Lawyer as gardener: Handling thorny challenges so students can thrive

Julia Choi likens her work in education law to that of a gardener: “It’s like weeding soil so the trees can grow, so that schools can do the work of serving their students, teachers, and families.”

Since completing the Center for Public Research and Leadership program and graduating from Berkeley Law in 2022, Julia has been an associate at Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch LLP in California. Specializing in education law, Julia juggles dozens of cases at a time, and no two are ever quite the same, she said. Each case often requires delving into multiple areas of law to address student issues like discipline, sexual harassment, special education, homelessness, and foster care; employment; constitutional issues; fiscal management; facilities; and day-to-day school operations.  

“That makes it a challenge to not only figure out what the client needs, but what I need, too,” she said. “We have to think of things holistically, to see the forest rather than the trees. It requires a mindset of, ‘I’m starting from scratch every time. What do I already know and what can I pull in?’” She leans on the Evolutionary Learning approach she learned at CPRL to see the big picture, to seek out multiple perspectives, and to understand the ever-changing legal and local landscapes. 

It’s essential for helping clients get to the heart of the matter, to help them reflect on their real goals and how legal support can help them accomplish that. “Sometimes, the first question a client asks us is not necessarily the right starting point,” she said. “Part of our job is helping clients identify what the issues are. From there, legal assistance can really shine.”

Her hope is that by handling the thorny and complex legal issues, she and her team can help free up school leaders to focus on matters like the quality of instruction and student learning, and to adopt and enact the kinds of practices she learned so much about at CPRL – “experimentation, observing how systems work and improving on that, flexible feedback loops.” 

“Law is so complicated and even as a lawyer, it’s sometimes hard to understand what schools are required to do. It requires a lot of risk management,” she said. 

That was clear during the Covid-19 pandemic when, as one example, one of her school clients bumped up against California law on instructional minutes. The state increased the daily minutes requirement out of concern schools were not providing enough instructional time during the pandemic. Julia’s client was compliant with the old laws, and in fact exceeded requirements for instruction time overall. “The kids had a great year in the classroom. The school focused on maintaining as much in-person interaction and keeping the calendar as close to a non-pandemic calendar year as possible. But on paper, it wasn’t how the law said time should technically be distributed per day,” she said. The school was hit with a fiscal penalty. Julia’s team leaned on equitable principles, legal precedent, and the historical context of the law. In the end, the penalty was waived. When cases like these succeed, she said, “we can save schools upwards of thousands of dollars that can now be reinvested into their students and the instructional program.”

Setting up school systems for success, she said, requires customization and input from a range of community members. This approach is central to her team’s work helping school systems draft policy and prepare handbooks, which both reflect and shape a school’s culture. While many schools set similar types of policies, from discipline and dress code to schedule and curriculum, she said, “Each school community serves different cultures, languages, and economic demographics. Customization requires being flexible, understanding the law that applies, and then crafting policies to match that community and ethos.” 

In all of this work, having a diverse team whose members bring different levels of experience and expertise has been critical for navigating complex problems, a lesson Julia learned while at CPRL. “It helps to have people around who have different perspectives and might be more attuned to certain areas,” she said. 

Looking ahead, Julia and her team, like so many in education, are focused on how to address the pressing educator shortage. She has been advising clients about educator credentialing issues and how to move qualified teachers into classrooms more quickly within current legal frameworks. “We’re keeping our ears close to the ground in the state capital and talking with clients about legislative changes they hope to see,” she said. 

“As lawyers, we tend to focus on the granularity and nuance of legal compliance, which helps position educators to focus on issues like classroom instruction and school culture, on their passion for supporting students' lives and futures, on investing in their communities – the reasons they became educators in the first place.”