SPEAKER_01 1:05

I see Patrick almost always when I join Chris's monthly uh gatherings to develop one of our cases. Patrick shows up a lot more than I do. He is dynamite. Chris is dynamite. Patrick, please introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Good morning, John. Yeah, I became a lawyer while I was serving in the Marine Corps. It wasn't really part of the plan. I grew up wanting to be a paleontologist, or perhaps I never grew up. I uh never lost the love of dinosaurs. But uh due to financial circumstances, I had to turn down a scholarship to the University of Chicago uh to learn paleontology, and I went to a small school in the South in Dallas, a little Catholic school, uh named University of Dallas. They didn't have a paleontology department, so I eventually eventually ended up being a medieval history major. A couple of my buddies upon graduation joined the United States Supreme Corps. I got married a month after graduation, and so I remained and was doing uh graduate studies in politics, and with a uh within nine months we had the child, and I knew it would probably take me 12 years to get my PhD, and I said, Well, it looked like my buddies did a good thing. I'll go serve the Marine Corps for a few years, get financially stable, and then figure out what I'm gonna do, maybe go back and finish that PhD. And uh ended up loving it. That was a, of course, the Marine Corps being what it is, took a uh medieval history major and put them in with a bunch of electrical engineers in the communication electronics field, which I enjoyed greatly, but I didn't really see I had a career in it. But having loved the Marine Corps, I competed for a program where they would send you to law school, pay for everything, as well as give you your salary. And by then, uh number four was on its on her way, and so it made sense to uh do that. I loved what I was doing in the Marine Corps, and I got my law degree at the University of Texas in Austin. They sent me back to Texas for a law degree, and uh upon my uh graduation from law school, uh Saddam Hussein decided to celebrate by invading Kuwait. And so by the time I had passed the bar and reported for my first study station in Camp Hendleton, operation of Desert Shield was well underway.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Let's break this down for a moment, if I can, about where I was when all this was happening then. You graduated from college when? Uh 1980. And I graduated five years later. Uh so uh I'm about to hear about your experience of the desert uh shield and or desert storm. And uh I marched in the uh second weekend uh uh demonstration against the war. So I'm listening.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

Yeah. And uh I reported to Camp Pendleton, California, right a couple of days before Thanksgiving, and they told me that we have way too many Marines sitting in Saudi Arabia waiting for the ground war and way too many attorneys in the Marine Corps deployed. So you're gonna sit out this war. So went home to my wife and uh who was uh carrying in her tummy number five, our our second daughter, and said, Well, I guess I'm going nowhere. So we were kind of camping out in a friend's house because base housing hadn't opened up. And again, typical of my 20 years in the Marine Corps, they promptly changed their mind two days before Christmas, a month later, and said, You're going. So I told my wife, kids, uh, I'm out of here, got on a plane, and uh it's a fun story, but I'll leave it out. I just say that I ended up uh about a week later in Saudi Arabia and found out as I entered the uh workers' camp because the US military was by and large ensconced in these third country national camps in Saudi Arabia because all the uh Filipinos and Koreans and Palestinians who work the oil fields, the Saudis don't do that, had fled when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. So it's easy for Saudi just to put us all there to protect uh the holy land of Saudi Arabia and get ready to invade uh Kuwait and throw Saddam Hussein out. And so I found that it was correct. There were way too many Marine lawyers. So when uh a major said, Hey, I'm setting up a team to go up north to the edge of the battlefield to set up a legal team, I quickly volunteered. I became the prosecutor on the team, and that's what I did during the war. I prosecuted cases, and most of the cases involved pretty much the same scenario. This was the first war that the U.S. was in, in which we had general order number one, which is now common all the time. General order number one essentially says no alcohol, says other things, but that's basically what it says. Because we're in Saudi Arabia where allegedly they don't drink alcohol. So the Marines, uh being the uh improvisational and and and creative persons that they were, decided to deal with that situation by getting the big black five-gallon water jugs that we used to tote uh water uh around with us, and they would get a little starter bottle from home of you know, jack cannons or smirnoff or what have you, and they put it uh some fruit powder and yeast in it, and they would make their own moonshine. That's wild. And two things would happen inevitably after that. Number one, uh, they would get deathly ill. Number two is of course we're all carrying firearms, and something stupid along that way would happen. So that tended my cases tended to have something to do with people indulging in that homemade brew and then doing something uh highly uh unwise and intemperate and getting in trouble with the law. As you may know, the U.S. military is a community with you know communities throughout the world. So anywhere you have a base or outpost or what have you is a community. The senior officer is, in an essence, amongst other things, besides the military commander, kind of the mayor of the community. And he or she's got to enforce the law. And we have a law uh under Title 10 of the United States Code, uh, which governs the military, a portion of it is called the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it is essentially the penal code for the military. The jurisdiction is not geographic, it's uh personal to the status of the of the individual as a military person. So when you join the US military, you become subject to this code, and you can be uh held accountable at a court martial if uh it's believed that you somehow have violated the code. The code has a lot of traditional um uh prohibitions against murder, robbery, rape, etc. But it also has some uniquely military uh offenses in it, like disrespect, disobedience, uh absence without leave, that sort of thing, AWOL. And that's the job of the military prosecutor is to receive reports of misconduct and prosecute them.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

