The Bobby Bones Show - Episode 8: Fighting To Give Others a Fighting Chance

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

On the season five finale of "On The Job," we meet Leonette. Her path to her career - she's a Law Clerk at the US Department of Education - had more than a few twists and turns. In fact, she started law school in her 30s, after realizing that she could help to address the yawning gap in African-American and female representation in the legal field. Now, she's using her degree to advocate for others who lack a voice: victims of predatory for-profit colleges. She's part of the DOE's Borrower's Defense Group, and is responsible for processing claims against these unscrupulous schools. Turns out that Leonette found her niche after all, and her work is helping others - many of them new to the country and to the English language - regain their footing so that they may, too, find their niches. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Again, top-shelfcountrycruise.com or 888-381-4420. This is On the Job, a podcast about finding your life's work. On The Job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season, we're bringing you stories of folks following their passion to carve their own career path. For this season finale of On the Job, we talked to Leonette, a second career law clerk who works daily to help relieve student debt for people who've been misled by bogus colleges. We talked to her about the surprising accessibility of the profession itself and the importance of new voices being represented within it. As a radio producer, I feel like one of the most confusing and out-of-reach lines of work for me is any job in the field of law. I'm recording, you're recording on your voice memo?

Yes. Okay, awesome. Luckily, I got to demystify that world a little bit by talking with Leonette. So my name is Leonette Rainey Hammett. I am 42 years old. I keep having to think about that. COVID messes up. It's COVID. Leonette is a lawyer. Technically, a law clerk for the Department of Education, borrower's defense group. If you're like me and you hear someone's a lawyer, you immediately think they're duking it out in a courtroom and working direct. with clients. But what we do is we actually are more administrative. We take and we process claims.

The borrower's defense group, where Leonette works, is part of the Department of Justice, a government job. And the claims that they process are from people who say they've been tricked into taking on massive amounts of student loan debt. So it's all fraudulent debt. Basically, these people have gone to for-profit school. They've been charged an exorbitant amount of money. Like predatory colleges.

Yes, they were predatory. Most of them are for profit, and they made misrepresentations. So these are those sketchy schools you might have heard about in the news. Some of the more well-known ones are the Corinthian schools and ITT Tech, both now shut down. But there's a lot more out there, and they market themselves hard to people who might not have had a shot getting into more reputable schools. So these schools were telling people, like, I am going to give you this amazing opportunity to go to this wonderful school. We have all of these great businesses and companies that we work for and they will give you a job and you're going to get paid and you're going to have a wonderful life after this. And they're talking to people who are sometimes first generation high school graduates and a lot of people don't have English as a first language. Like it's really predatory.

Like they are going after a certain demographic. Needless to say, these promises the predatory colleges make are often not true. But people enroll because these colleges offer a better future. opportunity. And if you're someone who hasn't gotten a lot of opportunities, you take the chance and you sign on the dotted line, hoping. You don't think about the money, though. It's, you know. Out of sight, out of mind. Until six months after you graduate. And then, wait a minute. They knock on your door. Yes. When these enormous amounts of debt come knocking, after students receive their certificate,

they don't have the high-paying jobs to pay them off. And they file claims with Leonette at the Department of Justice. We adjudicate these cases to give them some relief. On a day-to-day, what that looks like is Leonette and a team of law clerks going through all these claims. So we look at whatever they've claimed, the school has done wrong. We look at all of the cases, we look at them together, and we see if there's any uniformity. Like, as everyone's saying the same thing, is this school misrepresenting on this one point? So if you went to a regular college and you claimed that you left with crazy student loans, like many people do, and you just didn't get the job that you wanted to afterward.

Your case would probably be denied by Leonette. They are looking for trends and usually find them when 10 or more similar claims are made about a singular school. Now, for most schools, we have thousands of cases. Some of these schools have been shut down. Some of them have been sued. A lot of them have been fined by the government. They've had to pay back into the government.

