Fighting To Give Others a Fighting Chance

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 reached lines of work for me is any job in the field of law. I'm recording, um, you're recording on your voice memo? Okay, awesome. Luckily I got to demystify that world a little bit by talking with Leonette. My name is Leonette Rainy Hammett. I am forty two

years old. I keep having to think about that. It's COVID. Leonette is a lawyer, technically a law clerk for the Department of Education Borrowers Defense Group. If you're like me and do you hear someone's a lawyer, you immediately think they're duking it out in a courtroom and working directly with clients. But what we do is we actually are

more administrative. We take and we process claims. The Borrowers 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 off 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 I T. T. 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 where 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 um, a lot of people are don't have English as the first language. That'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, as you know, i'd say 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 received 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 your 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 as everyone saying the same thing, is the school misrepresenting on this one point. So if you went to a regular college and you claim 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 ten 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 approved 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 rediculous. 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, and you have doctors and lawyers who haven't paid their student debt, and you you kind of come to terms with 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 hard working 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 the house and read a book. So you were forced to be a nerd. I was forced to be a nerd. I was still a little cool though, Like I was 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. Neither 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 in My family. Was like thirteenth 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. Um, 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 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 ever.

Like sitting down my first day in class, my professor her name was Dr Hamilton's and she wrote that on the board, Dr Hamilton's not Miss Hamilton's, not Mrs Hamilton. I have Dr Hamilton. And I was like wow, Like this 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 developed curriculum that worked for them. Eventually, I was supposed to learn how to like do breo, but I didn't stay long enough. I was like, wait, what was your degree in biology? Okay, no, it still doesn't make sense. I'm trying to make the connection. Um,

I mean I have a sculpture degree. Here we are right right, listen, stranger, things have evan 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 head hunter. 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 head hunter eventually got her an interview for a financial endless 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. I'm 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 two thousand and eight financial crisis hit and no one was hiring. And it was at that time, you know, people were like walking in Time Square with their boxes in their hands from like Lehman Brothers and like, you know, all these other funds. 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. The only difference is Leonette 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 and there 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 decided to have my daughter. I was like, Okay, now you're like a real adult, like you have a whole another person here, and like prior to that, I was like I'm probably gonna move to l A. And I'm like, I was just ready to go all the time. I'm 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, uh, do I want to

go back to school? Leonette was thirty three. She knew she was done with finance and business, so she wasn't going to go back to school for an m b A. 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, went on one attorney and black women only represent two percent of all attorneys in the United States. That's it. I thought about how the I could help my community with that, and that was my reason. I'm like, I'm gonna 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. You know the perfect job is out there, you're just not sure how to find it. The good news is you don't have

to go it alone. You need the Specialized Recruiting Group. We're here to guide you and help you find a job that fits all without costing a dime. We're the Specialized Recruiting Group and Express Employment Professionals Company. Go to s r G express dot com for free support and get on the right course. Now back to on the job. So, at thirty three 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 tour. 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 amiba maybe, Like 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 learned the ends from you know, beginning to end, soup to nuts. You learn everything, and you can basically the world is your oyster. You can do it 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 like antitrust. So you know, we have to learn the gamut. So so not only is getting your law degree more accessible than you might think, but you can just always have a job. After having her second baby, a little boy, Leonett 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 you know, I am not a live aholic, right. But I love a kations. I like enjoying my kids. I like, you know, putting food on the grill and just sitting out. I enjoy my life. In Late Howard University's Career Services Center of posting for this job that she is now at the d o J with the Borrower's 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 judicate these cases, and you just start doing it, you know, based on the merits. It's just like law school. You look at the law, you look at you know, what 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? Has 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 that's off started making me, you know, I was

way more interested. So for the last couple of 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, it 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 seers, who are basically quality control. So after Leona approves or denies a case, it still has to go through another set of eyes before it just

passes through. Yeah, which is a good that's a good thing. So, um, 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 and 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 a hundred k, writing the school told me I would not get a job making a hundred k. And I think you and I could both agree that that person probably meant the schools told me, right, we we I mean, you use basic common sense, and you imply you use it. You just make a basic inference. It's not that you understood

this and you gave it your stamp of approval. Of course, Lena identified a lot with the claim and story understood the perspective. She wrote it. 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 sears. Well. It was sent back to me um as a denial, like now 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 you know and I so of course I went to bat for it and then it ended up being fine. It was approved, and um, that's good work, like,

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 bed 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 you that changed their lives just you being there, 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 it's 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, that's like 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 at firsthand and I'm like no, like no, like this is 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 two 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 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 it's logical as 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 waters, without a question. Leon And 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 I have a couple of friends who are lawyers, or if I meet someone who's who's like, oh, yeah, I went to law school, I'm a lawyer, and be like oh, because it just has them in the same even when um, you know, I was 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. 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 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 arms reach, you know, that they can ask about anything that they want to do, and that should be

someone that looks like them like that. 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 fraudulent one, should not put people in debilitating death 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 it is kind of just as crazy. Um, these loans are a regular thing that we've all just accepted. Um, So 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. Um, but does does it ever get to you that Wow, Like I wish I didn't have to do this, Yeah, but 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 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 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 of shutting that down, because otherwise it would it would just be too heavy, like too much, it's too much.

As we end the 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 like Leona 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 fear 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 aptimistic about that. For On the Job, I'm Modus 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 Smallens. The show is mixed by Matt Noble for audiation studios at The Loft and Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on I Heart

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, audition