How about we jump forward to give your URL, your web address, and then tell us about uh your how long were you a military judge, and I think you were a U.S. attorney, and then what when did you start doing the the defense side?

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Right. So uh, well, the website to get the rest of the story is uh one is simply my name, Patrick, and the letter J for my middle initial and my last name, M C L A I N. So Patrick J McLean.com. And the that primarily focuses in our criminal offense. I'll I can touch on that in a moment. The uh other site concentrates on our military uh legal representation, because we now do uh representation of military people as civilian lawyers, and that is McLean Military Lawyer.com. That's M C L A I N Military Lawyer.com. Great. So uh yeah, I I had decided once I accepted the selection process to go to law school uh that I was going to stay in uh at least 20 years, and that's what I did. And uh once I hit 20 years, uh Mrs. McClain made it quite clear that that was enough, and we had actually lived in 19 different homes in those 20 years. Uh we had our ninth child was born uh close in time to those 20 years ending. So uh it was time to settle down. We were in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a little bit south of you. I was staying on the phone call. That's where Leela is. And that uh happened, uh retirement happened in 2002. So if you might recall, the year before we had a rather horrific event in the United States that we recall by the shorthand 9-11, because it happened on the 11th of September of 2001. And uh I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to retire, but uh it's hard to put oneself back that 24 years. But in 2002, as horrible as 9-11 was, there wasn't much going on in the world of the military. We were basically involved in Afghanistan uh picking up alleged terrorists and then dragging them to Guatanamo Bay and that horrific story. But seeing that we weren't going anywhere and I hit my 20 years, I put in my retirement. Unfortunately, things were kind of stagnant. Um, I still remember uh because I I had pretty much assumed I wasn't going to leave the uh Northern Virginia area. It's typical a lot of military people that retire out in your neck of the woods just to remain there and move from military life to civilian life and work for one of the alphabet agencies. And I was I remember distinctly in early 2002 being in a building, if memory serves, is maybe southwest of the capital. It was bare inside, except for wires hanging from the ceiling, naked light bulbs, and all that. And I was interviewed by a person who soon had become the general counsel of a new organization called the Transportation Security Administration. And I asked them, Well, what is TSA going to do? And they said, We're not entirely sure. We're trying to figure that out ourselves. I said, What would my job be as a lawyer? They said, Well, we don't know about that either. But though that was one of the organizations I interviewed with. I interviewed with the FBI, interviewed with a number of U.S. attorney's office because for a lot of military lawyers, the Sina Qua non, the ideal job is to become an assistant U.S. attorney after serving. And I actually had an interest in particular in uh uh prosecuting crimes against children. Uh and so I interviewed with the uh child exploitation obscenity section, and that was one of the ones where I was in the competition for a job, and I'd gone to Texas because the U.S. attorney in Houston said he wanted to interview me. And just by happenstance, I stopped in Dallas because I had some dear friends from law school that were there. They said, Oh, come on, apply in Dallas. So I said, Well, you know, I put out my resume, but I haven't heard anything. Uh they said, Well, give it a shot. And I went to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Dallas, and the first assistant, which is the right-hand person for those that are unfamiliar with that uh organization, was a retired military judge from the Navy Reserve. I had actually met him because military judges, and I towards the end of my career, I was a military judge, meaning I was the judge presiding over courts martial. And I had met him because every year the active duty and and reserve military judges get together, and I had met him at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. And he said, Well, you know, I've got 200 resumes sitting on the desk here, and you know, when the U.S. attorney gets around to it, I don't know, but I'll pull yours out of the pile and see if I can get in. And that was on a Monday. I said, Well, thank you. And I went down to Houston Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and came back. And the first assistant said, Well, uh, she's back from testifying in Congress. The U.S. attorney is, and I'll see if uh she'll talk to you. And she did on a Friday, went very nicely, and I went home. That Monday she called me up and says, I want you to work for me and prosecute crimes against children. So I was uh happier than a pig in mud. I was uh accepted. Um, an interesting time because uh those of you in the Fairfax area will remember in late 2002 time frame, this was the time of the uh shooter. I forget what they called him, something like the I-95 shooter. It was some guy going up and down I-95 and randomly shooting at people. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