But Leonette isn't actually involved with what happens to these schools. And she isn't involved with the people claiming that got defrauded never meets them. It's her job to be unbiased and either approve the claim or deny the claim. We just adjudicate the case on the merits. You know, it's just the law, the case, what we found. That's it. Even though she's impartial behind the desk, she is personally motivated to do the job and help when she can because of the staggering amount of debt that has come to define recent generations of Americans. She's fired up by how huge this problem is, even for people who went to non-predatory schools. It's still so heavy. Like the amount of debt to go to school is ridiculous. It doesn't even

make sense. Is it worth? I mean, there's just so many, there's so many arguments to be had when you're talking about student debt and people's ability to pay. I mean, you have doctors and lawyers who haven't paid their student debt. And you, you kind of come to terms of that you can't fix everything, but you can fix what you can fix. And that's what I work on. That's what That is what I have to focus on because it gets heavy. It's a lot. It's a lot. Working in law is actually Leonette's second career.

And her trajectory to get there isn't as clear cut as you might think. But talking with her a little bit about her upbringing, it starts to make sense how she ended up there. So I am originally from New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven, pretty small city, great pizza. Leonette was really active in sports. She was popular. Her parents were hardworking.

churchgoers, so they made sure that she was on the straight and narrow. So I won't say I didn't do much, but I wasn't able to, like, you know, like hang out with my friends. That wasn't really a thing. My parents were like, no, you can stay in house and read a book. You were forced to be a nerd? I was forced to be a nerd. I was still a little cool, though. Like, I was still a little cooler than most of my friends, you know, in school anyway. Leonette was really inspired growing up by her parents being entrepreneurs. Her mom ran a hair salon. Her dad owned an exterminating company. Either of them went to college.

But for a few reasons, Leonette never questioned that she was going. No, there was never an option. College for, and my family was like 13th grade. Like, you just have to keep going. There's not an option. You're going to college. So I was also very excited about leaving home. I knew I was going away to school, so I was excited about that.

The other thing she knew is that she wanted to go to Howard, a historically black university, which she got into. In her all-girls high school, she was one. one of four black girls that graduated in a class of over a hundred. She had grown up in a black family, went to a black church, but in her whole life up until college, she had never once had a black teacher. Never. Wow. Ever. Like sitting down my first day in class, I remember my professor, her name was Dr. Hamilton, and she wrote that on the board, Dr. Hamilton, not Miss Hamilton, not Mrs. Hamilton. I am Dr. Hamilton. And I was like, wow. Like this is, is this is it. Like I made the right decision. I'm so happy. I'm here. Like, it just felt like home.

After graduating, she came back home to New Haven and started to figure out what she wanted to do. She had a few jobs, started testing the waters. My parents wanted me to be a doctor. I knew I did not want to be a doctor. I was not going to medical school. Like, I was like, no. She ended up substitute teaching and became a vision specialist, basically helping blind kids in school develop curriculum that worked for them. Eventually I was supposed to learn how to do braille, but I didn't stay long enough. I was like, I, this is. Wait, what was your degree in?

Biology. Okay. No, it still doesn't make sense. I'm trying to make the connection. I mean, I have a sculpture degree. Here we are. Right, right. Listen, stranger things have happened, right?

She got engaged, called off the engagement, and realized she'd always wanted to live in New York City. So she moved there. She hired a headhunter, initially wanted to go into pharmaceutical sales, and she couldn't find anything in that realm. So she just started applying to anything at all. Like any kind of job. Like, I just want a job. I want an office job. I have a degree.

Someone should hire me because that's what I was taught. You know, you get a degree. You get a job. Her headhunter eventually got her an interview for a financial analyst job at Bloomberg. And I did that. I studied for the broker license. And I was like, I can do this. I can do finance.

