Lawyers Who Learn

Brett Tanferani spent 21 years at the FBI chasing espionage and counterterrorism threats. Now he's sounding the alarm on something bigger: Q Day, the moment quantum computing renders modern encryption obsolete, may have just arrived.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Tanferani, a former FBI assistant special agent in charge now working in cybersecurity incident response, ransomware, and digital forensics. Tanferani breaks down what quantum computing actually does, why it accelerates AI learning exponentially, and how Japan's August 2025 announcement of a fully operational quantum computing stack may mark the threshold moment the security world feared. He explains "AI harvesting," the practice of nation-state actors stockpiling encrypted data today with the expectation that quantum computing will eventually crack it open, exposing everything from stolen medical records to defense secrets thought safely locked away for years.
Tanferani also traces his own path from a rejected federal job applicant to a two-decade FBI career spanning counterintelligence, post-9/11 counterterrorism, and cyber operations against nation-states, along with lessons on decentralized leadership drawn from General Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams.
For attorneys advising clients on data security, incident response, or regulatory compliance, Tanferani's warning is a call to rethink what "safely encrypted" really means going forward.
Browse Brett Tanferani’s Lawline CLE Courses → https://www.lawline.com/lawyer/brett-tanferaniBrowse All Lawline CLE Courses → https://www.lawline.com/cle/coursesLawyers Who Learn Podcast → https://linktr.ee/lawyerswholearn
Connect with Brett Tanferani (Guest) → http://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-tanferani-2081309Connect with David Schnurman (Host) → https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschnurman/
Lawyers Who Learn explores how lifelong learning powers attorneys' growth. New episodes weekly.

Jennifer McCoy just watched a federal investigation into her client vanish without explanation, the second one this year. It's a small mercy in an unusually turbulent moment for white collar law, one she says she's never seen in her career.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with McCoy, a partner at Troutman Pepper Locke in Dallas whose four Lawline courses with co-instructor Paul Coggins, the firm's former U.S. Attorney, have reached more than three thousand attorneys. McCoy focuses on white collar government investigations and antitrust, work she stumbled into after turning down a summer associate offer and nearly abandoning big law altogether.
She traces her path from a Dallas courtroom's seven-week healthcare fraud trial to Jindal, the first criminal prosecution of wage-fixing as an antitrust violation, and into her latest Lawline course, "Increased Scrutiny of Grand Jury Proceedings." There, she breaks down how subpoenas tied to Jerome Powell, James Comey, and Letitia James have been quashed or dismissed, and why so-called "no bills" have surged this year, evidence, she argues, of a grand jury process increasingly bent toward political ends rather than genuine investigation.
McCoy also shares what drew her to teaching, the niche lessons her students bring back to her, and the books, from Atomic Habits to Everything's Tuberculosis, shaping how she thinks. Her insights offer legal professionals a rare, practitioner's view of how prosecutorial discretion and public pressure now collide inside the grand jury room.
 
Browse Jennifer McCoy’s Lawline CLE Courses → https://www.lawline.com/lawyer/jennifer-mccoyBrowse All Lawline CLE Courses → https://www.lawline.com/cle/coursesLawyers Who Learn Podcast → https://linktr.ee/lawyerswholearn
Connect with Jennifer McCoy (Guest) → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifermccoy2/Connect with David Schnurman (Host) → https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschnurman/
Lawyers Who Learn explores how lifelong learning powers attorneys' growth. New episodes weekly.

Somewhere in his 40s, Doug Brown made a deliberate decision. He was not going to be the version of himself at 60 who wondered whether he'd ever gotten where he wanted to go. He's 60 now, and the work he does with clients is the work he had to do for himself first.
The questioning started much earlier. As an associate under 30, Brown looked at the partners twenty and thirty years ahead of him — tired, overworked, quietly unhappy — and asked whether that was really the goal. His answer drove three decades of deliberate change: corporate counsel, executive director of the Connecticut Bar Association, MBA program chair at the Baldrige School of Business, and eventually South Carolina, where he built a coaching practice helping law firm owners get past what stopped him — grinding harder instead of asking for help — and build firms that don't depend on them..
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Brown, whose nine Lawline courses have logged over ten thousand completions with a 4.9-star average. Brown unpacks the "upper limit problem," the phenomenon where success triggers a cortisol response that pushes high achievers to unconsciously sabotage their own progress. He traces it back to his own diagnosis of high-functioning ADHD at 54, an experience that reframed decades of self-imposed grinding and burnout. Rather than teaching lawyers more information, Brown focuses on what actually keeps them stuck: permission, not knowledge.
It's also why he now works almost exclusively with law firm owners on succession, firm transitions, and what comes next — the people who built successful firms and are now asking what happens to them. His approach is deliberately unconventional for a coach. He doesn't reflect questions back and ask what you think. He tells clients which plays will work for them and gives them a two-week playbook — and is on-call if they get stuck.
Brown's candor about mental health, reinvention, and redefining success in the second half of a legal career offers listeners a rare, practical roadmap. For attorneys feeling stuck, burned out, or quietly wondering if there's a different way to build a sustainable career, Brown's journey shows what's possible on the other side.
BrowseDoug Brown’s Lawline CLE Courses → https://www.lawline.com/lawyer/doug-brown-2Browse All Lawline CLE Courses → https://www.lawline.com/cle/coursesLawyers Who Learn Podcast → https://linktr.ee/lawyerswholearn
Connect with Doug Brown (Guest) → https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasbrown/Connect with David Schnurman (Host) → https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschnurman/
Lawyers Who Learn explores how lifelong learning powers attorneys' growth. New episodes weekly.