I think they call him the belt, the beltway shooter, yeah, and that was uh John Muhammad and the and the uh the youngster who was with them.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Yeah, but now remember, you got you gotta roll back in time. The FBI, I may occasionally say unflattering things about the FBI, but I have my reasons. Uh their uh crack profilers had decided that it was a lone white male in a white van pulling out and shooting at people. Um, and this is based on their composite of uh so-called eyewitnesses. So the irony was this is a time period where I recently retired from the Marine Corps, was waiting for the job offerers to come back. So I pulled in some extra income by substitute teaching in the area. So all around um Spotsylvania County and Stafford County and those areas around Fredericksburg, Virginia, I was called in to be a middle school and high school substitute teacher. And I drove a light-colored Chevy astral van.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

Oh yeah, yeah. So I pulled up to these schools, you know, uh, looking like I look, and in that light-colored van, and not needless to say, I caused a certain amount of consternation because everybody was at high alert. Uh, in my own uh where we lived in Fredericksburg, uh, within a mile away at a gas station right off the interstate, there had been a uh shooting. And of course, it turned out that the profile was totally off. And uh, but at the time I was unfortunately fit the profile of what they thought was the the shooter.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Um this on the Patrick and the day of right um or or the day before the uh Jim Mahom and Minnelville, yeah, the other one was Melville and I was um at the end living in Maryland in the calling train because they had just been the lens shooting, and I went to the um one MCA um and they found out later that these two after uh they're shooting for the morning, um, went over to that same 1 MCA to release. So not believe that they were fully there when they were there previously previously. It it just underlines uh why it's just a good idea, for instance, not to beep your horn at people you don't need to beep your horn at. You don't need to flip your your uh bird at, for instance.

SPEAKER_02 17:52

Particularly if you pass a blue sedan with a hole cut out of the trunk so the shooter can better conceal himself in that. Oh, that was a crazy case, yeah. So I I went to Dallas and um, you know, uh just like in the Marine Corps, uh there was a uh Sour Point uh at one point as an assistant U.S. attorney, and um because I and some other uh assistant U.S. attorneys had not served long enough to have our employment vest, you um the the general rule is you have to serve two years uh as an assistant U.S. attorney once you do that under the uh Merit Systems Protection Board or whatever agency governance uh employment assistant U.S. attorneys, uh it's much harder to let you go. But uh, we are easily disposable, and at the time I am told that the reason was is that uh the senator at the time, Senator John Corner wanted some uh folks uh hired, and so they needed to uh vacate some spaces. So I was informed uh on a Christmas in 2003 that um uh I was no longer employed and no complaints about my work, my content valves, and no warning. And with nine or ten children, ten children by the time, and that was one of the rare occasions when they were all at home because you know there's a 23-year age difference, so um, you know, very seldom were they all together, but uh I actually had them home, uh the college-age ones. I had one at uh St. John's College in Annapolis, I had another at University of Virginia, another was about to be on his way to William and Mary, and um so I was informed uh yeah, you don't have a job. And we just purchased a house in a uh in a very nice uh uh community south of Dallas called Cedar Hill. And so I had to figure out what to do, but at age 45, um, at least in the legal world, you are not as employable as one would think. Um in part because you know I don't fit the qualifications of a uh associate, uh, because I'd probably work harder and longer than and have more knowledge than the average associate, but they just don't see uh a 45-year-old guy working 80 hours in it, which means they didn't know me. But so I just hung up my shingle, and it was the best damn thing to have me. Um I found a passion in going back and representing people. I had done that in the ring corps because in addition to prosecuting and and serving on the bench, I'd been a defense counsel and uh I swore I never would do that. And the minute I got it, I was delighted because uh a defense counsel in the Marine Corps reminded me very much of my days as a platoon commander in the communication electronics field, where I had about 60 Marines uh uh working under my uh uh supervision and leadership. The difference was is that instead of most of my Marines being in trouble as a defense counsel, all my Marines were in trouble. And so uh it was a it was it was a great life. Uh and so I I'm not mentioning going, I had obviously experienced uh in federal court, and I decided also to put my name out there for military law. And at the time, this is kind of early on. Most civilian lawyers in courts martial uh were kind of local. It'd be some guy or gal right outside the gate. The idea of a half bag will travel uh civilian lawyer was not too common. And so it took off for. Me and next thing you know, I was traveling to Europe, Asia, the Middle East, representing military people, Air Force, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, as well as the Marine Corps in courts martial, and then back in Dallas representing people in federal court and in state court. And I'll tell you, John, my hats are off to you that have a big state corps practice. It was a rude awakening for me. I don't know how it is in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but in the Republic of Texas, um uh rules are um kind of uh precatory. It just depends whether or not the judge recognizes rules. That includes rules of procedure and rules of evidence. That's right. And so I, you know, I had to learn real quickly to uh lean on advocacy because I couldn't necessarily rely on rules and the law, which is very good.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

