Transcript:

I came to law school specifically wanting to be a labor, a union side labor lawyer. I, you know, I, I did have a little bit of. You know, I, I explored other options where, while I was there, but ultimately concluded that yes, I did want to be a labor lawyer and being able to have Professor Gould as a mentor and as a teacher as an advisor really did help me succeed in the, the career that I very badly wanted to succeed in.
And Jeremiah, when you and I spoke, I asked you what Bill was like as your mentor, and you said he really wasn’t my mentor. He was really my colleague, and that you as a young law school student that he treated you, you know, as an equal in terms of the work you did, and you want to talk about that. Yeah, it’s actually the more I think about it, the more unusual.
It seems to me in a positive way. I mean, I started working as his research assistant middle of first year. I had not taken labor law. I certainly haven’t taken anything about employment discrimination, and he we would just he he was writing the white workers and black black workers and white unions book at the time.
And my job was essentially to write all the footnotes with everything from just case citations. To half page long substantive footnotes. And I don’t know, I mean from the get go, it wasn’t that I had, you know, bowled him over with my abilities right from the start, he would It seemed natural to him somehow to, to work on a, on a fairly even level with this completely you know, wet behind the ears first year student.
So he would be talking through the issues in the book, and then he’d get to where, now this footnote is going to deal with this issue, and he’d describe it, and he’d say, you know, I’ve written, sometimes he would have written something about it, he’d direct me to it, sometimes he’d say, I think there’s a case with this or that name, and I would come back with a, you know, a fully developed you know, half page footnote on this thing, which he of course would always completely rewrite, but he was, you know, giving me a substantive role.
And that I certainly appreciated and it was very, very exciting to the point that I while I was his research assistant, I pretty, I spent probably more time with that working for him than I spent on my studies, even though I spent plenty of time, adequate time I decided not to do law review because I was just so excited that I could have this kind of, working relationship with this tremendous, talented and knowledgeable guy.
And likewise, he was doing litigation, he would have me draft sections of briefs for him to edit. And again, I mean, I’m in first year law school, and he just. At every point, he would treat the stuff I was doing, you know, with tremendous respect and appreciation, and it must have been, you know, a lot of it must have been pretty juvenile in comparison to what he would write on his own, but he was just fantastic to work with that way.
Endless back and forth. I wanted to do something that I would think of as in the public interest. But I had no background, family background or other with the unions. So I think it was seeing Bill in action and getting excited with the work and seeing him as a sort of a role model for having a career in that area.
It’s probably what got me pretty quickly aiming for that as what I would probably do. I, I didn’t rule out possibly going to civil rights work or something else, but it was, by the time I was looking seriously for permanent jobs, it was going to be labor. And in fact, Bill put me in touch with the firm I ended up working with because he had known one of the lawyers there while he was at the NLRB in the early stage of his legal career.
So he certainly, it certainly was the experience with Bill that decided me to become a Kathleen Schneider who is a very close friend and has worked with bill gold and Kathleen, what’s your position. Now, I’m the regional attorney for the National Labor Relations Board in San Francisco, and my understanding is that you’re coming to the National Labor Relations Board had something to do with bill to begin with.
And can you tell us that It was entirely because of Bill. I was not going to law school to do labor law. In fact, I emphatically told him on many occasions, because I worked for him during the same three years I was in law school. I emphatically told him I was not gonna be a labor lawyer and he kept telling me that oh no you were going to be that I was going to be one and I was going to love it and I kept telling him no and he turned out to be right as he always is.
In my third year I thought you know I’ve been doing a lot of work on labor law maybe I should take labor law. And lo and behold, I took labor law from his very good friend, Herman Levy, and it really came alive for me. And I think it’s just because I’ve been hearing for, you know, by then two and a half years worth of stories I’ve worked on multiple books for him.
I knew some of the players I’d met them in real life and it just came alive and I’m on. Maybe this is a good place for me where I can feel like I’m helping people, but I’m not so emotionally involved. And yeah, it went from there. I went to Santa Clara Law School, but I work for Bill at Stanford. How did, how did you, how did you get to know Bill to get that job?
You know, I wish I could tell you 100 percent except I just wanted a little job before I started law school in the, in the fall, and I, my, and I, so I went to Stanford Law School, just looking for a job, and I think they assigned me to bill. I don’t think that I ever interviewed with bill. I, he needed an assistant, and I just got assigned to him and I was in like I said it was, I was only planning to work for him.
For the summer, but he, you know, assured me he’d work around my. you know, school schedule and the like. And so I stayed on with him my whole three years up until studying for the bar exam. Even when he was overseas in South Africa for, I think it was a summer, he’d still send me things to do and I’d help out some other professors and the like.
And that, and we just worked, we just sort of clicked. My name is Keith Kennington Parmiter, class of 02. In the fall of 01, I was lucky enough to sit in the very last labor law class that Bill taught as a full time member of the Stanford faculty. I am now a law professor at Willamette University in Oregon, and that’s directly because Bill gave me my big shot.
Bill, thank you for giving me my big break. I am a law professor because of you, and you’ve really modeled what it means to be a public intellectual, engaged in the scholarship, influencing public discourse on labor law, and most importantly, showing each and every one of your students that you care, and that came through day in and day out.
So, thank you for sharing. Your love of the subject, your love of law with us. We’re lucky to have you in our lives. I mean, for me, it was, you know, really an honor, obviously, because, you know, he’d been my law professor and I wasn’t that much far out of law school even, you know, and to really have a chance to work with him.
