was unheard of. So she dressed up like a boy, and she and her brother were hitchhiking, and that’s where she met my grandfather, was hitchhiking. And she never made it to the wedding and she married my grandfather. That’s one of my grandmothers.

Luke W Russell:

Oh my goodness.

Randi McGinn:

I come for a long line of rebels and people who chafe against the restrictions that society puts on them.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Do you have any stories or memories of how your mother was showing up in that capacity too?

Randi McGinn:

My mother was more passive. My mother just quietly… I think her protest was… I mean she hated housework and she hated cooking. She just hated it. And the way she dealt with it is, when we were kids, we just had a meal every day of the week. So Monday would be spaghetti night, Tuesday would be taco night. Wednesday was the horrible tuna casserole night. She didn’t revel in really how to cook and doing all this. She hated every minute of it. I just bided her time till we were grown, for 25 years, and then went to work. I mean, she was more quiet about her rebellion. And I think my mom’s more of a rule follower than my grandmother was.

Luke W Russell:

What did you see shift in her when she went off to work? Did she maybe seem to come into more of her own or either joy or passion?

Randi McGinn:

She just loved it. It coincided with the advent of computers, her going back to work, and she loved computers. Had she been born now, she would’ve been some big techie, and probably working in one of the big tech companies because she loved computers so much and loved figuring things out. Society is cruel to smart women. My mom got by by hiding her intelligence under a bushel barrel until all of us were out of the house, and then cut loose when she was in her late forties, early fifties. I mean, that’s when she went back to work. I’ve learned from watching those lessons, watching my grandmother, watching my mom and saying, “I’m not keeping this under a bushel barrel.” Although, I’ll tell you, when I was younger, my mom said to me that I shouldn’t let guys know how smart I was because they wouldn’t go out with me.

Randi McGinn:

And I never listened to my mom. My mom always said stuff like that. She wanted me to learn to play tennis because I could meet boys. She was not really successful with boys. When we learn tennis so I could meet boys, and I’ll never forget the first time I came back and just beat my boyfriend on the tennis court, and she said, “You’re not supposed to beat them. You’re not supposed to beat them.” And I said, “I’m sorry. I love beating them. And I’m going to find a job where I can beat the boys all the time.”

Luke W Russell:

Yes. I love that.

Randi McGinn:

There you go.

Luke W Russell:

Are we talking high school at this point?

Randi McGinn:

High school.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Yeah. Did you have any school subjects that you got particularly excited about or that you excelled in?

Randi McGinn:

Journalism. And that was my undergraduate degree, was in journalism. I really liked writing and storytelling, and did that by the way, from a young age, when I was the oldest of the five of us. This was like the sixties, and so they would have these cocktail parties that you see on Mad Men, and my job would be to take my three sisters and my brother into the other room and keep them quiet. So I would keep them quiet by making up stories and doing storytelling in this back room where I was telling them stories, usually where they were in the stories somehow. And that’s how I got started telling stories. Then just have always loved reading and have been a student of storytelling my whole life. And isn’t being a trial lawyer storytelling on steroids?

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Yeah. And when you weren’t telling stories and you weren’t doing schoolwork, what were you doing other than things like stealing stuff, like the big hamburger boy outside of A&W?

Randi McGinn:

Oh, you’ve heard about that, did you? You heard about that. That’s my wild grandmother’s streak that I had in me. I mean, the good news was… I mean, when we moved… You’ve probably heard, when we moved from California to New Mexico, to Alamogordo, New Mexico, this little tiny town in the middle of the ugliest desert in New Mexico… The most beautiful places in New Mexico, the desert by Alamogordo is not one of them, all right?

Luke W Russell:

Yes. Okay.

Randi McGinn:

So as we drove out, and this is after my freshman year at this huge high school in Southern California, by the beach, all that stuff… And our house on the edge of the air force base that didn’t have a fence. I remember opening up the sliding glass door and looking at this horrible gray caliche desert and thinking, “I should just kill myself now.” Luke, I mean, that was it. It was like, “My life is so over.” And instead, it actually was a really great thing because I could do all these mischievous things, and instead of them calling the cops, which they would’ve done if I lived in California, they would call your folks because it was such small town. So she’s stealing the giant burger boy. And we put the burger boy in our homecoming parade and then returned it. It was never any malicious stuff. It was, “What can we do? We’re bored. Let’s go steal the giant burger guy.” So there you go.

Luke W Russell:

That’s too funny. I love that. Now what about religion? Did that play a role in any of your upbringing?

Randi McGinn:

Well, religion skipped me because my mom was raised as a Christian scientist, and mom didn’t… Part of the Christian science religion is that this world isn’t real, and if you are sick, you can overcome that just by recognizing that the sickness is not real. So my mom had horrible, horrible ear infections when she was a kid and her mom would never take her to the doctor. She was in pain all the time. So my mother rejected religion completely and was an agnostic, and so we didn’t get raised with religion. And I was 13 years old, remember I’m the oldest, and my dad got sent to Vietnam, and my mom made a deal with God at that point that she would start taking us to Catholic catechism if God would bring my dad back from Vietnam. So suddenly, without having any religion for 13 years, I’m suddenly thrown into Catholic catechism classes with the nuns who didn’t like me very much because I kept asking all these… what I now look at as lawyer questions.

Randi McGinn:

So in the Catholic religion, there are venial sins. At this time, this has changed, but then it was venial sins and mortal sins. If you die with a mortal sin on your soul, you go straight to hell. If you die with a venial sin on your soul, you can go to purgatory and burn a while and then get to heaven, all right. So when the nuns were explaining all this to us, I always wanted to know where the line was between the venial sins and the mortal sin. So I’d be asking the nuns questions like, “Sister, sister, is a guy feeling you up on the outside of your clothes, is that a venial sin or a mortal sin? And when they’d answer, I say, “Well, what if he puts his in inside your clothes? Is that venial…,” because I was trying to figure out, “Okay, how close can I get?”

Randi McGinn:

So, as you might expect it, I was constantly getting thrown out of catechism class. And the one thing I remember, great story, they’re always trying to scare us into being good in catechism. They told this great story about the young Catholic girl and her Catholic boyfriend. They’d been engaged for two years. And now it was a week before their wedding. They were parking on the bottom of the hill. They went out parking and they were parked at the bottom of the hill. And the young Catholic boy says, “Well, look, we’re just going to get married next week. Why don’t we just go ahead and have sex?” Although the nuns never used the word sex. So they said, “And then she let him into the temple that was her body,” is how the nuns would put it.