Bigger the picture, uh the the film strip of the uh frame picture I have a from the gladiator, that's what it's about. Um winning within the rules so often.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

Yeah, absolutely. And uh, you know, it it appealed to my warrior ethos, but it uh it it was definitely a learning experience, but now we do that. I um uh just to uh cut short the narrative and get to the point, it's 2026. So now I have a small law firm. We I have four associates and they each have a paralegal. Uh we have an investigator on staff, we have you know other admin people and you know, intake, that sort of thing. So um we have uh any time we have about 15 or 16 people working uh together in the law firm. And now I'm actually I'm uh getting it running so well that I become unnecessary to the law firm and hopefully sell it and move on. And I am at the uh young age of 67 going back to school, uh working on a psychology master's a little bit backwards, as you know, as lawyers we get a doctorate, but I'm working on psychology master uh masters while also training with mental health professionals known as psychodramatists, which is how you and I met. Right. And uh uh psychodrama, I know you've talked about your on a podcast because I've listened to it and listened to folks who talk about it. So uh just for the the person who may not have caught that from a prior John Katz podcast, psychodrama was the probably the first group therapy uh uh mental health discipline. Right around the uh beginning of the 20th century, a fellow who was studying under Sigmund Freud in Vienna, his name was Jacob Herino, uh decided to go a different way in uh mental health. He was a uh physician who became a psychiatrist and decided that uh the best way for people to deal with their mental health is in group work. And taking the principles from the dramatic arts in the theater, and uh they have uh persons who are uh in need of mental health work uh become protagonists in dramas based on their own life, and the other participations, participants in a group become auxiliaries or persons in the the um scenes in that protagonist's life that are being reenacted. And the idea is to not only gain a more truthful uh understanding of the events of the person's life, but also insight and uh greater understanding. And the uh Merino called it developing spontaneity and creativity, which again in his uh own convoluted Viennese way, uh, came out something like how to deal with an old problem in a in a new and better way, or a new problem in an adequate way. And uh some amazing stories of insight and recovery from uh his career as a psychodromatist, but now I've seen it myself because uh again, how you and I are connected, I believe, is through uh the community that has been formed across the country by an entity called Trial Lawyers College. Right. It is it is unique in the uh train, it's a unique training program in trial lawyering. Uh I believe because one, it it entirely ignores the flash. In other words, it doesn't promote, you know, getting eight-finger results for the personal injury attorneys that attend, or uh, or the or even the acquittals for those of us in criminal defense. It talks about becoming a better version of yourself to show up as an authentic advocate in trials so that the judge or the jury who's making decisions uh is persuaded by you because you're more authentic and real, as opposed to teaching you some sort of uh magic tricks or uh sleight of hand in doing what we do as advocates. And that appealed to me. The name kind of turned me off psychodrama. It took me two years uh from the moment somebody told me about it to when I went to it, because uh psycho, psycho, no drama. No, I'm I'm not gonna do that in psychodrama. Hell no. But uh once I did it, as you know from us working together, John, I I just took to it like a fish to water.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