Like, this is great. I love it. It's interesting. Sign me up. She liked it, but she wanted to use it as a stepping stone and get hired out by other companies Bloomberg worked with. But then, the 2008 financial crisis hit, and no one was hiring. And it was at that time, you know, people were, like, walking in Times Square with their boxes in their hands from, like, Lehman Brothers and, like, you know, all these other friends. I was like, I have to figure something else out.

She pivoted again, moved to North Carolina, trying her hand at being an entrepreneur, like mom, opening a hair salon. Only difference is Leonette's salon lasted about eight months. This was right after the crisis. Right after the crisis. And we were selling like a, we were trying to do like this upscale salon in Durham, North Carolina, no less. Like right after the mortgage crisis, it was just like ridiculous. She ended up back home in New Haven, got back into the educational system, facilitating tutoring systems for kids, just constantly going and constantly switching up her work.

And that's when, um, when I, um, when I. I decided to have my daughter. I was like, okay. Now you're like a real adult. Like you have a whole other person here. And like prior to that, I was like, I'm probably going to move to L.A. And I was just ready to go all the time. Just ready to go.

Just enjoy life. Like I'm like, we only get one shot here. I'm going to do everything I want to do. But then I had another person. And so I was like, do I want to go back to school? Leonette was 33. She knew she was done with finance and business, so she wasn't going to go back to school for an MBA. This is when she really started to zoom out and think about what her life would look like from then on, done hopping around. The next move being the one that she was going to stick with for a while.

And I wrote down the things that I wanted to do. I wanted to help people. I wanted to be an asset to my community. I wanted to be a role model for the other little girls in my family. Like, you know, my daughter included, but also my little cousins and, you know, now my niece and just everyone else. The moment she figured it out, she was on an Amtrak train after visiting her mom with her infant baby in her arm. And she asked herself a pretty big question. What don't we have in our family? Who has a professional degree? Well, we don't have one attorney?

And black women only represent 2% of all attorneys in the United States. That's it? I thought about how I could help my community with that. And that was my reason. I'm like, I'm going to do it. I have to be an attorney. We'll be right back to Leonette's story after the break. Navigating the professional job search is hard.

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Now, back to On the Job. So, at 33 years old, Leonette had a daughter and started going to law school. She thrived in all the work that she'd done before that, and she says, things always did come easy to her. That really set me up for law school because that's where it ended. like nothing comes easy to you in law school like that's a totally different game you were a big fish growing up and then oh i turned into an amoeba maybe i guess what really shocked me talking with leonette is that once you go through three years of law school like she did there are so many different opportunities after that so many opportunities you learn everything like you don't specialize

in anything in law school you learn the and from, you know, beginning to end, soup to nuts, you learn everything. You can basically, the world is your oyster. You can do with that what you want. Like, to the point where someone will call you because they just know you're a lawyer and say, I got hurt on the job. Do you know anything about personal injury? Yeah, I can tell you about personal injury, and I can tell you something about estates.

And yeah, I know a little bit about antitrust. So, you know, we have to learn the gamut. So not only is getting your law degree more accessible than you might think, But you can just always have a job. Right. After having her second baby, a little boy, Leonette graduated and took the bar. She started looking for work to line up after spending time with her new baby

and thought that a government job might be perfect because of the reasonable hours. You know, I found out that I'm not actually a workaholic. I thought I was, but, no. I am not. You want a lifaholic. Right. I love vacations. I like enjoying my kids.