Valena Beety spent her early career as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C.—until a single funeral changed everything. Meeting an exoneree whose mother had just passed after fighting eighteen years for his freedom, Beety realized she wanted to be part of that grace, not the system that had denied it.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Beety, a professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law and a Lawline faculty member since 2024, whose course tackles the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people. Beety traces her path from federal prosecutor to Mississippi Innocence Project attorney, founding director of the West Virginia Innocence Project, and now educator and author. She unpacks devastating case studies—including a daycare worker sentenced to over a century in prison on flawed child pornography charges tied to her queer identity, and the San Antonio Four, women wrongly convicted amid satanic-panic hysteria. These stories ground the term Beety coined herself: "pink crime," charges rooted fundamentally in gender bias, from stillbirths prosecuted as murder to drag performances treated as criminal acts.
Drawing on her books Manifesting Justice and the newly released Pink Crime, Beety shows how identity-based prosecution persists across decades and how litigators, students, and communities chip away at injustice case by case.
For defense attorneys, civil rights practitioners, and anyone representing vulnerable clients, Beety's work offers a framework for recognizing bias hiding in plain sight within the criminal legal system.

Rebecca Moll Freed knew she wanted to be a lawyer in high school, the moment mock trial replaced a childhood plan to become a pediatrician. A college internship in the Clinton White House sealed the deal, showing her that law, politics, and business could actually intersect for a living.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Freed, a Lawline faculty member since 2016 whose courses have reached more than 6,000 attorneys, about the deliberate path that took her from Georgetown Law to partner at CSG Law.
Freed breaks down "pay-to-play" laws in plain English: rules meant to stop government contracts from going to the highest campaign donor instead of the most qualified bidder, and the murky, high-stakes gray area companies navigate around lobbying, gifts, and procurement to protect their eligibility for that work. She traces her break into the field to a chance pairing with a partner on a New Jersey gubernatorial election and transition, as her first assignment out of law school, and reflects on building a specialized practice while raising two kids who later followed her to Georgetown themselves. Along the way, she pushes back on the idea that getting ahead requires an edge, arguing that kindness and good manners are entirely compatible with ambition.

When a hiring partner warned Gina Nicotera he wouldn't take on someone who didn't know what ERISA stood for, she admitted she'd never heard the term and won the job anyway. Fifteen years later, that willingness to learn on the fly has carried her from a biomedical engineering dropout to a senior labor and employment attorney, where she now helps employers navigate an entirely new set of risks: workplace harassment fueled by AI.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Nicotera about a career shaped by trial, error, and curiosity, from switching majors after a rough semester of multivariable calculus to building a practice representing restaurants, hospitality groups, and manufacturers in employer-side disputes.
Nicotera unpacks how AI is reshaping her caseload: employees weaponizing deepfakes against coworkers, HR screening tools that can inadvertently filter out candidates by race, and the discovery risks of feeding confidential data into open AI systems. Much of her work, she says, amounts to therapy, coaching anxious HR professionals through difficult conversations before they escalate into litigation. She credits her growth to treating every detour, including an abandoned engineering major, as data rather than defeat, and to building a network of mentors along the way.

