In honor of Mother’s Day, meet Leah R. Cole mother to, Rachel G. Mahoney and Mario Gonzalez, a proud family trio of legal professionals who are all SJCL alumni! Learn more about this great family, their shared love for law and why a strong family support system like theirs is essential to being successful in law school.
Tell us about yourselves and the road that led you to SJCL.
LEAH: My father was a lawyer and I was always interested in it as a career. I ended up getting married and having a couple of children however and not going to law school until I was 28 and a single mother.
RACHEL: I was born and raised in Fresno and my mother and grandfather were both attorneys, so that’s where my interest in law came from. Also, my strengths throughout high school and college also led me to that road as well.
MARIO: I went to undergrad at Loyola Marymount University and I was a film production major. What led me to law school was the fact that my sister and future brother-in-law were enrolled at the time and I spoke to them and my mother about their experiences and that’s when I got interested, so I decided I wanted to come back to town to give it a shot.
What do you do now and how did SJCL help prepare you for your career?
LEAH: I am now a partner and owner in the law firm of Cole, Fisher, Cole and O’Keefe, a law firm my father started. My daughter Rachel Mahoney now works with me and she will be my partner very soon. We practice social security disability and worker’s compensation plaintiff work.
RACHEL: I’m an attorney at my family’s firm and I represent applicants primarily in worker’s compensation cases as well as some social security/disability cases. SJCL really helped me in that it’s a local school, the worker’s comp community is such a small, tight community and I met people in the field prior to entering law school. I’ve continued to work with people whether it’s defense attorneys or people in other capacities who went to SJCL and that gave me a common bond with them in addition to getting an excellent education.
MARIO: I’m currently an attorney at Peel and Garcia, LLP and we do defense work. I feel like so much of the battle is after school and after the bar when you’re actually practicing, but I definitely received a lot of positive encouragement at SJCL.
Why did you decide to attend SJCL?
LEAH: I didn’t want to leave town to go to law school and take my children away from their family, so I chose San Joaquin College of Law. They did an excellent job of preparing me to pass the bar and at the time I was there, they had a 78% bar passage rate!
RACHEL: I knew that I was going to be local, so I wasn’t really interested in going out of town for school and I wasn’t overly concerned with ABA-accreditation for that reason. SJCL provided a much lesser financial commitment, which was very appealing to me and ultimately helped me make my final decision to attend.
MARIO: I know a lot of people who went to SJCL including my mother, sister and brother-in-law and not only was it going to be local for me when I moved back home, people had also told me about their good experiences at SJCL. They were able to establish good careers and relationships afterward and that helps in a small town.
What was the culture like at SJCL while you were in school?
LEAH: The culture at the law school was excellent. We started with a class of more than 100 people, slightly over 30 graduated. Everyone knew everybody, was friends with everybody and helped each other. We were almost entirely second career people.
RACHEL: It was small, which was great. I knew pretty much all of my classmates and we were able to form study groups and really share in the experience. We also got together socially and the professors were very accessible, which was great. I was able to have one-on-one meetings with them and address any needs that I had quickly.
MARIO: It was interesting, everybody connects more with certain professors rather than others but the school was well run. I enjoyed the staff and in terms of the students, it can be clicky with the upper division and lower division students. But for the most part, I made a lot of great friends in school.
How beneficial are those friendships outside of the classroom during school and after graduation?
RACHEL: During school, it was important to have the resources of those people. There were lots of times when I needed another person’s perspective to make something make sense to me, so that was very helpful. Now, I work with a lot of people that were actually in my classes. One of those people is actually doing the exact same thing as me and we served in another organization together and have really been able to benefit from the relationship in terms of just treating each other well professionally and adding to our worker’s comp niche.
How influential was your mom in your decision to go to law school?
RACHEL: Oh, very much. Growing up, she did it all. She was a single mom and she was running her own firm, so it was amazing to see and I just thought that was something to admire and live up to. I always wanted to go beyond college in some capacity and have a professional degree of some sort, but she was probably the reason I even went to law school. She really provided me with a great example for what going down the legal path could do.
MARIO: She’s always been supportive of anything that I wanted to do, but everyone asked me why I wanted to go to law school and put myself through that. However, they were all extremely supportive when I made my decision to do it.
What were some of the benefits of your mom graduating from law school ahead of you?
RACHEL: Her insight and experience was very beneficial. When she did it, she had two small kids at home so I was able to talk to her and find out how she pulled that off. She had some of the professors I had, so having her know those people made things a little bit more familiar and less scary. If I ever ran into an issue, she could always identify and share her experience with me.
MARIO: There’s the obvious answer of the family reputation preceding me because I knew most people there because they knew I was Leah’s son or Rachel’s brother. I always tried to be more of the lighthearted presence in law school because a lot of the students really took themselves too seriously.
What advice did mom give you during the tough times in law school?
LEAH: I told them, it would not be from lack of brains that they would fail. If they persevered, they would succeed!
RACHEL: She always told me to keep going and there were times where it felt like it couldn’t be done, but she always believed in me and knew that I could do it. If I needed to take a break, she’d advise me to take one or if I needed to bear down she would tell me that. At the time, I lived with her so she supported me in every other aspect of my life by providing me with a home, food and just the ability to focus 100% on what I was doing.
MARIO: She would tell me “I did it, so just do it” and she was very clear about how difficult it was going to be. I remember asking her for help during an assignment on how I should go about doing it and she said “Oh no I’ve already done it, it’s your turn.” My mother and father were very tough love-oriented but they’re great supporters and what they did seems to have worked well for us.
How important is that kind of support from your family while you’re in law school?