Randi McGinn:

“And at that moment, the concrete truck parked at the top of the hill’s brakes failed and it rolled down and crushed them and killed them both. And they both went straight to hell.” That’s the story they would tell to make us be good. So what did I learn from that? What did I learn from that? When I would go out parking in high school, Luke, I would always say the guy, “We got to park at the top of the hill. We can’t park down here.” We got to park up there. That’s what I learned.

Luke W Russell:

We’re not having any concrete trucks roll over us.

Randi McGinn:

No. No, let’s park up there. That’s where we’re parking. So I did not… I think it’s because it happened so late that it didn’t really take, you know what I mean? But all of the rest of my family, because they were younger when they started catechism, are very religious still. And my mom became very religious. In fact, she’s a born again Christian. I think only two of them are still Catholics, but two are born again evangelical, the two youngest ones. And they kept throwing me out, Luke. How could I learn anything if I kept getting thrown of catechism class?

Luke W Russell:

Oh my goodness. That was fantastic. So, you mentioned your undergrad where you studied journalism at New Mexico state university, so at this point, you know love storytelling, was the plan to be a newspaper reporter? What were you looking for with this?

Randi McGinn:

I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and to write articles for publication nationwide. That’s what I wanted to be, and got a job with a small newspaper out of undergraduate school. Had been a sports reporter during college, and the sports editor of our little college paper. And so was going to be a writer and started sending in spec articles to national magazines, which was obvious to me, they were getting immediately rejected, that they were… nobody was reading them, just rejection, rejection, rejection. So I was talking to my uncle, who was a professor at Harvard, about, “Look, nobody will read my stuff.”

Randi McGinn:

And he said, “Well, it may sound stupid, but why should they read your stuff? You’re some punk kid.” I was like 20, sending in these articles, “But why should they read your stuff? You’re some punk kid from New Mexico without any kind of status or degree. If you would go and get an advanced degree, people would read your stuff,” he said to me. So I said, “Oh, what advanced degrees could I get when I go to med school?” Well, no, I didn’t like blood. That was not good. So of all the advanced degrees, law sounded like the easiest one, Luke. And I said, “Look.” So, I went to law school for the completely morally bankrupt reason, that I wanted people to read my stuff. And if I had a degree, they’d read my stuff. That’s why I went to law school. And by accident, complete accident, found the place I needed to be.

Randi McGinn:

And because, when I got there, “Wow,” it was storytelling. It was the stuff that I loved, except that you got to do everything. Instead of just writing it, you got to do what you kind of do as a journalist, investigate the case, get all the facts, take the steaming pile of facts, and from the steaming pile of facts, reach your hand in and pull the heart of the story out. Then you got to direct it. You got to produce it. And you got to star in it. I mean, what could be better for a storyteller than trying cases. And then, if you do it really well, the end result is, what I call, verbal alchemy, that it turns the story into justice at the end of the case. What could be better than that? What could be better than that?

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Do you remember if there was a specific moment in which you realized that the goal was no longer to be a journalist, but it was to… you really wanted to practice?

Randi McGinn:

Yes. It was a couple years in, when I was on the Moot Court Team. It was doing trial work, being able to argue and take facts and then convince somebody to do something. So it was when I got there. Because the first year I was… Because I was there on suspicious circumstances anyway, I wasn’t like everybody else who had, wanted to be a lawyer since they were a little kid or blah, blah, blah. My dad was a lawyer. I always felt kind of like an imposter. The Socratic method was very painful to me. I wanted them to tell me the answers and I’ll regurgitate it for you on the exam, which is undergraduate. Just tell me the answers and I’ll just memorize them and then I’ll just say it to you, now I pass.

Randi McGinn:

But that’s not how the Socratic method works. The Socratic method, you give them the answer and they change the facts somehow and now you’re completely wrong and you got to rethink it. And it just hurt my brain, even though it changed the way I thought and helped make me a good lawyer, because now you can take a problem and see all aspects of the problem. But while it was happening to me the first year, I just hated it. And I was clueless on what they wanted on the exam. They’d give you big, long essay exams, and I’ll never forget my first semester, I’m sitting in the exam, and there was some question about, this was a family law course that they made all the students take, there was a question about a gorilla.

Randi McGinn:

And I remember sitting in the exam saying, Gorilla? There are no gorillas in family law. I’m going to flunk this exam,” and just feeling for the first time I was going to flunk an exam. So here’s what happens. I write the exam up. We go, and at that point, they used to post our grades with a number on the board. And I go look at my exam for this family law class, and I have an A, but with a little asterisk next to it. What I thought that meant, Luke, was that they were challenging my exam, that I –

Luke W Russell:

Oh gosh. Yeah.

Randi McGinn:

So I just kept my head down and was just very, very quiet. Until the next semester when they called me in and said, “You wrote the highest exam in this family law class and you have to come by and get your book prized, because you would win a prize for writing the book now.”

Luke W Russell:

Oh wow. Okay.

Randi McGinn:

But wait a second. Did that make me feel better? No. I have no clue what they want. And throughout law school, when I thought I did great, I would not do so great, when I thought I did terrible, I would do great. And that did not make me feel more secure. It made me feel like I had no clue what I was doing. Interesting.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. During your time at law school, which should be around in your mid twenties when you’re wrapping this up, was this about the time when your mother would go into her work?

Randi McGinn:

Yes.

Luke W Russell:

Did that influence you at all, as you were exploring your own path into law and seeing your mom go into practicing as an architect?

Randi McGinn:

She actually went in when I was, I think, in undergraduate school, she started doing that. And it was just inspirational. Although it really was my uncle that told me that, “You get an advanced degree, so go to law school.” I can say it. So I’m one of those examples of people who are just stumbling around through life and suddenly this is where I should be. This is the place I should be. And then it worked out.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. And so you scheduled your, if I have my facts right here, you scheduled your bar exam for the same day that your daughter was due. Do I have that right?

Randi McGinn:

Well, you don’t schedule it, they just set the date of your bar exam. So you don’t have any choice over…

Luke W Russell:

Okay.

Randi McGinn:

You don’t have any choice over when you take the bar exam. They give it twice a year and you’ve got to be there on that day or else you have to wait another six months to take it. So they set the bar exam and my daughter just happened to be due the first day of the bar exam. And luckily, and she had always, always had impeccable timing, came the day before the bar exam and was born at 10 o’clock the morning of the Sunday before the three day bar exam started on Monday.