And I I found that the the thing that attracted me in the Marines, the integrity and the and and the uh the high moral code, uh was uh really true in the community I found with Trawlers College. When I sit with you, with our friend Chris Floor, if uh if he if he finds his uh camera before we're done, um uh and the others that uh work with us um really are authentic good people, people of integrity, and people who are important to me, love the clients. Uh uh I don't know how you feel about it, but I I am turned off by some of our practitioners, those lawyers for people, particularly in our criminal defense work, that have uh a negative view of our clients that denigrate them. That's you got that right, yeah. And uh I uh and I certainly don't like people who do that about juries. Um and I I I believe that really love does win. And if the jury understands that you love your client and you care about them and you want them uh to get the truth and to uh base it on doing the right thing rather than just me having the most compelling personality or the uh uh most mesmerizing uh uh final argument. That just by being real with them and helping them understand uh not only the facts, but also our bedrock principle, that a a defendant, a citizen walking into a court accused of a crime is presumed to be innocent, and that he or she cannot be found guilty unless by the government's evidence they establish guilt beyond any reasonable doubt by legal and competent evidence. Right? Yeah, and that that to me, if you can get them to do that, you get them to walk out and say, you know what? Yeah, she might have done it, but the government did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Uh I feel like we've really done our job for our clients and our system adjustments.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

Patrick, when did you attend the TLC? To what extent are you involved with the organization? Uh it's itself the leadership, and uh, how many of these regional groups do you join with uh each each month uh by Zoom or whatever? Because I know you're very dedicated to Chris's group. Right.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Well, uh again, it was just by happenstance, and uh ironically, it was a couple of Marines, uh a little bit younger than me, but close in time to when I served, uh, who also served a full career. They said, Hey, you know, come do this psychodrama thing with Travelers College. And uh one of the more prominent persons involved with the college was not at its end, but was at the time was uh uh a lawyer by the name of Jerry Spence, who I didn't know. Uh, I remember seeing him on uh uh that popular CNN uh talk show called Larry King as a commentator on the O.J. Simpson trial. After he was not selected to be on that team, he ended up being a commentator. But it didn't mean much to me. I I was um I'm not one for you know having idols or what have you. So but I respected the guys that recommended it, and I do really believe in always self-improvement, educating yourself. And so I said, well go. So I finally ended up going, it was in Texas, it was in um kind of smack dab in the center of Texas, in the uh the woods between Houston and Austin, and a what appeared to be an Austrian village that had been sky lifted and dropped in the middle of the woods. It would have a uh huge stone uh uh uh gothic church in the in the middle of it, similar buildings around, and a magnificent uh uh theater of dark wood and red velvet that had actually been founded by a concert pianist who had created this uh place for those in the arts, singers and musicians, what have you. And and as is often the case, we are uh we our programs are often hosted in environments like that. So I showed up and gave it a whirl, and we had a psychodrama sessions where we learned what psychodrama is and does before we learned how it applied to our work as travelers. And during that time, I had a conversation with my mother, who had passed away oh, about five years before, and uh the nature of how she passed away, I had not been there, so I had not had the opportunity to say goodbye to her, and uh that particular session allowed me to do that, and uh for those listening now to what I'm just saying, it might sound odd, it might sound uh touching, whatever, but I would say it was just miraculous how psychodrama allows you to do something that didn't even happen, but was true to your life and authentic. And I said, wow. Because one of the troubles we have with our clients and advocating for them is really getting to know them. Yes, and uh there are a lot of impediments to that for us. We tend to be quite busy and we we don't often take the time to sit down and get to know our clients well. Our clients are naturally uh scared, anxious, distrustful of the system, and we don't think of ourselves as a system, we think of ourselves as, if anything, as you know, holding the system accountable. But you know, so what we learn from psychodrama actually helps to uh break down the barriers. And I have had clients tell me uh they've never had the kind of experience that psychodrauma allowed them. If you allow me one digression, uh several years ago, I was asked to come up to Missouri to defend a uh young man accused of murder. Uh he uh the reason I was asked is because of somebody I met through trial orders college, and a case involved a person who had served in the Marine Corps returned home uh to his hometown of New Madrid, not New Madrid, New Madrid is the way they say it, Missouri, in the boot hill of that state, right on the Mississippi. And he had compensated for his terrible PTSD from combat. He had seen some horrific things uh because the VA care, veterans administration care was so inadequate that uh meth seemed to do the job. And so he was uh working blue-collar jobs and uh medicating with uh alcohol and meth. And one night, while doing that in the um uh utility building behind his home with a few others, he pulled out a pistol, put it to the temple of one of his compatriots, and pulled the trigger. So we went through his story, and he he came from uh money. There was a family that was uh dirt-rich and cash poor, and uh he had a very troubled life. His his, despite what might seem like somewhat prominence in the community, his his grandfather and relatives were plastered all over the courthouse walls because they were founders of the community. Uh, he, his father, and others were on a kind of a downward spiral spiral. And um we had him reenact scenes, and we had him reenact uh a scene of his childhood, and I won't go into it too much, part because this involves confidentiality, but it illustrated that a childhood he described as fairly normal and happy was actually quite miserable, and his one and only happy moment that he remembered from his childhood struck most of us as well uh kind of boring and if if anything peaceful, which is why it was his happiest moment. And after that session, uh we had another the next day, and the first thing he commented was it was the first good night of sleep he had ever remembered in his life. Wow, yeah. Uh it was touching and it was great. And one of the things about it was I had people join us. Max Mitchell, who was a lawyer on the other side of the state, came and joined us. Jerry Perry from Minnesota came down um to work with this psychodromist by the name of John Raspberry, who comes from Tupelo, Mississippi, uh Elvis' hometown. And um yeah, and uh uh we were actually hosted by uh uh Trial Lords College graduate who was the criminal defense lawyer in town, but was not taking the case. And it was just amazing to do that work, and and you know, one of the things about the work is you know, we often talk about it. I mean, uh, we all talk about our acquittals, you have lots of them, I I have plenty of them, but this case ended up in a resolution of a plea bargain that went from being charged with a crime of murder, which would have uh required a uh sentence of life without parole if convicted, to a second-degree uh uh uh plea agreement that got him 15 years. So with the time served and other things, he should be out fairly soon. And uh hopefully having a better life. He um I communicate with him once in a while in prison, and he's uh doing much better. Um but yeah, that's the kind of stuff that the work of the trial lawyers college does, and I I I mentioned a little bit about that group. So my work as a military lawyer uh requires me to travel, and I would go to places like Seattle, San Diego, um uh Tampa, Florida, uh, places like that. And I would want to work with my case. And I would, if I persuaded my client that investing in a psychodramatist was in his or her best interest, I would fly out a psychodramatist and we would work up the case. And uh uh I would invite other graduates of the trial lawyers college to come participate because it's group work and needs other bodies, and it it gave uh a chance for them to get together because the work in psychodrama really bond bonds people. That's right. When you go to this trial lawyers college, the almost the whole first week of the three weeks, you know, I heard back in the day it was four weeks, which is just crazy, you know, thinking of a lawyer taking three or four weeks out just to train.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

