memoranda

Vance Everett and Gary Buckway

In the early days of byu Law, doing research meant pulling books from the shelves of the law library, taking notes required pen and paper, and submitting papers involved using the Law School’s in-house copy center. The technology landscape of legal education and the legal profession has seen enormous change in the nearly 50 years that have followed, and innovations in technology continue to increase in speed and scope.

For byu Law, innovation is not just a reality; it’s a priority. Dean D. Gordon Smith has said, “I want byu to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.”

For over four decades, a team of information and technology experts has helped ensure that byu Law keeps pace with innovations that impact the law school experience. We spoke to two veterans of that team about how technology at the Law School has changed during their tenure.

Four Decades of Technology Innovation at BYU Law

BY RACHEL EDWARDS

From Mainframes to PCs

In 1981 the Law School acquired its first large-scale mainframe computer: the vax 11/750. At the time, Vance Everett was completing a year-long programming project on what would later be known as Capsoft, a legal document automation software developed by byu Law professors Larry Farmer and Stanley Neeleman. Everett, who eventually became systems manager at byu Law, had recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree from byu’s computer science program and was recruited to manage the vax system.

According to Everett, the vax (short for virtual address extension) was a superminicomputer, with less memory than today’s average cell phone. “It wasn’t a lot of storage for an entire law school,” says Everett. “The vax had terminals which were placed at strategic places such as secretary offices, faculty offices, and the library. That’s how computing was done,” he said. “In the early days my focus was on managing the vax and verifying that backups were done properly. I would constantly be checking that the system was up and running and meeting the needs of the Law School.”

In 1991 the Law School replaced the vax with a PC network running NetWare, a Novell operating system. Gary Buckway, then the Law School’s systems librarian, who had earned a master’s degree in information systems from byu, assisted Everett with the transition.

Buckway recalls the handson work required in implementing the first PC network. “The vax used phone lines that had been installed by byu,” he says. “When it came time to install the

bradley slade PC network, Vance and I were up in the ceilings pulling cables. We had our own equipment, so when we needed to do any kind of modification or move things around, it was up to us. I ran cables through all the different floors of the building. Moving from the vax to the PC network was the first big challenge we faced.”

An essential aspect of Buckway’s job in the beginning was training users on new equipment. “Over time,” he says, “we moved from floppy drives to hard drives to a server. Each system required a different way of thinking, and our job was to help everyone make the change to the new system.”

Everett adds, “Back in those days the hardware was extremely expensive, and we couldn’t buy enough for everyone. It had to be parceled out to those who had the greatest need. As technology prices dropped, we were able to do more. Eventually we installed servers, put PCs and Macs in different offices, and created a network.”

Creating Open Dialogue

One constant Everett and Buckway have found through the years of ever-changing technology is the importance of effective communication. “A lot of technology professionals don’t prioritize communication,” says Everett. “They prefer to sit in a back room and program, saying, ‘We know what everybody needs. We’re just going to do it and make everybody use it.’ Gary and I have always been the opposite. We love to stop by offices that are open and ask whether there are any technology concerns and, if so, find out what we can do to resolve them.”

Another way Everett and Buckway have sought to maintain an open dialogue about technology is through the Computer Committee. “We created the committee as a focus group that included four or five faculty members and an assistant dean,” says Everett. “Over the years we’ve held regular ‘brown-bag’ lunches to discuss the technology-related requirements and concerns of the faculty.” These discussions have been a crucial way for the technology department to keep tabs on the Law School’s needs.

Moving In-House

By the late 1990s, the Law School decided to transition to new record-keeping systems. “The systems used by byu’s main campus worked well for undergraduates but not as well for graduate programs,” Everett says. “It became necessary for us to develop our own student record, admissions, and career services systems, so we went into the business of designing things.”

At that time, byu Law hired a new systems librarian, David Armond, enabling Buckway to focus on the Law School’s network. Eventually he would be named the byu Law IT manager. “Originally, most of the technology positions were run through the library, but now they operate separately,” Buckway says. “Anything that relates to scanning or digitizing documents for their collections and the main card catalog is handled by the systems librarian. Our team oversees the computers and servers used by faculty and staff.”