Randi McGinn:

And the good part was she… This is the only child I gave birth to. She was only a four hour labor, so she popped out, and then I said to people, “I’ve got to study.” They kept taking my books away from me in the hospital and said, “No, no, you’ve got to rest. You better…” I said, “No, no, I’ve got an exam tomorrow.” And then my mom came down, or my mom was living in New Mexico at that time and came up to Albuquerque, and she watched her during the daytime while I went and took the bar exam, sitting on great big pillows.

Luke W Russell:

Oh my gosh. So you pass, and now you have a newborn, your mother’s helping out and… Did you spend roughly a year doing private practice before you go work at the district attorney’s office?

Randi McGinn:

Right. I went to work for an insurance defense firm that I had done some clerking for because I needed the money to help pay off my student loan, and then went to the DA’s office and prosecuted violent crimes for three years.

Luke W Russell:

What did you discover about yourself during that time as an assistant district attorney?

Randi McGinn:

It was very fulfilling work, but it takes a toll on you. And the very best prosecutors, and this is true of all storytellers I think, the very best lawyer storytellers feel the pain of what’s happening around them and then can translate it for the jury into what’s going on. And the problem, if you’re that kind of lawyer, as opposed to a lawyer who’s doing prosecution who can just treat people like widgets, going through the system and just process them like this without feeling anything, is that you burn out. And so, it was a very painful time because of all the pain that you’re dealing with.

Randi McGinn:

And it’s not just the pain of the victims of crime. It’s often the defendants themselves have very, very sad stories, have been abused themselves or have had terrible, terrible lives. Or kill somebody they love, get drunk and kill somebody they love. I mean, I liken it to eating pain every day. And I stopped reading the newspaper because you’d read the newspaper about some horrific crime and you’d realize it’s going to be on your desk when you go in. So I loved the job and got a lot of trial experience, learned how to try cases, but I quit the month I noticed two things.

Randi McGinn:

One, when I went into a restaurant with friends, I would fight them for the seat with my back against the wall so I could scope the room. All right. And secondly, I began asking my daughter, who at that point was 3, 4… 4 years old, “Has anybody touched you,” because I was doing sex crimes against children too. And I said, “This is making me crazy. I’m beginning to see everybody as a criminal, and this is not healthy for me.” So even though I think I did a really good job as a prosecutor, it was just eating me up by the end of it. And so I said, “I’ve got to go do something else because this is too much for me.”

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. I love that. So you start your practice, your own practice. Your daughter, I think if I am timing this, is five-ish?

Randi McGinn:

Or about five-ish, yes.

Luke W Russell:

Yep. And you have these cases that you had built up. Were you just kind of like, “I’m going to do this”? Were you optimistic, were you fearful? What was going through Randi at this time in her late twenties, early thirties, as she’s venturing off?

Randi McGinn:

So Luke, and I don’t take any credit for it, I think I was just born this way, I’m not afraid. That may be a stupid thing. Like I say, I mean, what was I doing? What was I doing, while my daughter’s five say I’m going to go out and start my own practice? But I’ve never been… And people sometimes in seminars, look, I do a lot of speaking around the country, ask me, “How do you overcome fear?” And I say, “Well, you got to ask somebody else,” because I don’t feel fear. And again, I take no credit for that.

Randi McGinn:

I think it’s much… I mean, that’s not a courageous thing. I mean, courage is when you feel fear and you do it anyway. I have just put my head down and believed I could do stuff and not been afraid always. And it was just how I was born, so was not afraid. I just said, “Well, I’m just going to do this.” That’s why, when the bank lady said, “No, I’m not giving you money,” I just found a new bank. Well, forget that. I’m just going to go do this. And luckily it worked out. I mean, it could have been a horrible story. It could have been… If the right cases hadn’t come in, we could have starved, all that kind of stuff. But it didn’t. It worked out really well.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Your law firm and your reputation, they’ve grown over the years. How have you changed with the practice as it’s grown and shifted?

Randi McGinn:

Have I changed?

Luke W Russell:

Ooh, I like that question.

Randi McGinn:

Have I changed? I think I’m basically the same person, but I have a greater appreciation for the people around me. I mean, I have only been able to do what I’ve done because of my extraordinary partners, law firms. And my daughter who has forgiven me for missing things over the years and for not baking all the baked goods like the stay at home moms did, but just going and buying food, snack, that we just go buy it from the store.

Luke W Russell:

Yep. Yep.

Randi McGinn:

And so, I wasn’t the great stay at home mom and she’s forgiven me that, and hopefully, has been an inspiration to her too in becoming an architect and doing her own thing, because it’s really hard. And she’s there now. She’s got two little kids, my two grandsons, and is trying to put together her own architecture practice. What people don’t know is, when Heather was little and I was at the DA’s office, I was getting no sleep. I mean, the person that you end up shorting in those times, I mean, you’re always shorting somebody, you feel like you’re not giving enough to your job and you feel guilty about that. You feel like you’re not giving enough to your kid, and you’re feel guilty about that. If you’ve got somebody you’re dating, you’re not given enough time for them.

Randi McGinn:

But the truth is, the person you short the most is yourself, in those situations, and women who carry the world on their backs, short themselves a lot. And so, at that time period, I would, because there wasn’t remote working back then, so when I was at the DA’s office, I’d tell the judge I got to go pick her up at five. I’d bring her home, feed her dinner, give her her bath, read her a story, put her to bed, have a babysitter come in about eight o’clock or nine o’clock. I would go back to work and I’d work from eight or nine until two or three in the morning, come back, get three or four hours sleep, and be there to wake up at feed her breakfast.

Randi McGinn:

So I’m surprised I can remember anything about that time, Luke, quite frankly, because I was not getting much sleep. And by the way, women all across the country do that every single day without any kind of credit at all, particularly women who are working two jobs and don’t have any help or babysitters or any of that kind of stuff. So it was a really difficult time but worth doing.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Would you describe yourself as a fighter?