But anyways, I was there for four weeks, 1995.

SPEAKER_02 40:51

Right, you were back in the day when it really was a full month, yeah. Uh, and uh wow, yeah, and you know how it is, you just really connect with that group, and so I I still remember actually our entire class was about 54, 55 people, and we gathered for the first couple years after graduation several times a year all over the country. Um, I still remember uh I mean there's just forgive, I it spins off the side stories. My my travel to Trial Lord's College, I actually drove from Texas to Wyoming with my wife going uh about 90% of the way with me. And uh several hours uh out of our home in Texas, uh somewhere in uh north central Texas, we had a horrific accident. Some guy crossed in front of us on U.S. Highway 287 uh from the shoulder, pulled right in front of my wife without any chance to react or to, and essentially totaled the pickup truck we were in, and uh injured my wife. Luckily, uh uh not that it needed hospitalization, but she still has some problems from that. And I thought I wasn't gonna go to the trial lawyers college. This is a sign that I wasn't meant to go because we now had no means of transportation. And she said, No, you're going, we'll get out, rental and we'll get you back to the airport. I'll fly you there. I said, as it turned out, um, this is rural Texas, in typical rural Texas. The the folks were out there helping us pull out of the the weeds in the sheepfold where we uh she had to veer off and crash. And um they uh the wife of the pickup truck truck driver, I'm sorry, the tow truck driver, um took us two hours north to Amarillo, got a rental, went back, got our stuff, and kept driving, and we uh settled down that night at my sister's home in Denver, and then drove in the morning another eight hours. I put my wife on a plane and I went there. And so at the end of that three weeks, I was eagerly anticipating her return uh because we were going to drive back, and so I spent the night with my wife in the town outside the uh uh Wyoming ranch where we had Travelers College back in that day. Du Bois. Good old do yeah. Don't say Du Bois, Du Bois, yeah. And uh yeah, and uh so I had no idea what an F-Warrior was. The Travelers College had decided that they wanted to call themselves the fucking warriors. And uh the Secretary of State's office in Wyoming decided that they were not going to permit that. So they shortened it up to F warriors. And uh that was the alumni. So I heard we had a class president, she was a great lawyer, a member of our class, but I had no idea of the significance of it. And I was like, oh yeah, we get together every year. Like, awesome. And that following year, 2013, it happened to be in a little Jewish youth camp outside of Austin, Texas. And I show up, and there's 45 of our 54 classmates there. And we essentially took over the alumni uh or uh risk uh gathering and we had our own thing. And uh I still remember uh one of my roommates at Trawler's College Jason Johnson and I called and got a party bus with a stripper pole in the middle for us to dance and have a fun time. We had somebody chauffeur us around uh Austin, Texas, um uh seeing the sights. And that's the way it was. And then I said, Well, I'd like to be part of this organization. So I ran for um the board of the alumni because there are 10 regions, and each region has a couple representatives, uh, and as well as well as having uh the most recent class representatives on a board. At any rate, I ran and I lost to another Marine who was a Travelers College grad, a guy named Tod Kelly out of Austin, Texas, who I didn't know, but I've become a dear friend. So I went to the the following year, 2014 uh alumni thing, uh not as a rep, but just as another alumni. Had a great time. We in those days we were going to a hippie commune uh in Loveland, uh Colorado, that was our site, and uh so we we ate uh organic food and just had a great time uh honing our skills and working together. Then the following year, another uh uh spot opened up for representing Texas, and I ran and I was elected that time, and I showed up, and our president had decided to resign, so we didn't have an alumni president anymore. And the person who was her um uh I guess what do you call it, the the vice or the president elect was unable to attend either for health reasons, so we needed a president, and me three year out three years barely out of trialers college, and uh entirely new to the alumni board was elected. And we had a lot of work to do. Those days the alumni were having a lot of friction with the college itself. So my goal was to create a stronger organization and a uh stronger tie to the college, and we did that. I essentially served on the board two years as president-elect, essentially president, uh, then as president, and then finally as the past president. And uh really uh I think the board did some wonderful things in tying the community together, which was very important, because at the end of that six years, we were uh uh about nine months into COVID.