I like, you know, putting food on the grill and just sitting out. I enjoy my life. In late 2019, Howard University's career services sent her a posting for this job that she has now at the DOJ with the borrowers defense fund, helping people who were defrauded by predatory colleges get their money back. She got the job, and they threw her right into the deep end, working on cases immediately. They teach you how to adjudicate these cases and you just start doing it based on the merits. It's just like law school. You look at the law, you look at what's required, and then you look at this application and see if you can plug these things in.

does it fit or does it not fit? Is it approved or is it denied? That's it. She initially liked it. It was a job. But the more she got into the gravity of her work and how big the problem of these schools really was, she became way more invested. What schools, you know, have misrepresentations and what exactly does the law mean when it says misrepresentation and what was on the mind of the framers when they wrote this law? That stuff started making me, you know, I was way more interested.

it. So for the last couple years, she's been adjudicating as a clerk, doing your job, and doing it right. Still, she really wanted to be personally helping people who needed it, which can be hard to feel when you're simply at your desk saying yes or no based on a law that just exists, a law that is meant to do some real good in the world, but Leonette wanted to feel that she was doing something good. I think the day that that actually happened was probably about maybe three months ago. Leonette was adjudicating a case. And for all cases at her job,

there are two other people called Sears who are basically quality control. So after Leonette approves or denies a case, it still has to go through another set of eyes before it just passes through. Yeah, which is good. That's a good thing. So one of my cases I approved

and the person who sent in the claim was, I would say that maybe English wasn't their first language. So some of the language in the claim actually went against what we would approve. By this, she means very basic language barrier stuff, using negatives instead of positives. Like, instead of saying, the school told me I would get a job making 100K, writing, the school told me I would not get a job making 100K.

And I think you and I could both agree that that person probably meant the school told me, right? I mean. You use basic common sense and you imply. Absolutely. You just make a basic inference. It's not that. So you understood this and you gave it your stamp of approval. Of course.

Lena identified a lot with the claimant story, understood the perspective. She wrote up the report, explained this is what they meant by this. This is what they're trying to say. And she approved it and she passed it along to her seers. Well, it was sent back to me as a denial. Like, no, the person absolutely didn't say that. And I'm like, this is problematic. Like, no, they did say it.

And this is how I know. And so, of course, I went to bat for it. And it ended up being fine. It was approved. And that's good work. And that's something that, you know, I'm proud of. I'm proud that I was able to be that voice in the room because otherwise it would have absolutely been denied.

And, you know, I don't think it should have been. When you first started telling the story, I was like, I thought you were going to say that they, you know, you went to bet for it and it was still denied. And, you know, and that made you be like, you want to keep fighting and doing what you do. But they approved it, which means that you, speaking up and being there, fundamentally changed whoever this person who's claiming this, that changed their lives just you being. It changed their life. And if I wasn't here, there's a possibility. I mean, that's huge. And it's like, I mean, I don't feel like I'm huge because I did that. But that, that representation, it, when people say representation matters, no, it really matters. Like, that's one person, yes, but that's a, it's a big deal. It's a big deal for someone. Not a big deal for me. It's a really big deal for that person, though. Because the people who denied it, you, you made your case again. And they thought, oh, I didn't think of it like that. Okay. Right.

That's like a, that's, that's really scary. It's scary. It's really, really scary. And I was like really, I was like really like upset about it. Like I was like fired up because I'm like, I know, because this is the stuff that we hear about all the time. You know, and I mean, I know that it happens. But I saw it firsthand and I'm like, no. like no like this is come this is wrong this is why black women and like minorities and other people like

this is why we need to make up more than 2% of any field like there always needs to be someone in the room you know what i mean like that represents everyone like everyone should be represented this is this is what we look like everyone doesn't have the same vernacular there should be someone there who can say maybe we need to take a closer look at this that's that's probably when And I just really felt like, okay, like, I'm here for a reason. It's not just me passing through. In her workspace, Leonette brought the perspective of someone from a family of entrepreneurs in a minority community.

She empathized with the people whose files were on her desk. And meanwhile, she says that she'd hear people around her basically say, how can someone fall for this? Like, who would be crazy enough to go to a school that's saying blah, blah, blah? And I'm like, a lot of people. And it's not that they're crazy. but you have to look through their eyes. Like you cannot stand here as you and say,

who would be crazy enough to do this? A lot of people would. It's not crazy. It's something that it's logical. It's people actually trying to make a better way for their family. And this is the only opportunity that's presented to them. That's it. And it sounds better than all the other opportunities.