Randi McGinn:

Yep. Probably worrier more. For other people… I’m better at fighting for other people than fighting for myself, I think.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Randi McGinn:

And so, that’s how I see my role, is that somebody hires me as their champion and I go into battle for them, you see. That’s what being a trial lawyer is all about. And that’s my skillset now.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Running a law firm requires so many skills not taught in law school. I know you mentioned your law partners with great appreciation earlier. Did you have any different mentors along the way who helped you just figure out… because you’re not only having to figure out how to be a great trial lawyer, you’re also having to… your firm’s growing over time. Were there people along the way who supported you in that?

Randi McGinn:

So the answer is no, because there weren’t any women trial lawyers. All right. I had to figure it out on my own. One of the things that helped was, early on, I began teaching other people, and because there were so few women role models for me, begin going out to try to help other women become trial lawyers. And when you teach, you have to figure out what it is you’re doing to be able to tell it to somebody else. So that when my practice of law pride progressed by leaps and bounds is when I had to teach other people what I was doing, because I was just doing it organically. And then you have to figure out, “What did I do that worked and what did I do that didn’t work? And now how do I tell that and teach that to somebody else?”

Randi McGinn:

So, probably the thing that made me the best trial lawyer was teaching other people what it is I thought I was doing. And then just trying a lot of cases. How do you learn to be a good trial lawyer? You try a lot of cases. And then, the recognition that you can’t do it all by yourself, even though I’ve been doing it all by myself for a long time. The thing that my partners gave me was the team and the… not even a team, it’s really more like a family at my office. And because my three partners are women, it worked out really well because we understood what each of us were going through. It’s just worked out where everybody had their kids sort of staggered, so when one of them had their kids, the rest of the group then came in and took over their cases while they were home with their kids.

Randi McGinn:

And it’s just worked out where nobody had kids at the same time. We didn’t plan that. That’s how it worked out. And you can bring your kids to the office. Everybody understands that. And we recognize that family comes first, and so when somebody says, “I’ve got to go to this family thing,” everybody steps up and covers for everybody else. It’s a remarkable situation to be in. And that situation then also gave me something that I didn’t have before, which is people that have your back. And you have their back always. That has made all the difference in my life.

Luke W Russell:

Now, can you tell me about the women’s empowerment art in your office?

Randi McGinn:

Oh, we do have a bunch of that. Well, so I like art because it’s one of the skills I don’t have. I can’t draw for beans. And I chalk it up to you never know how people are going to influence your life. I’ll tell you of the bad influence on my life. I remember being in kindergarten and overhearing the kindergarten teacher tell my mother that I was the worst colorer she’d ever seen because I wouldn’t stay within the lines, which also was a description of my personality by the way. But I heard that and I said, “Okay, I can’t do art.” So, from that moment forward, I can’t do art. But I really admire people who can, and so that’s what I spend my money on, is buying… supporting artists and finding images and imagery that speaks to me. And all around our firm is all kinds of women empowerment kind of art. So it’s great to go into work every day, because there is all this support, even on the walls of what it is that we’re doing.

Luke W Russell:

Storytelling, you mentioned earlier, you started telling stories to your siblings growing up and you really fell in love with it, and then that’s like… You went to journalism school, you go to law school and you realize it’s all about stories. You go into the courtroom, it’s all about stories. What makes for a great story?

Randi McGinn:

Well, it has to have a hero or a shero. It has to have a great villain, and it can be told in a myriad of ways, Luke. And so, when we have cases and we focus group them, we will put together different ways to tell the story, to see which is most effective. So you can tell it in different time sequences. You can tell a story from the beginning chronologically to the end, that’s not usually the most effective, and you can sometimes pick in the middle or tell it from the end and then go back and tell what happened and how this horrible thing happened. You can tell it from different points of view. And so when we’re trying to create a story for the court for opening statement, we figure out what point of view is the most powerful?

Randi McGinn:

Is it the person who got hurt? Not necessarily. It may be the person who got hurt’s mom who got the call that we all… and you tell the story from, “The call comes in that all of us dread and they tell you someone’s been in this horrible crash.” Or one of the favorite ways we told the story was that from the point of view of the insurance adjuster, in this case where our guy had just been driving down the freeway in his new Cadillac and this truck in front of him was throwing off debris and he tried to get away from it and ended up rolling his car because of the debris dropping truck, and made a claim to his own insurance company because the truck drove on. And the insurance adjuster… So here’s how that we told that story.

Randi McGinn:

It’s Christmas Eve, December 24th… and by the way, somebody else had made this claim, sent in a claim to the insurance in February, now it’s December 24th… while everybody else is hanging up their stockings and lighting the fire and wrapping the presents. The insurance adjuster, sitting in front of his computer, wearing I think those gloves with the holes in it, says he has one last chance to ruin somebody’s day. And he writes up his letter, denying coverage of the insurance claim. Now that’s a great way to tell a story, from his point of view. What an asshole, Luke. I mean, that’s just it. So you look for what’s the best way to tell the story. Good lawyers become students of storytelling, so when they see a movie that they like, or they read a book that they like, you need to break down, “How did they tell the story? What were the parts that were most effective? How can I take that and use that in the courtroom?”

Randi McGinn:

And so, that’s what I do. So I think there’s no one way to tell a story. There’s all kinds of ways. The other thing, the other really great storytelling device, is the two track storytelling, which is the Jaws movie, or the music, dun dun dun dun… This little person come running into the water, dun dun dun dun dun dun, and then there’s splashing around and dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, you see the fin, dun, dun… You see that this bad thing is about to happen, and here’s your nice little person, and they’re going back and forth, back and forth between those stories. Now the jury understands why this misconduct was so bad and how it caused this, for example. And so, that’s the kind of stuff that I do, is I study all that and then try to bring it in to tell a story in the court room.

Luke W Russell:

I hear that you tell stories for the jurors in a way that puts the jurors into the story sometimes, so that they feel and understand what’s happening.

Randi McGinn:

Right.

Luke W Russell:

Talk to me about that.

Randi McGinn:

Well, that’s the best storytelling, is where you… A person will not long listen to a story that is not in some way about themselves, right?

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Randi McGinn:

That’s true of every story. The most successful movie is people can see themselves in the story. And so, let me give you an example of a start of a real live opening statement. Okay. So the most terrifying time where you were the most vulnerable, where a patient is the most vulnerable, is when they put you in that little room at the doctor’s office and they tell you to take off your clothes and they give you that robe. Sometimes it’s paper, sometimes it’s material.