SPEAKER_01 47:03

Schism came.

SPEAKER_02 47:04

Yeah, and you know, they say schism, but it really wasn't that. It was a few members of a board who had a very different idea of trial lawyers college and uh what to do with the money that the graduates and alumni had given, primarily for scholarships and for helping out uh uh uh young advocates who couldn't afford to go. And they these persons who had a different vision were going to take that money and build a uh basically a monument to uh one of the founders. And uh the majority of the board said that's not a good idea, and that's a uh a violation of the trust that the alumni had put in it, and so they voted no. So those uh uh several board members who had had this vision of building a monument in this ranch of Wyoming to one of the founders and to uh you know an entirely different program that really I believe went away from the psychedelic foundings and the idea of developing the attorneys who attend his own best self as an advocate. Um they were kind of tending more towards the idea of here, become a lawyer like I am and do what I do, which was entirely contrary to the ethos of Troller's College.

SPEAKER_01 48:36

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 48:37

So the the the vast majority of alumni left. There were some, including some friends of mine, who continued to go to the ranch in Wyoming. And I understand why. Uh even though the ranch itself is really not what the college was about, there was uh uh beauty, an austerity, a peacefulness of the land, of the people, the Shoshone who arapa that live there, who would be part of our graduation ceremonies. Uh that kind of that did draw you. It kept me coming back for uh almost a decade before this all happened, but we don't go to that ranch in Wyoming anymore because of that, which is fine because we have found that Trial Lord's College lives on really because of the people and the foundational uh philosophy that comes from psychodrama, and so we continue to do that kind of work like you and I do on uh the second Saturday of every month, me primarily virtually, because I'm seldom in the beltway. Uh but uh and we try to help each other out. So John Katz or somebody else comes to the group and says, Look, I'm working on this issue in this case. Um and I I want to figure out a way to deal with it in an authentic and compelling way, and we try to help each other out. And uh that's what I do in places like like I said, uh whether it's from Seattle down to San Diego on the West Coast, it can be from Vermont and New Hampshire down to Florida on the East Coast and everywhere in between in the country, and overseas as well. Um, a little more challenging when I go overseas because there's you know not too many travelers college graduates in uh a lot of psychodrome just in Europe and Asia, but not a lot of uh travelers college graduates. So a lot of times I have to bring in military attorneys who are entirely inexperienced with the process.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

So therefore, in the last few minutes we have, because I said we've finished eight Eastern time, I go a few minutes over, if you're willing. And so I'd certainly like to have you back on because there's so many other questions I have for you. What I want to know from you is to what extent, I'm not gonna reveal what goes on at these meetings that you don't give me permission to, but to what extent do you reveal yourself at our uh gatherings at Chris Floor's office? And what gives you the courage to do that?