Designing an in-house system for the Law School was a game changer for the technology department. “I could sleep at night because we didn’t have to worry about outside things we had no control over,” Everett says. With the changes, it became easier to manage the administrative data of the Law School. Everett explains, “Over the years, we have developed a system specifically tailored to help students, faculty, and staff get their jobs done. We want to do anything we can to make processes easier and more efficient and to help our community accomplish its goals. That’s what it’s all about.”

A class recording system architected by the IT team also simplified processes for students and faculty. “Since the early days of the Law School, we have recorded classes—with professors’ permission,” says Everett. “It makes it very easy for students to be able to go back and listen to the course material.” Initially, classes were recorded using cassette tapes, which were copied by the media services department and made available to students for $1 per cassette. “When we realized we could record using computers, we did that and made the recordings available to students on the server. These are the kinds of things we learned to develop in house to help the students.”

A Culture of Innovation

byu Law’s IT team, along with members of the larger byu Law community, has anticipated the changing needs of the Law School and helped create a culture that supports innovative technology solutions. “Many years ago, we invested in Polycom (a large videoconferencing manufacturer) and made several of our courses Polycom capable,” Everett says.

Everett credits Larry Farmer with having the “tremendous foresight” to introduce the Law School to Zoom several years before it became a mainstream tool. “When covid-19 hit, we were very Zoom friendly because we’d been using the technology for years,” he says. “All we had to do was help faculty get used to the idea that they could teach their classes via Zoom. We purchased a lot of cameras, but we already had the software in place.” A supportive faculty and deanery facilitated a quick transition.

“Our team was present at the Law School full-time during the covid-19 shutdown,” Buckway says. “We needed to ensure that all the classrooms were set up for virtual instruction, and as the faculty got more comfortable using Zoom from home, we were here to provide support and manage any problems. Our students were able to move right along with their coursework.”

Both Everett and Buckway retired in 2021 after a combined tenure of 76 years at byu Law School, passing the torch to a new team of technology specialists—including David Pratt, a systems architect, and Israel Silva, a full stack developer— who will pick up where Everett and Buckway left off. Through the decades of change since they joined byu Law, Everett and Buckway have been integral to keeping the Law School on the forefront of advancing technologies. “It’s like being a carpenter,” Everett says. “In order to build things, you need to have tools. Our tools are technology skills.”

Buckway adds, “Over the years, we have learned how to do new things—how to adapt. That’s the nature of the job.”

Making Meaningful Change Now

A Leadership Fellow in Action

BY RACHEL EDWARDS

Being a leader means having a vision and working with others in pursuit of that vision to achieve a great result,” says Brooke Gledhill Wood, a 3L at byu Law. Wood was selected as one of six leadership fellows for the 2021–22 school year and serves as president of byu Women in Law (wil). These opportunities have helped her to “strengthen the muscle of leadership,” she says, and have affirmed that law school was the right path for her to take.

“A law degree is a leadership degree, a platform for making meaningful change in the community,” Wood says. “My legal education is preparing me to recognize and analyze problems and to develop solutions to those problems in order to help other people. That’s why I came to law school.”

Leading Out as a Fellow

The Leadership Fellowship is one component of byu Law’s Inspiring Leadership Initiative, a program launched in 2019 under the direction of Dean D. Gordon Smith. “Law students are graduating into an increasingly complex and unpredictable world,” Smith says. “The purpose of the initiative is to equip students with the insights that will inform their work and their lives after law school.”

Each year, a select number of students are designated as leadership fellows and given the opportunity to be mentored by byu Law’s Council of Inspiring Leaders, a donor group that supports leadership initiatives at the Law School, including the Annual Law and Leadership Conference, the Leadership Study Tour, and the Leadership Fellowship. “The goal is to challenge students to think critically about leadership and to develop their own ideas about ethical leadership as members of the legal profession,” Smith says.

For Wood, being selected as a leadership fellow has validated her desire to use her legal education to effect social change. “I came to law school with the hope that I could gain a set of skills that would enable me to add value to an organization that is making positive change,” she says. “I’m very mission driven. I’m less concerned about what type of work I’m doing for an organization and more interested in what the organization is achieving as a whole. As long as I feel motivated about the impact an organization is seeking, I feel ready to get on board.”

