Heather S. Orr

About the Author

I’ve known that I wanted to be a lawyer since I was five years old. So much about the profession attracted me—the nobility, the intellectual challenge, and even its adversarial nature. I set my course in that direction, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School twenty years later. I actually liked law school, as well as my fellow law students and professors. So when I heard the repeated cliché that lawyers were egotistical, unethical and greedy I didn’t worry; those stories seemed exaggerated in the face of the people I had grown to respect in the field.

However, when I actually started practicing law—getting my start in BigLaw where I was litigating against all types of lawyers—I found myself in a different world than I anticipated. The cliché of the greedy lawyer was a reality, and yet I found the attorneys at my firm to be respectable and ethical. It turned out that the legal profession and its practitioners weren’t easily reduced to stereotypes, and there was no clear model for what kind of lawyer one should be to obtain success and happiness. And so I spent the next ten years navigating this unpredictable field, often learning lessons the hard way.

And then I found—or rather created—the practice that five-year-old me had dreamt about: full of excitement, challenge and even nobility. When I became an adjunct law professor, I realized that many of my students were as lost as I had been upon entering this complex, daunting and rapidly changing field. Thus, the inspiration for this book was born, my meager attempt to provide a little insight and guidance to those who might one day make the practice of law more useful for clients and more rewarding for its practitioners.

This practice also granted me the freedom and financial resources to pursue my other passions. I’m a skydiver and am approaching my 400th jump. I practice yoga daily and run several times a week. I travel frequently and play softball as much as I can. And I volunteer and provide pro bono legal services for animal rescues and nonprofits. My practice brings me back and forth between Los Angeles and San Diego, but when I’m at home in San Diego I’m usually enjoying a home-cooked vegan meal with my partner, his kids, and our chiweenie (half Chihuahua, half dachshund). I live in a near constant state of gratitude for all of the joy in my life and can only hope that my books contribute to other’s ability to find the same.

You can contact me at HSOrr@SpoonfulofSugarPublishing.com with questions, comments or to arrange speaking engagements. If you enjoyed this book, I would appreciate it if you would post a review online.