SPEAKER_02 51:16

Yeah. Well, I do my um my best to be raw and authentic with him. So one of the things that psychodrama does is to create a behind the connection with the participants. Um if you're not willing to open up and be real with a jury or a judge if you're having a pench trial, why would you expect them to be the same with you? If you're not real and open, authentic, and raw with your client, so that you better understand his or her story and can be a better advocate for them. If you're not that way, why would you expect them to be? So I try to lead by example, and that includes in our group work. You know, I uh uh I try to be real and go deep as soon as possible, as soon as it seems appropriate, so that the participants feel comfortable doing the same. And I think by and large it it works when we share things that are our pain, our vulnerabilities, our sins, uh, and are really open about it. Uh you find rather than rejection or repulsion, you find acceptance. Yes, and and uh connection, and dare I say love. Uh the three parts of any psychodrama work is a warm-up. You have to warm up. It's it's so important that you do something that warms up. And it and it it has to be real, it has to be something that warms us up to the work. I found even in our group that we do in the in in Maryland, uh, with the attorneys from Maryland, DC, and Virginia, that if the warm-up's just kind of a you know, kind of a trick or a a fancy, it doesn't do as well as being something real. And um certainly in our work, which does very much resemble uh my life as a Marine, there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of suffering, and there's loss. And uh we take it, I mean, I I can have a hundred acquittals, and then I have one loss, and I brood about that loss much longer than I celebrate any victory. And I think it's really important to recognize that and deal with that, because we don't want that to hamper us. We want it to be a important we don't want to be a it'd be a terminal illness. We want it to be something we grow from and we heal from. So we we share not only personal things but also our professional things we're struggling with. And uh I the trust and the bond that gets formed from that, that I hope John Katz would know if he called me up and said, Hey, I I need to work on something, I need uh let's find some time that I would do that. And I know the people have done that for me. And uh that's why uh you know just like you and I come from very disparate backgrounds, uh the the attendees of Trial Lords College uh come from a very wide range of cultures, uh religious faith, um uh uh uh upbringings, and yet there's that common bond, which interesting enough, again, hark is back to the Marine Corps. Uh when you get to the Marine Corps and they take away your civilian clothes and shave your head and put you in a squad bay, as it's I started off at Officer Canning School in Quantico, Virginia, uh with about a hundred people, I think we got it down to 150 by the time we graduated, but about 100 people just all over the country and quickly bonded trauma bonded from military training. But it's a similar thing with the uh the work we do as advocates that have been trained through the trial orders college.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

That's well said. Uh really, there's so much more I want to talk to you about, and I get the benefit of doing that even uh off camera. Uh I agree so much with the Patrick that the those bonds with the training of lawyers college attendees is really something, you know, it's it's different dynamic uh with with with each different person. Um and and and it's quite a transition to leave the training lawyers college once you first go and to go back out into the uh the world of people who haven't been there. And it's often just something in a transition from driving back from Chris's office after uh uh spilling my guts out to everyone in the effort to win from our clients, and no one else has experienced that.

SPEAKER_02 56:27

Right. I I almost wish, and you know, that prompted a thought I hadn't had before. We'll need to talk about Chris and maybe have one of these times where we plan far far enough ahead that we have a weekend where we really get into it. I don't think we'll be able to goat rope. Uh the dean of psychodramatist that often joins us, Don Carson from Maryland, uh, who is who is approaching 90 years old and you wouldn't know it, but uh said he's retired, retired. But maybe, maybe, maybe we can sweet talk him and we could have a have a weekend with Don and really, really dig deep because um working with you, Chris, Don, and all the all the guys and gals that join us is really uh rewarding and refreshing.

SPEAKER_01 57:20

I agree. Well, uh this is just the start of the conversation that I'm having in more depth with you than ever before. Uh Patrick, thank you so much, everyone. You've heard from Patrick McLean, a great man, a great trauma lawyer in Dallas, Texas. And his website is Patrick J. McLean. N C Patrick J. McLean, N-C-L-A-I-N-D-K. Check a man indefinite military lawyer, is German craft some community friends, and do you have a defence lawyer here in French Northern Virginia? This is better for the future, there is an easy domain that there is no other way.

SPEAKER_00 58:10

Thank you, Freddie.