Randi McGinn:

You can never figure out if you tie it in the front of your tie it in the back. And wherever where you tie it, something is exposed. So you climb up on that crinkly paper with the smell of antiseptic in your nose, and you sit there in that room by yourself, waiting for the doctor to come in and tell you the thing that you’re dreading, “Is this lump cancer? Are my headaches a result of a brain tumor?” Whatever the news is, you are at that moment more vulnerable than you ever are at any point in your life. So that was the start of a real opening, which as I’m telling you that, you’re imagining yourself in that same situation, right?

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Randi McGinn:

And what happened was, this doctor would come in and then lie to people and say, “We’ve done these tests and you need a pacemaker or you’re going to die.” And he’d often come in with the sales rep for the pacemaker company. He was putting in pacemakers into people that didn’t need them. So that’s why there are laws that say a doctor can’t take money from the pacemaker company, because we want the doctor to have a pure opinion when he comes into that room and tells you whatever the answer is.

Randi McGinn:

And this guy was getting kickbacks from the company and he was implanting pacemakers into people who didn’t need them. But the start of that was to put people in the situation so they would recognize that this guy could have done the same thing to them, some doctor could have done the same thing to them, so they’d understand all that and be there with you throughout the case. So that’s one way to do it.

Luke W Russell:

When we come back, Randi talks to us about how lawsuits are never about the money, especially if someone’s loved one has been hurt. Stay with us. I’m Luke W. Russell, and you are listening to Lawful Good.

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Luke W Russell:

When we left off, Randi was talking to us about how to be a great storyteller, particularly in the courtroom. As we continue the conversation, Randi talks to us about transformative law and what that means for the safety of society.

Luke W Russell:

You’ve described your work as sending messages through cases at times, like in the early 2000s case, so against the convenience store where you proved that they had inadequate security in a calculated way to make more money, which had resulted in, I believe, 13 killings and over 1,200 other violent incidents. When you look at taking on a case, how often are you even just looking at that special prosecution you just talked about? How often are you looking at this as you want to send a message, and how do you think about that in terms of when you’re going to take something on?

Randi McGinn:

Okay. We practice something that I like to call transformative law, that it is never just about the money in our case, it is about whether we can make a change that will keep society safer. So often we will ask not just for money, but for changes, so that somebody’s… And because I found over the years that when somebody’s loved one is killed, it’s never about the money, and they want to find some good coming out of the death of their loved one. So the way we’ve done it over… We’ve done it in different ways over the years, but the most fun way is to say to the other side, “Look, we’ll start settlement negotiations at five million dollars if you make no changes. If you make the following 10 changes, we’ll start settlement negotiations at two million dollars.” All right. Now, that instantly tells you what kind of person you’re dealing with because, and we’ve had about 40% of the cases where we make that offer take us up on the change offer.

Luke W Russell:

Wow.

Randi McGinn:

The other 60% say, “Well, if we make the change, it’s going to come out of our pocket. We like redesign our product or if we put a warning or if we change our policies or have retraining, we’re going to have to pay for it. It’s going to come out of our business. Bottom line, if you hit us for a big verdict, it’s going to come out of the insurance company’s pocket. So we’re going to say we’re not going to make a change.” And when somebody says that to you, when the company in there says that to you, now you see who they are, don’t you? And now you have no qualms about taking it to them in the courtroom and taking them for all you can. So it’s an interesting litmus test of what kind of company are you dealing with?

Randi McGinn:

And the truth is, if they were really a great company, they would’ve fixed the problem already before you ever sued them, and so many of them have done nothing by that point. I’m doing that right now in a case, now, against 7-Eleven, who… The city of West Hollywood had an ordinance that said you had to have a security guard on duty between two and six, because of all the crime that was there. And my guy got hatched in the head by somebody who was shoplifting as a result of them not having a security guard there. They still haven’t fixed it, and that’s something they should do. And because they won’t, we’re going to go to trial in January, February in California. Hopefully, the jury will make them do it.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Okay, Randi, I want to switch over to what we call a high velocity round. I’m going to ask you a series of questions that are all yes-no questions. And the only rule is you can’t only answer with just yes or no. You got to give me more than that.

Randi McGinn:

Okay. Alrighty.

Luke W Russell:

Can one ever be too optimistic?

Randi McGinn:

No, there’s more to that. I mean, no, you have to have faith in yourself and you’ve got to have faith that you can do stuff and that things are going to turn out in the end. I just think we can’t ever be too optimistic.

Luke W Russell:

Does Taco Tuesday lose its appeal after a lot of Tuesdays?

Randi McGinn:

No. I’m from New Mexico. How can you ask me that question? We can have taco every day. And by the way, when my mom would make those meals, Taco Tuesday, my favorite day when I was a kid. Taco day was great.

Luke W Russell:

Yes, I love it. Is the draft for your next book nearing completion?

Randi McGinn:

Oh, the outline is done. The outline is done, but it’s a whole different book. It’s a book about… So the last case I tried, which was a horrible case, a case where a 16 year old kid got killed underneath a semi, got trapped under a semi and burned to death. As I was preparing for that case, I found out that my husband was dying of the fatal disease ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. And so it is a story about that and how I negotiated that and what I learned from both things. So, it’s kind of a heavier case. It’s not as light as the last one that I wrote. So yeah. But I’ve got an outline of it and I’ve started writing it, although it’s taken me… My husband died two years ago. It’s taken me two years to be able to really work on it.

Luke W Russell:

Is there anything better than grandkids?

Randi McGinn:

No, there is not. There is not. And I have a bunch of them, by the way, I have all kinds of grandkids, mostly grown. I’ve got two little ones left, but I’ve got eight total and six grown ones, and… Actually, no. Nine, I’m leaving out one, so I’ve got six grown ones and then two little ones left. Six, seven, maybe it’s eight. Anyway, it’s eight or nine. I’ve got eight or nine, somewhere around there. Three, four, five boys. Five boys, three girls. That’s eight. Okay.

Luke W Russell:

Awesome. Are you a workaholic or is there a better word to describe your love for the work you do?

Randi McGinn:

Not a workaholic. I work when it’s needed, and when it’s needed, I’ll work 24 hours a day if I need to work 24 hours a day. But when I’m not working, then it’s downtime and family time and hanging out time, walk your dogs on the ditch time, that kind of stuff. So not a workaholic. I would say no.

Luke W Russell:

Would you compare yourself to a jaguar’s prowling when you’re walking around?