As a first-generation college graduate and soon to be the first attorney in her family, Wood says that the leadership fellowship has been an incredible boost to her confidence. “I’m connecting with so many people from across the state and country who are interested in causes I care about,” she says. “It’s amazing to be aligned with these individuals and to step into a role where I’m not only learning from them but can contribute something as well.”

Applying Her Law Skills

In September 2021, Wood put the skills she is developing as a law student and a leadership fellow into action when she became involved with a Utah nonprofit known as the Policy Project, an organization focused on advancing healthy, long-term policy at a local and national level. “I saw an Instagram post from the group about one of their focus issues, the Utah Period Project, which is a campaign aimed at promoting menstrual equity in the state of Utah by—among other things—repealing the tampon tax and increasing access to period products in Utah’s public and charter schools,” says Wood. “I felt this might be a great Utah issue that a group of future women lawyers could get involved in.”

Wood contacted the founder, Emily Bell McCormick, inviting her to speak at a wil event at the Law School. She subsequently began attending weekly meetings with McCormick and the other founders of the Policy Project. Wood volunteered to help the organization with their founding documents and application for 501(c)(3) status and later received an official invitation to join the board. Since that time, she has become actively involved in all aspects of the Utah Period Project.

“When it comes to period poverty and menstrual equity issues in Utah, many people are unaware that any problem exists,” Wood says. But the statistics tell a different story. According to the Utah Period Project’s website, 46 percent of women in poverty have chosen between purchasing a meal or purchasing period products, and 25 percent of teenage girls can’t afford to purchase menstrual products.

School-age girls are at the highest risk for mis- or undermanaged menstruation as almost all begin their periods before they are able to legally work (90 percent menstruate by age 13), and they rarely have control over family finances or the ability to drive to a store to purchase period products. Lack of access to period products leads to missed school, health risks, lower confidence, shame, embarrassment, and missing out on myriad beneficial programs thoughtfully put in place for students. [“The Period Project,” the Policy Project, accessed December 13, 2021, thepolicy project.org/theperiodproject.]

In addition to working to advance legislation that would repeal the tax on period products in Utah (adding them to a category of products deemed medically necessary, which currently includes Rogaine, Band-Aids, Viagra, and Advil), the group is campaigning for the Utah Legislature to

Brooke Gledhill Wood

increase access to free, safe, and good-quality menstrual products in female and allgender bathrooms in public and charter schools throughout the state.

“This is an issue that is fixable but that we are just not paying attention to. That’s why I’m so excited to be involved,” says Wood. She says this “smart, ground-up approach” to fixing problems in Utah is exactly the type of work she wants to be doing. “We are a scrappy organization, essentially a group of five or six women getting together each week with a startup mentality, asking, ‘What skills do you have to offer, and what do you have time for this week?’”

Wood is in a business organization lab at byu Law this semester, learning about bylaws and articles of incorporation— information she has used to inform her work with the Policy Project. “I’m definitely learning on my feet, but it’s been nice to see that what I’m learning is so helpful and applicable,” she says.

Bringing Awareness to the Issue

On November 11, 2021, the Policy Project hosted a symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah, in an effort to spread awareness about period poverty and to create a broad coalition of support among nonprofit leaders and policy influencers from across the state. Speakers included Diana Nelson, global advocacy director for Days for Girls; Jennifer Weiss-Wolf from the nyu Center for Justice and author of Periods Gone Public; and Susan Madsen, founder of the Utah Women & Leadership Project. Wood helped organize and also spoke at the conference, sharing information she learned while researching period poverty for her 3L substantive writing paper.

“This issue transcends age, race, and socioeconomic status in a way that few issues do because it’s connected to biology,” Madsen says. “Historically, periods and menstruation have been taboo subjects, but as the stigma lessens, each state is deciding how to handle menstrual equity issues. Utah was one of the first territories to allow women to vote and the first to elect a female state senator. It is our heritage to lead out on these issues and to pass these laws that benefit women.”