It's not that crazy. And the person who is adjudicating those cases, if they don't have the ability to see through that lens, or have the empathy to even try, then that could completely change someone's life for better or for worse. Without a question. Leonette says, a big reason why there's such a small percentage of minorities in the legal system

is because of its reputation. The word lawyer itself has an elitist air to it that makes people think that they could never do it. Even I have a couple friends who are lawyers, or if I meet someone who's like, oh, yeah, I went to law school, I'm a lawyer. I'm being like, oh, because it just has that in the same. Even when I read just your title and what you do, to me, just fundamentally felt like, wow, that's something I couldn't do. That's fundamentally not accessible.

And I think that keeps a ton of people who should be doing what you do from even starting. A ton of people, a ton. Who would be so good at it. Would be so good at it. And would bring an empathy to the job that is so desperately needed. I mean, it's just, I can't even put into words how desperately needed it is. A lot of people just don't think that they qualify. Like, I couldn't do that.

Like, that's for, oh, I have no way. You could. You absolutely could. And you're needed. Today, at least in her workplace, Leonette fills that need. And her family, they're no longer missing an attorney. For her daughter, for her cousins, her niece, they've all now got someone to look to and say,

she does that. I could do that. Every little black girl should have someone that they can ask, like right at arm's reach, you know, that they can ask about anything that they want to do. And that should be someone that looks like them. Like, this should not be an anomaly. Like, there's absolutely no reason. It should be an anomaly.

In the same vein, Leonette also recognizes there's no reason she should have to do what she does every day. A college education, even a non-fragulent one, should not put people in debilitating debt for the rest of their lives. And it really shouldn't be that easy for a school operating illegally to look like the real deal. The reason that they can do it is because the legal way is kind of just as crazy. These loans are a regular thing that we've all just accepted. It's not that different. I mean, it is, but it's not, you know. It's semantics, it feels like.

That's it. So just you philosophically when you're going to work. Like, you're obviously doing something that needs to be done. But does it ever, like, get to you that, wow, like, I wish I didn't have to do this? Yeah. But... Like you shouldn't have to. Right.

There should be no need. Yeah. Or it should never have happened. But here we are. That doesn't get you down every day though. No. No. I can't let it because I have so many issues that I care deeply about.

And none of them should exist. And yet they do. And so, you know, like it's like I'm going to live. live and I'm going to be happy and I'm going to, you know, try to give my children the best of me that I can every day. And that requires like some level of shutting that down because otherwise it would, it would just be too heavy. It's too much. It's too much. As we end this season of On the Job, I think it's important to note what this show is about in the first place, jobs and the people who work them. Because oftentimes, the right person working the right job means so much more

than that person having a stable income, having a place to go every day, clocking in and out. The right person in the right job can change the lives of the people that they deal with every day, saving them from a lifetime of debt by simply being in the room to share their own perspective. It can change the lives of the generations that come after them when they look up and see someone is doing a job they were made to believe that they could never do. The right people in the right jobs level the playing field and over time helped to fix the enormous problems of wealth disparity, gender pay gaps,

and representation in the workplace. They aren't problems that should exist. And if you think about them too much in the grand scheme, you'll probably go crazy. But if you're like Leonette and you genuinely want to be part of the solution, what you can do is put your head down and get to work.

It's chunking it. It's taking a little chunk and trying to fix this part because the system as a whole, it desperately needs to be revamped. And it's a lot. Do you feel optimistic that you're affecting that? Yes, I do. I definitely feel optimistic about that.

For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job, brought to you by Express, employment professionals. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were written and produced by me, Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. The show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at the loft in Bronxville, New York.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring. stories about discovering your life's work. Aviation. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill. Expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years, and waiting around for a technician to set everything up.

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