Randi McGinn:

Ha, somebody told you that, didn’t they? Yes. It’s how I get rid of the nervous energy. So I’m in the court room and I’m getting ready to give an opening statement and I’ve already thought about it, and I figure out what I want to say, and I can’t sit in my seat. I just need to walk around the court room while waiting for the court to come in, to get the nervous energy out, and then I’m ready to go when the court comes in. It’s like Mick Jagger. All right. So Mick Jagger, if you watch Mick Jagger, what he’s doing before the concert starts, is he’s jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping up in the air, jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping, so that when the concert starts, he hits the stage energized. So it’s kind of the same thing.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. I love that. Do people underestimate you?

Randi McGinn:

Not anymore, alas, Luke. It was a great time when they underestimated me. When I was a younger lawyer, I’d say, “I’m going to go to trial.” In my little pipsqueak voice, “I’ll just take you to trial if you don’t settle with us.” They would say, “Okay. Yeah, because you’re just pro, is that right?” But after you hit people in the nose a couple times, they stop underestimating you, unfortunately. Because that’s the most fun, when they underestimate you and then you get to go to trial and kick their butts.

Randi McGinn:

But now, alas, they can find out that… And I would love it if they would do it again. Sometimes out of state council do. And the best thing is when we get out of state council come into New Mexico, because they always think we’re stupid because we’re a little tiny state. And so we get people from, New York is great, Texas, LA, and they come in and they’re really arrogant and they can’t pronounce any of the Hispanic names here in New Mexico. And they think we’re stupid. That’s always the best. That’s the best of all because our juries hate them. And then they… Yeah, it’s brutal for them here in New Mexico.

Luke W Russell:

Would you describe yourself as down to earth?

Randi McGinn:

I don’t really know what that means. I think how I describe myself is authentic, that I just say what I think and I don’t worry about stuff and I don’t hide who I am and I don’t… I would say authentic and honest. And if that’s down to earth, then I guess I am. But why would you… All that stuff about my mom saying, “Pretend like you’re stupider than you are so the guys will go out with you,” I’ve never been that way. I’ve just been… Look, if they’re going to get scared off by how smart I am, I’d rather they get scared off right away. I don’t want to waste any time on them. If they’re going to find… That you pretend you’re stupid and then they find out you’re smart and they leave you, what advantages are there in that? So I’d rather scare them off early. I just am who I am.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Can you tell us about your bid for Congress?

Randi McGinn:

Oh, it wasn’t that fun. It was middle of the pandemic. What else can you do besides run for Congress? It was really a great learning experience. I have been involved for years in a group and felt helped found a group called Emerge New Mexico here in New Mexico, like 16 years ago, which helps recruit and train women to run for office, because there weren’t any women legislators. And it’s actually that group has transformed the face of politics in New Mexico by training all these women who are… We have now a majority woman legislature now. And most of the people in Congress, more than half of our delegation in Congress is now women because of people working their way up through Emerge New Mexico.

Randi McGinn:

And so, when Deb Holland, who was one of our big success stories, we trained her years ago in one of the first classes, the woman who was a Congress person and now is head of the Department of Interior. When she resigned I said, “Well…” One of my friends approached me and said, “Why don’t you run?” And I thought that this was… I’ve been approached a bunch other times over my career to run for office and I’ve never wanted to, but this seemed like a time when I could actually help, that my skills of being able to cross examine people might be useful in Washington in some of these investigations they’re doing now. And so for the first time in my life, I said, “Well, I think I can help. So I will run for office and see if they want me, and then I’ll go to Washington and help with some of these investigations.”

Randi McGinn:

But alas, Luke, they didn’t want me that much, so it was a weird kind of race. It wasn’t like a big primary. The party picked the candidate. And I had not been very involved in the party on a direct level, because I couldn’t because my husband was on the Supreme court, and so I couldn’t be involved in the party politics. So I think that was a detriment, but it was a great learning experience. And I met all kinds of people that I would never have met had I not run for Congress, including this group of all these people, Democrats, who have become, I think of them as the white cell warrior Democrats. Your white cells float around in your body your whole life and just live happily until some disease attacks your body.

Randi McGinn:

And then they come to the fore and they react and they fight the disease off. Well, so these people, in response to the Trump administration, who have had never been involved in politics before, got radically activated, people of all ages, old people, young people, and have formed all these groups that are doing all kinds of just incredible things. And those people were just terrific to meet and connect with and to hear all their wonderful ideas about how to make the country better and how to make the community better. Those people would be my friends for the rest of my life. I mean, they’re just… And what a great group of people. So, it was really worthwhile to do.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. You mentioned it was a good learning experience. What was maybe one of your big takeaways from that?

Randi McGinn:

Most people care. And this is not original to me, but the thing that I think about all the fighting of politics is something I read from… somebody else had come up with, about black ants and red ants that live together in harmony. Even though their colonies are together, they never fight with each other until somebody takes the red ants and the black ants and they put them in a jar and they shake it up, and then they begin attacking each other and biting each other.

Randi McGinn:

And so, rather than hate somebody for their politics, you should probably be asking, “Who’s shaking the jar and why?” That’s what I learned, that people on both sides of the aisle care very much about our community, and somebody else is shaking the jar and trying to make us hate each other. And that’s the question you should be asking rather than hating the other side, “Why do they want me to hate the other side so much?” Anyway, that’s what I learned. That’s one of the things I learned.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. So I’m curious about your perspective on an argument before the United States Supreme court right now, that argues that because of the advancements in society, women no longer face the challenges they did in past decades to participate “equally in the economic and social life of the nation,” and lawyers are arguing that this idea that there were barriers to women’s lives have largely been removed by the March of Progress.

Randi McGinn:

Well, we’ve made some progress, but women and men are still different. And to give you an example, let me ask you, Luke, what you do on a daily basis to keep from being raped?

Luke W Russell:

Oh, you actually wanted me to answer that?

Randi McGinn:

Yes.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. I probably am going to stand out from the norm on this question. From what I’ve been told, I do actually, one, check my locks at night in a pattern my wife has no concern about. I check underneath my car from a distance when I’m walking up to it. I look in the backseat of my car when I open it. Very cautious when I enter… I think restrooms are probably one of the most terrifying places on the planet.

Randi McGinn:

Well, is it because you’re worried about being raped though? Is it because you’re worried about being raped?

Luke W Russell:

Assaulted sometimes. If I’m in the public restroom, raped, yes. For me.

Randi McGinn:

Really?

Luke W Russell:

I know I’m outside the norm of that, but yes.