RACHEL: It’s vital. You can’t do it without that and it’s like having kids: it takes a village. Without the people who are most important to you understanding your commitment and that “whatever it takes” attitude, it’s just not possible.
MARIO: It was invaluable and another big reason I went to SJCL. I have a great support system with my sister, brother-in-law and my parents and no matter how much everybody thought it was a crazy decision to go to law school, they supported me 100% once I committed to it. Between law school and the bar, it definitely tries to break you, so if you don’t have those people around you I don’t know how you’d get through it.
How did you balance a healthy work/school and home life?
LEAH: Looking back, I really have no idea how I balanced it all. My children were four and one when I started law school and I worked as well as going to school. I was lucky to have a lot of help from my family and friends.
RACHEL: I tried to give myself downtime at the end of each day, whether it was half an hour or so. I just needed that time to decompress and I usually would spend that time just talking with my then-boyfriend and mom or whomever was around. I attended regular exercise classes and made that a priority and I knew that if my mental/emotional health wasn’t in the right place, then I wasn’t going to be able to sit down and be productive. I have a tendency to sit there until I get something done and there are times when you just have to step away because you’re not focused and you need to get to a better place before you come back to it.
MARIO: There’s really no healthy balance. I think the only way I kept sane was by working out six days a week and that was a big release of physical stress.
What was your favorite part of law school?
LEAH: I very much enjoyed what I was learning in school, but it was the camaraderie with fellow students and professors, who were quite accessible, that I enjoyed the most!
RACHEL: The feeling of overcoming that hurdle and that great feeling of accomplishment. When I started law school, both of my parents were sick and I was stressed about life in general. So I started it off on the wrong foot and law school was challenging for me every step of the way. Honestly, every time I passed a test or got some reinforcement that I was doing well, it made me a stronger person then and even today because I overcame those challenges.
MARIO: Definitely when I started to figure out how to take the exams. For better or worse, you just really don’t know how to take the exams for a while and the way law school tests your knowledge is very unlike anything else you’ve ever done in terms of performance. So my favorite part was when I kept going to help sessions on writing essays and learning how to answer things with a legal response. I just kept working with my professors and when I started to figure that out, I was very excited because I knew I had a chance to succeed.
How proud are you that your family has become so successful in their legal careers?
RACHEL: Extremely proud, especially now that I’m out here and have been practicing for several years because I know that that’s not the same story for everyone. I definitely don’t take that for granted and the people in my life who are successful have done it through a lot of hard work and perseverance, so I’m very proud of that.
MARIO: Extremely proud. It’s a hell of a lot to live up to but there’s a lot of pride that comes from knowing we all went to SJCL and we were able to embark on a successful career afterward. It’s not easy to achieve and it still blows my mind that it’s worked out this way.
If you had to do law school all over again, what would you do differently?
RACHEL: I probably would try to do it in three years instead of four just to get it done. Maybe I say that now because I’ve gotten a little bit better with my time and stress management, but I felt like during that fourth year I was a little bit burnt out and ready to be done.
MARIO: Honestly, it’s something I would want done differently rather than what I would have done differently. There needs to be more of a focus on how to answer bar essay questions and MBEs from day one. There’s no reason why some portion of time shouldn’t be dedicated to that from the beginning. It’s the hardest thing when you graduate to be bombarded with complex multiple choice questions, the bar graders are going to grade your essays completely differently and you have to get in the amount of practice necessary. It’s very difficult, so if you were doing practice MBEs and exposing yourself to questions and answers from past bar exams, which are all available online, you’d be so much more prepared once you took the bar exam. I think more of the focus in the beginning is on how to brief a case and that’s good to know, but it gets pounded into the ground. I would tell students to start preparing for the bar from day one, even if it were only for an hour a week.
What advice do you have for future students who are considering going to law school?
RACHEL: Try to get some exposure to the practice of law itself before making a final decision. I had the opportunity to work in our family’s law office from a young age, so I had that but I think a lot of people don’t know exactly what it’s going to entail. So they go to school and put in all the blood, sweat and tears and graduate, but they don’t really know what they’re getting into. So definitely try to get some exposure so you can know for sure if it’s really the path you want to go down.
MARIO: Honestly, I had a lot of people tell me not to go because it’s so hard. But the real response I’d give is to make sure that’s what you want to do. People go into law school in a loose fashion sometimes to try it out, but you’re going to put yourself through mental anguish and financial debt that will take a while to recover from so make sure it’s what you want to do. It’s a very serious decision and I would never discourage anyone from going, but just really think about it.
What would you like to tell mom after all her years of support for you?
RACHEL: What she’s given to me as a mom and as an attorney is invaluable and has shaped me into the person I am today. Now I’m a mom and I’m doing what she did, albeit with help, but I would just say thank you for always providing an example of a mom who does it all but also a professional who is successful and performs her job with the utmost integrity, regardless of how many hours she has to put in or what she has to do. She always puts her clients first and that’s really provided a wonderful example for me.
MARIO: I would love to tell her that there’s no way I could have ever done it without her. She’s been such a great example from the beginning and even before I ever knew I wanted to go to law school. I always saw by example all of her hard work over the years, from going to law school while she was raising us to the late hours she kept while still taking care of her responsibilities in raising us. When I look back on it, it provides this tremendous catalog of all these wonderful things she was able to do and her perseverance in all of that. So I would thank her for setting such a wonderful example for me.
Want to learn more about San Joaquin College of Law, sit in on a class or set up an appointment to discuss your law school future? Contact our Admissions Counselor, Francisco "Javier" Rosas today!