In addition to increasing community awareness around period poverty in the state, the Policy Project board is working with Representative Karianne Lisonbee on a bill that proposes adding period products to Utah’s ongoing school budget, which already covers toilet paper and paper towels in school bathrooms.

“We have had multiple meetings with distributors and have researched the best supply options. We want to have answers to all the potential questions and to mark the path of least resistance by the time this bill gets introduced,” Wood says. “We recognize that there needs to be an educational component during the rollout, and we are working to mitigate any misuse of the product. We don’t want girls to feel that they need to stockpile products. We want them to understand that these are always available.”

The initiative has garnered enthusiastic support from Utah’s business community, including private sponsorships from the Larry H. & Gail Miller Family Foundation and the Andrus Family Foundation, which have donated funds to cover the costs of purchasing dispensers for period products in all public and charter schools.

Wood says that while life as a 3L can be hectic, she has no regrets about her decision to become involved in the Utah Period Project. “There is a heartbreaking element to this story. There are so many women and girls who struggle with this issue, with access to period products and management strategies that allow them to be truly productive in their lives,” she says. “On the flipside, it is such an empowering issue because it is solvable. It is an issue where you can make a big impact in a short amount of time.”

Wood is certain that her time at byu Law and the opportunity she has had to serve as a leadership fellow and assist with the Policy Project are helping prepare her for whatever the future brings. “There is something about the way we are trained in law school that helps us to understand the bigger picture, to see the holes and to come up with solutions to fix those problems,” says Wood. “It’s easy to be aware of many issues, but for me, leadership means stepping up and taking ownership of part of a problem and putting your skill set to work solving it. I’m very grateful for the donors who have made the leadership fellowship possible. It’s been an exciting opportunity.”

Unexpected Opportunities

Stories from three byu Law alumni whose careers have unfolded in unplanned and unexpected ways.

Winding Path, Bright Future

nicole thomas durrant, ’00

The year 2000 was a banner year for me. I graduated from byu Law School, passed the bar, bought my first suit, and got married. I was working for a small firm in Salt Lake City, and the job felt like a golden opportunity. I was doing work that I liked—erisa litigation for healthcare and disability plans— and the hours were reasonable. I made close connections with my colleagues, and I had a mentor who guided me with attention and care. I even managed to work through two pregnancies and the baby years.

All seemed to be going according to plan—until the wheels slowly started coming off. My two sons were diagnosed with a rare, chronic illness. I found out I was pregnant with my third child. We bought a fixer-upper house. And my husband started working longer hours with his job. It was all too much. My stress levels were sky high, and my family was not doing well. My husband was very supportive of my continuing to work, but in the end, I decided to leave my job and focus on our family.

In certain ways, leaving my job was the best choice. I was able to lower my stress, help my kids get the medical care they needed, and be there when the tile guy showed up. But it bothered me that I wasn’t practicing law. I stopped telling people I was an attorney. When my occupation did come up—often at school pickup when I was in yesterday’s yoga pants, a Hogwarts T-shirt, and flip flops—I could see people’s confusion. They would always ask with concern why I didn’t go back to work. It was one of the questions I asked myself often.

Was I a feminist sellout? Why had I worked so hard just to sit at home and make cookies for my kids? Couldn’t I hire a nanny, “lean in,” and have it all? But with high childcare costs, numerous medical visits, a newly discovered radon problem in the basement, and complicated insurance claims, the answer was no. So I took on odd jobs: I worked yard duty at my kids’ school, I taught English to adults, and I worked as a librarian. And I took writing classes at our local community college. I kept reminding myself that Sandra Day O’Connor took five years off to raise her sons, and look where she ended up.

Years later, when my children were older and in better health and when my husband’s job was in a good place, I tried to relaunch my career. I bought a new suit and rehearsed what to say about the lost years on my résumé. I was hired by a small firm to practice immigration law part-time. I was excited. A month later, I received a call that my son had been in a boating accident and had suffered a serious concussion. His recovery was long, involving various therapies, doctor visits, and medications. I quit my new job and homeschooled him for a year.

Miraculously, my son made a full recovery, and once again I found myself searching for a job. I was hired as a legal intern for Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit organization that helps asylum seekers at the Mexican border near San Diego. As a legal intern, I have learned the complicated tangles of asylum law and have been able to offer real help to refugees. I am incredibly grateful to have a new chance to do work that is so meaningful to me.