Randi McGinn:

You are the first person who’s ever answered that question that way, because when you ask a room full of men, “What are you doing on a daily basis to keep from being raped,” most men say, “Nothing,” or some smart ass will say, “I stay out of jail.” That’s what a smart guy will say. But the truth is, for women. If you ask women that question, they have the list that you came up with, “I check my locks. I don’t walk… I don’t run at night. I don’t wear headphones when I’m out walking because I want to be aware of who’s around me. I park my car under the light at night. I have somebody escort me out of my house.” I mean, long, long list of things. And so, for men and women, and it sounds like you’re aware of that, for men and women, it’s a different…

Randi McGinn:

Just even walking out the door is a different experience for men and women, where most men don’t think about this stuff at all, ever. Just like walking around. And so things have improved, but the truth is, I think we backslid a lot on women’s rights under the Trump administration, in particular, because here were these predatory men, including our past president, in positions of power and denigrating women all over the place and not putting women in positions of power. I mean, you look at who he appointed to all these federal judgeships. It’s all white guys, and not just men, but white guys, and very few women in his administration, very few people of color in his administration. I think we backslid. And so if anything, I think we’ve gone backwards. And of course, this fight through history is never a straight line, right?

Randi McGinn:

It’s always up and down, up and down, up and down, and you have to keep trying to bend the arc towards justice, but it doesn’t always bend towards justice. I think Martin Luther King was wrong about that. I mean, we have to keep trying to pull it that way. And by the way, we can lose this at any moment. That’s the thing people don’t see, is that all of history, from the beginning of human history, is a fight between fear and superstition and reason and science. And we’re seeing that fight play out right now. And that’s how you can have these civilizations rise to the top and then crash down, that you have the enlightenment followed by the dark ages, followed by the Renaissance, followed by boom, now we go again. So, when you look at the long arc of history, we think we’re safe and we’re going to have democracy and all this stuff forever, and that’s just not how it works. You have to keep fighting for it.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah.

Randi McGinn:

And women’s rights. The same.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Would you describe yourself as a feminist?

Randi McGinn:

Yes.

Luke W Russell:

And how do you define being a feminist?

Randi McGinn:

I would say it is the belief that women can do anything that a man can do. Even pee standing up, but it’s harder for us. It’s harder for us. They have that in Europe, you can do that too. But women can do, and should have, the opportunities, the same opportunities that men have, in every aspect of life. That just seems to make sense. That’s what equality guaranteed by our constitution, even though it was only written for men at the time, that’s what it should mean, is that everybody has… It’s not just a quality of opportunity. For those who start lower, I think our society has an obligation to help lift them up so they can look over the fence too. That for people who start down here, we need to help boost them up so they really do have an equality of opportunity.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. I can hear your passion. So many different ways about elevating women into leadership, whether that’s through Congress, whether that’s through supporting women through the teaching and mentoring. Is there ever a time in which a male leader maybe should consider stepping aside to create space?

Randi McGinn:

No. The best person should be in the office. I bet you didn’t expect that answer. I think not. I think you want the best person in office. And if that best person is a man, then you put that person in office. You look at all your choices and then you decide who’s the best. And our political system doesn’t always pick for the best, but that’s the ideal, that you… And if you think somebody, a guy, has the experience that would make him a good leader in that position, then you put him in, and if it’s a woman, then you put the woman in too, and you don’t care that some guy has lots of money or any of that kind of stuff. You put her in too. That’s happening. And by the way, the thing is, women haven’t gotten a chance to even be in the race.

Randi McGinn:

And that’s why Emerge New Mexico. And that’s why promoting women and helping encourage women to run for office, is they just never… Men and women are different in that, if you ask any guy, like the taxi cab driver, “You think you could be president?” He says, “Yes, of course I could be president.” You ask a woman, even a very high powered woman, this is how Emerge got formed, you ask a high powered woman, “Could you run for school board?” And they say, “Oh gosh, I don’t know anything about running for office. I’d have to learn how to fundraise. And I don’t know where I’d get the votes.”

Randi McGinn:

So why Emerge was formed, was to… because it takes asking women like 10 times before they’ll do it. To have a group of people who are going out finding women and saying, “We think you can do this.” And when they say, “Oh, I don’t know how to do all this fundraising,” that this group then over seven months trains them how to do all that, how to do fundraising, how to give speeches, how to do all this stuff. So by the end of it, they don’t have any excuse not to run for office. And it’s been remarkably successful though. It’s been really…

Luke W Russell:

I love that. Yeah.

Randi McGinn:

We’ve remade the political landscape in New Mexico as a result of that group.

Luke W Russell:

Your daughter is half Mexican. As a mother, what did you discover about yourself in raising a multiracial child?

Randi McGinn:

You love them just the same, first of all, Luke. And they are the most beautiful children. Multiracial children are the most beautiful children. But I’ve felt discrimination through her that I didn’t know, that we don’t recognize our white privilege until your kid is being discriminated against. And the only reason why is because of their color of their skin. And by the way, she looks exactly like me, only everything brown, so brown eyes, brown hair. I mean, she’s me, only brown everything. And after 9/11, she began calling me, she was I think in high school doing a lot of traveling, high school or college, started calling me from airports saying that she had been randomly selected for the screening among all of her friends. She’d be with her whole class, and over and over and over again… In the first couple times that happened, you say, “Oh, it must be really be random,” but the 25th time it happens, you say, “Okay, I get it. I get it.”

Randi McGinn:

And people can’t tell what Heather is. They can’t tell if she’s Mexican, or some people think she’s Middle Eastern, and that’s why she kept getting pulled out for these things. As a result of it, she’s also gotten a very interesting insight into racism because people don’t know that she’s Mexican and will be saying things about Mexicans. And she’ll let them just go on and on and on and say, “Well, I’m Mexican.” Some people reveal themselves to her. And she shared all that with me, and it makes me much more protective and much more understanding of what my clients go through, my Hispanic clients, my African American clients, my Native American clients, and how they’re perceived differently by juries and just by the world, and how much more difficult it is for them sometimes.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Your daughter, when she reflect on her childhood, she remembers you standing up for her and speaking out when others would make racist comments.