Eran Kahana uses AI carefully and sparingly, having watched it produce polished text that passes for insight until it doesn’t. An eighteen-year Stanford Law fellow and AI governance partner at Maslon LLP, he treats AI less like a ghostwriter and more like a sparring partner he interrogates and never fully trusts.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Kahana, whose ten Lawline courses on AI governance, copyright, and privacy have logged nearly ten thousand completions, about a career built on "staying hungry." One rejected conference proposal in the late 2000s led, through a chance introduction, to an eighteen-year Stanford fellowship shaping how the law thinks about AI.
Kahana unpacks the money question underneath every AI copyright fight, how ordinary shopping data becomes health data once AI starts inferring from it, and why he juggles five AI models like a conductor rather than one assistant. His current project, a 37-principle "restatement" of AI's life cycle, exists because he talks to his own framework daily, pushing it to critique him back, guided by a martial arts philosophy: ten thousand changes, no surprises. For lawyers unsettled by AI's pace, his point isn't mastering one tool. It's staying disciplined, curious, and willing to be wrong, a distinction that will only matter more as AI redefines legal expertise.

Beth wrote a college thesis on affordable housing and voucher programs, then watched her legal career zigzag in the opposite direction—straight into Big Law real estate finance. It took one transaction involving Boston's inclusionary housing rules to reconnect her with the mission she'd nearly left behind, sending her from corporate associate to city government attorney to partner at a firm representing lenders who finance affordable housing across New York City.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, sits down with Beth to trace that career arc and unpack what's shaping New York's affordable housing landscape today. Beth breaks down how the city is creatively repurposing public land, speeding up the notoriously slow ULURP approval process, and even mismatching income bands to rent bands so units stay genuinely affordable. She also explains the pressure developers face under proposed rent freezes, why she took a steep pay cut to join NYC's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and how that hands-on government experience became the foundation for the CLE courses she now teaches on Lawline.
The conversation moves beyond policy into what fueled Beth's willingness to take risks: writing down her goals, seeking out mentors willing to teach her, and paying that mentorship forward through teaching. Beth and David also trade book recommendations, from parenting strategies to Barbara Kingsolver novels, rounding out a portrait of a lawyer whose winding career path led her exactly where her college thesis once predicted.

Erin Colgan was a 25 year old new prosecutor and seven months pregnant with her first child when she watched the horrific events of 9/11 on a small television from the Richmond County Criminal Courhouse. She explains this as completely surreal, and repeatedly paged her father, a Port Authority Police Inspector and commander of the World Trade Center who had survived the collapse. That morning would eventually shape a career built around representing police officers and firefighters and their spouses equally, with Erin in a unique position to understand the culture and the issues affecting these families in divorce. Later, she came to understand the importance of their retirement benefits and how best to address them professionally.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Erin Colgan about a wave of NYPD and FDNY retirements now colliding with rising divorce rates among first responders in their 40s and 50s. Erin describes representing these members and their spouses as a calling. As Tier 2 hires from the late 1990s reach retirement, their pensions, often the family's largest asset, become the center of emotionally fraught divorces, especially when disability or line of duty injury is involved. She sees it as imperative that both sides of these cases get precise, complete information about what is actually at stake with regard to their retirement benefits, not just a passing reference to the pension. Erin also breaks down the approaching September 11th certification deadline tied to the 25th anniversary of the attacks, and the stigma that has kept officers and firefighters from calling themselves disabled even as new conditions surface decades later. Ten years ago, she co-founded Northstar QDRO to help attorneys draft the QDROs and DROs courts require.
Erin's path, from assistant DA to solo practitioner to firm partner and entrepreneur, shows how personal history can sharpen professional purpose. She credits a book about forgiveness after tragedy with shaping how she handles even the most contentious negotiations.
For family law attorneys, Erin's story is a reminder that deep expertise grows from lived experience, and that teaching what you know multiplies its impact far beyond the courtroom.

Venable didn't have a political law practice when Ron Jacobs started there. Growing up in a blue-collar family in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jacobs once dreamed of public service before law school pulled him toward a career in the law instead. His early years as an associate bounced him between FTC, FCC, international trade work, and nonprofit associations, with campaign finance creeping in little by little t. By the time Jacobs made senior associate, colleagues were already routing anything political his way. The firm noticed, and let him build a practice around it, a rare move in Big Law.
In this episode of Lawyers Who Learn, host David Schnurman, CEO of Lawline, talks with Jacobs, now at Venable for 25 years, about how that practice came together and everything that's grown out of it since.
Citizens United sits at the center of the conversation: how it reshaped campaign finance law, and why contribution limits keep getting worked around rather than enforced, in Jacobs's view. AI tools like ChatGPT and Harvey are already changing his day-to-day work, a shift Jacobs discusses candidly alongside his years teaching political law courses for Lawline, work rooted in lessons from mentors earlier in his career. Raising three kids while making partner comes up too, along with the books, including White Shoe and The Man to See, that shaped how he thinks about building something that lasts.
Twenty-five years in, Jacobs's path shows what happens when a practice area gets built by one person's persistence rather than handed down.