Even though I have been an attorney for more than 20 years, my résumé is riddled with holes. Yet despite my setbacks, I am trying to approach my new beginnings in life with humility. For many years, I felt like I was weak for quitting my job to take care of my family. But after recently reconnecting with old law school friends, I have found I am not alone in taking a different career path than the one I imagined in 2000. Along the twists and turns, I have been able to use my skills to help my family and the people in my community. I am trying to give myself grace and to acknowledge that I did the best I could. I don’t know how my legal career will unfold, but I do know my future is bright.

Bottom 50 Percent

by jennifer fuentes langi, ’09

I never wanted to go to law school or become a lawyer. I had other plans. When the Columbine High School massacre happened during my senior year of high school, I couldn’t fathom how two boys could get to that point without anybody noticing how deeply troubled they were. As a teenager, I had struggled for a year after moving to Utah to adjust to the culture, and I missed my friends in Mexico, but it never crossed my mind to do something like those boys did at Columbine. Suddenly, I felt I had found my passion—I would work with youth, particularly young men, and prevent senseless violence in the process.

The summer before my senior year at byu, I got a job with Lightning Peak, a diversion program within Utah’s Division of Juvenile Justice Services. I helped supervise a dozen teenage girls who were spending the summer building buck-and-pole fences to work off their court-ordered community service. In the evenings, the other supervisors and I ran group activities on female empowerment and other topics designed to help the girls course correct and be all they could be.

But the girls I worked with didn’t seem to care about the empowerment the program was offering them. They saw no problem with their life choices, other than their punishment interfering with their summer plans. Looking back now, those girls saw right through us, and if I could go back and do it over again, I would spend more time listening and less time teaching. I failed to connect with any of them. Except for Amy.*

Amy had been through a lot. She had been prostituted out among the members of a local gang. To gain more street credibility, she had given herself a lisp to come across like English wasn’t her native language. But she was also charming, kind, polite, and such a hard worker— pretty much a younger version of the persona I worked so hard to project. I was eager to pour all of my future-social-worker self into helping her. Then she ran away from the program, hours after I thought I was finally getting through to her, and part of me broke. I suddenly found myself facing senior year with the awful realization that social work involves helping people who don’t want to be helped. My results-oriented, people-pleasing self couldn’t handle it.

My brother Alex Fuentes, ’06, was at byu Law at the time and suggested that I speak to the assistant dean of admissions, Carl Hernandez. I visited with Dean Hernandez and shared my woes. I wasn’t built for these micro-level interactions, but I still wanted to help make people’s lives better. Dean Hernandez shared a vision of what a law degree could do to make my dream happen and offered me resources for an lsat prep course. I took the lsat in December of 2005, and by February of 2006, I had been admitted to byu Law.

The first semester of law school was brutal. The semester would have been difficult regardless, but I was also the student president of byu Living Legends that year. This position involved a 20-hour weekly dancing and leadership commitment and several performance tours throughout the semester. I doggedly worked to meet all my commitments, but when grades came out, mine fell below that 3.3 curve we all know well. I read the soul-crushing phrase: “You are officially in the bottom 50 percent of the class.” I had never struggled with school before. Being above average was just a given in my life. That phrase destroyed me. I marched over to the office of Dean Hernandez, the man responsible for my pain, and told him I was dropping out.

Dean Hernandez seemed surprised, but I realize now I was not the first nor the last student to show up at his office with that announcement. He shared something with me that day that changed my life. He told me that my grades would absolutely matter for many opportunities, such as paid positions my first summer of law school or certain job offers after graduation. Outside of that, he said, what would matter—and what would make me a good lawyer—was if I was a people person and a problem solver. Those were the keys to success.

Dean Hernandez’s counsel kept me in law school. Later, his words and my husband’s encouragement led me to sign up for the bar exam again after failing it the first time. Their belief in me enabled me to apply for an immigration attorney position in Dallas, Texas, in 2015, six years after graduating from law school, when I realized it was time I used my degree to be the advocate I knew I was all along. Their confidence in me helped me start my own firm in October 2020 after covid-19 forced my old firm to close my department.