Randi McGinn:

Yeah, because even though you can’t change the racist, I don’t think, Luke, like if somebody uses the N word, for example, you aren’t going to change them probably if they’re that low. But you can set an example for everybody around you, that it’s not acceptable. And so, it was important for me to set an example for her that this is not okay, and for anybody else who was in the vicinity to say, “It’s not okay, and I’m not going to tolerate this. And if you’re going to keep talking like this, we’re going to leave.” It’s not all right. It’s not okay. And so, you try to set an example and try to set an example of what you do when people say stuff like that. You can’t let stuff like that go because then people think it’s acceptable.

Luke W Russell:

So as you mentioned, your husband, he was a Supreme court judge in the state of New Mexico, and he passed away a couple of years ago at the hands of ALS. Your daughter described the dynamic between the two of you as incredible, and how he recognized what an amazing and equal partner you were to him.

Randi McGinn:

He was the first person that was really an equal in all ways with me and vice versa. And we thought the same of each other. We were just so proud of each other. And rather than be competitive with other men in my life who were competitive with me and unhappy with my success, he was my biggest cheerleader, and vice versa, that we just were so happy when the other one was doing well and would brag on each other, both in front of each other, but also behind each other’s backs, and talk about how great the other person was. And really wanted each other to succeed to their highest potential. That’s really rare, I think, in relationships. And he was just terrific. I can’t imagine I’ll ever find anybody like him again.

Luke W Russell:

As a lawyer, and then him as a judge, I imagine you had to have arguments at some point in the house, but you’re both also skilled in arguing. What was those dynamics when there was tension? Were there moments where you…

Randi McGinn:

Everybody thinks that. Everybody thinks that. And by the way, all my girlfriends said, “Oh, tell me, tell me that over these 30 years that you guys were fighting all the time that you had blow points and blah blah.” So the answer is no, because we got it all out at work, and by the time we came home, we didn’t want to fight. We really liked each other. So for 30 years I got to have a slumber party every night with my best friend. It was the best. It was the best relationship. And not only, I mean, I can’t even remember… I can’t remember a single fight. All right. And so here’s what I liken it too. With other people that I had dated, and I had been married before, people kept saying, “Oh, you just have to work harder. You just aren’t working hard enough with this relationship,” blah, blah, blah.

Randi McGinn:

Look, if you are having to work that hard, look, I don’t mean you abandon the relationship right away, but if you’re having to work that hard, you’re trying to put square pegs into round holes. And when you find the right person, it’s not work. It’s like, “This is so wonderful. This is the greatest thing.” I mean, to his dying day, he could walk… If I would go in somewhere and he’d show up by accident, I would just be so excited that he was there, and so thrilled I’d seen him. I mean, to his dying day. I mean, he was my soulmate in all ways. And the one thing is, I mean, I feel lucky. I’m 66. I was 64 when he died. I feel lucky that I had gotten to the age of 64 and never experienced profound grief.

Randi McGinn:

The problem with finding somebody like that and loving them, finding your soulmate, is that… And I thought I knew this because of because all the horrible cases that I’ve dealt with, and watching my clients go through this. But until it happens to you, you don’t understand all those things that you’ve heard for years. Things like heart sick or heartbroken are real physical things. And so for the first year, some days you’d wake up and it would feel like your heart was being crushed and you couldn’t make it stop. It’s why people who have been together a long time often will die within six months of when the other person dies. By the way, because of my personality, you just keep going and you just put your head down and you just keep going. So, for the first year, had you asked me in the first year, “How are you doing?”

Randi McGinn:

I would’ve said I’m doing really good. But at the end of the first year, when I looked back, I said, “Oh my gosh, you have been a mess. You have not been doing well at all for the last year.” But in the moment, you’re just checking in, checking in. And then funny things happen. So I will tell you a funny grief story, if you would like a funny grief story.

Luke W Russell:

Okay. I love it. Yes.

Randi McGinn:

Okay, rather than make everybody depressed. So it’s three weeks after Charlie has died and I’m feeling pitiful and horrible, and so I decided to go to the little hole in the wall restaurant where we would go every Sunday for brunch. And because I’m by myself, I don’t sit at the table that we usually sat. I sit the counter. There’s some new waiter there, some young man, probably 19 or so. And he comes up and he says, “What would you like to order?” I say, “Well, if you’ve got the carne adovada, I’ll have the carne adovada huevos rancheros.” And as soon as I get that out, of course, this is what we ordered every week, I burst into hysterical, ugly crying.

Randi McGinn:

I mean the kind of crying where… you’re just… Tears are coming out. This very young man who stood across the counter from me, he pulls himself back like this and then leans forward and puts his hands on both sides of my shoulders, looks me right in the face and says, “It’s okay. We have the carne adovada,” he says. I can imagine that he’s thinking, “Boy, she really must love that carne adovada,” that she’s having this reaction. And then I just burst into laughter, because it was the funniest thing ever. So I told everybody over the next year, “If I’m looking really depressed, just tell me that you have the carne adovada and I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.” So stuff like that happens too.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Randi, it’s your 80th birthday celebration and people from all throughout your life are present. A gentle clinking on glass can be heard and a hush washes over the room. People raise their glasses to toast to you. What are three things you would hope that they say about you?

Randi McGinn:

She followed her dreams. She loved her family. She had wonderful friends.

Luke W Russell:

To learn more about Randi, visit mcginnlaw.com. A few notes before we wrap up. Please check out our season three sponsors. Be sure to check out Jason Hennessy’s book titled Law Firm SEO if you want the best knowledge available in the industry. To any plaintiff’s attorneys who have clients in need of simple interest loans, check out themilestonefoundation.org. If you’d like to join a growing group of attorneys that are actively working to improve their trial skills, head over to trialschool.org. For personal injury lawyers looking to acquire big cases through social media, visit 7figurecases.com. And if you want to experience rich human connection, join our LinkedIn group by going to joinbettertogether.com.

Luke W Russell:

By the way, are you looking for more great podcasts? I am also the host of two other shows coming out this year, and you can go ahead and subscribe to them today so that as soon as we start releasing episodes, you’ll be the first to know. Check out the Trusted Legal Partners podcast, a place where you can find good people doing good work in the industry. I am also the host of the Society of Women Trial Lawyers podcast. There you’ll find inspiring stories from women attorneys across the nation. You can find links to these in this show description, and they’re also available on the same places you hear Lawful Good. Thanks so much for listening this week. This podcast is produced by Kirsten Stock, edited by John Keur, and mastered by Guido Bertolini. I’m your host, Luke W Russell, and you’ve been listening to Lawful Good.