Even now, when my insecurities bubble up and my imposter syndrome whispers that a half-Mexican half–Lumbee Indian, first-generation college graduate has no right to have a thriving immigration law practice with 10 employees and 140,000 TikTok followers in its second year, Dean Hernandez’s words calm. I am a people person and a problem solver—and that makes me a lawyer.

*Name has been changed.

HALF FULL

Leveling Up

by nancy kennedy major, ’07

Law school was both a marathon and a sprint, requiring long stretches of mental endurance and short, intense periods of mental strain. It taught me to level up in the short term and hold on for the long ride in between. I went to law school with a vision of starting an estate-planning firm that would specialize in charitable gift planning. I spent one summer in law school doing estate planning and another summer working in philanthropy. But estate planning, it turned out, was not nearly the creative, dynamic catalyst for communitychanging philanthropy that I had imagined it would be. After graduation, I happily took a fundraising job. Those skills have been invaluable to me since I graduated, though I haven’t applied them in the ways that I expected to.

A year after graduating from byu Law, I met my future husband, Sam, who had just graduated from pastry school and was working as a pastry chef at a ski resort in Park City, Utah. While we were dating, Sam made the offhand remark that he wanted “boys and girls and a bakery.” I had always wanted a big family. Boys, girls, and a bakery sounded like a great plan!

Sam and I were married in 2009, and by 2017 we had two girls and two boys and had purchased a well-established bakery. We thought all our dreams had come true.

But over the next four years, despite our earnest prayers, the support of family and friends, and our Herculean efforts at home and at work, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. People never asked us, “How are you?” Instead, friends and strangers alike would go straight to “Are you okay?”— based, I assume, on our haggard faces and bloodshot eyes.

Then, in March 2020, shelter-in-place orders were issued in response to covid-19. Over the next three months, we laid off 11 of our 14 employees, closed our retail store, and lost my mom to a sudden noncovid infection. Those were truly dark days.

Our response to these difficult circumstances required skills I had developed in law school and have cultivated since: creative problem solving, confidence, flexibility, decisiveness, and stamina. We decided to transform our bakery’s most popular cookie, an iced shortbread, into an at-home cookie-decorating kit unlike anything on the market. Our new business, Color My Cookie, was born. We pre-iced the outlines of the cookie shapes in black and white, like a coloring book page, turning each cookie into a creative canvas. We developed a line of edible watercolors and created a cookie to be the paint palette. Our first sales were to loyal customers of our retail shop who were eager to support a struggling family business, especially one that sold a product that would occupy their children during the early days of work-from-home life.

Starting a business from scratch left no room for doubt or uncertainty. Everything I had learned with our storefront bakery had to be applied to the problems at hand. It was an opportunity to prove that those early years of intense learning, both in law school and afterward, had not been in vain. I addressed every challenge with a confidence I had lacked with our first bakery.

Nevertheless, by the time we were building Color My Cookie, Sam and I were both exhausted from the previous four years of trying to make our storefront bakery work. We were tired, financially strained, and nervous about our business revamp. The nights and the days ran together during the early days of Color My Cookie. Sam was salvaging and rebranding the wholesale division of the bakery we had essentially lost. All four of our children were under 10 and were home from school full-time. What we were building required our minds to be nimble and for us to move from one task to another, switching gears almost constantly.

Sam and I were both keenly aware that there was no time to waste. We could not spend a lot of time gathering data or identifying the best of all possible options. We had to make quick decisions, armed with the best information we could gather and the confirmation we sought through prayer. I truly believe we have been inspired as we have laid the groundwork for the businesses we built.

Despite these challenges, we leveled up and pressed forward with an eye to the future. In the nearly two years since we started Color My Cookie, we have grown our staff to more than 20 people, shipped tens of thousands of cookie kits to all 50 states and Puerto Rico, and been featured by Food Network, the Today show, Good Morning America, and more than 100 other digital and print media outlets.

My life is a lot different than I had envisioned in my first year of law school, but it is a sweet life I treasure, and one made possible by skills I honed at byu Law.