And one thing about Bill, you know, he, Bill’s always liked, you know, younger people. I mean, I’m not saying he didn’t like older people too, but, you know, he, he, he always treated me with probably more dignity than, than I deserved you know, and, and he’d be on the phone constantly about, well, you know, what about this?
And, you know, what about that? And so yeah, he was very, you know as I say, very anxious to learn about all of the impediments and all of the problems. You know, I, like, I think anybody else who works with, you know, governments you know, and this came out when he was in the N. R. B. I think in some ways to a little frustrated with the politics, probably.
And the way in which the politics you know, interfered with, you know, doing the right thing. But but always trying to work through, you know you know, how to how to make it go. You know, there’s only one time ever that I can recall with Bill where he, you know, in a sense. I won’t say he pulled rank, but he pulled knowledge on me.
The which was way back when, when I was clerking for the California Supreme Court. And I participated. My judge wrote a decision that was up his alley, and he’d written an article on, and I had candidly not spotted that article. And he was, he was frustrated that I hadn’t taken the advice that he would have given that was out there.
And of course, at that time, you can’t being a clerk in the councilroom court, you can’t be calling people and asking for advice. So the but otherwise, you know, he, yeah, he always treated I think it’s, I think that’s right. He always treated me like a colleague. And he always. Frankly, assume that I had a level of knowledge that, you know, probably I didn’t.
I mean, when you think about, I was not a labor expert, really and you know, here I was this is, you know, starting, I landed in San Francisco as chief labor employment attorney, six years after graduating law school, without having had Thank you. a whole lot of labor background before that was employment lawyer.
So, you know, but he he never he never made me feel stupid. My name’s Keith Korn and I was in law school at Stanford back with Gary Williams there, who I’m so pleased to see. I haven’t seen Gary in many years back in the mid 70s. And shortly after Bill actually started At the university.
That’s where I met bill. And I then went on to work at the NLRB and went on to work in the entertainment industry where I I worked for about almost 37 years before retiring in 2020, but I’m still a consultant which is where I am today. I’m at Paramount Studios today, but you know, I’m still a consultant and I can fill in more later on, but in short as I told you, Alan, bill breathe life.
Into the law for me and made, you know an interesting career for me possible by getting me interested. And engaged in labor law, I practiced for 6 months and I was 30 at the time. And it just while I was at a great firm here in Silicon Valley, I just, it didn’t feel right for me and making a decision to pivot away from that.
And try coaching. It was a really hard choice for me. There are a lot of people who scratch their head and said, well, why, you know, you have a law degree and an MBA from Stanford. What the heck are you doing? My mother included and family members and friends and, you know, there were a handful of people who I think whether consciously or subconsciously gave me inner strength to say, you know, this is this is my path.
This is what I want to try. And it’s okay. And I think Bill Gould was somebody like that. He had this way of just making you feel, comfortable, feel seen, feel valued and important. And, you know, I, I think that he, he was one of those handful of people for me who, who gave me the courage to just as you said forge my own path.
I was a student at the Cornell ILR school. And so I had had some exposure to labor law as an undergraduate, fair amount of exposure actually. And. You know, when I went to go meet with Bill to talk to him about his research assistant position, which a friend of mine from Cornell had, had held the year before and suggested I, I talked to Bill about it.
Bill knew exactly who I was. He remembered reading my law, my law school application. Apparently, Bill had it kept this, you know, kept an eye out on all the Cornell ILR folks because Bill was a Cornell alum. And IRL is. ILR is the Industrial Labor Relations School at the Cornell, Cornell University. So he knew who I was even before I knew who Bill was.
And Which kind of dumbfounded me as a, you know, stupid second, first year, second year law student, you know, can’t believe these professors know who I am. But, you know, and I don’t know if that was unusual, but that was certainly, you know, emblematic of, you know, Bill, this is Bill. He just, he, he looks for people and he gravitates for people and people gravitate towards him.
And that’s how I, I, you know, that’s how I met him. Literally, I applied for a job, and he already knew who I was. Well, my name is Karen Snell. I’m an attorney in San Francisco. Actually, I’m a recently, as of a month ago, retired attorney. I’m now on inactive status. I started at Stanford Law School in 1978 and graduated in 1981.
And I took labor law as soon as I was able. I knew I had an interest in that area. My second year and the summer after my second year Bill hired me as his research assistant and I served in that capacity from June of 1980 to June of 1981. Well, during that time, we worked on a wide variety of projects he had going and I, I just refreshed my recollection by looking at his resume to see what he was publishing around then.
And we worked on a white paper he did regarding black labor unions in South Africa, a book about Japan’s labor law and influence that it had on American labor, his primer, one of the additions of this primer. In 1980, Tammany vs. Atlantic Richfield came out, so he did a lot of work on run filled termination.
And that’s just a few of the many projects I worked on for him and, and really enjoyed. I think when I thought about this, the things that first came to mind and have stuck there are brilliant. Hardworking, caring, and cool. And I just recently read an interview that my grandfather gave in 1989, after I’d been a lawyer for eight years.
And the interviewer asked him towards the end of the interview, So what do you think of women lawyers? He said, Oh, there, there’s some good ones. And the interviewer said, Well, your granddaughters. She’s a lawyer, isn’t she? And he said, Yes. Did you encourage her? And he said, No. And so Bill was a very important force in my life in being someone who took an interest in my career and really helped launch it.
The one thing I knew when I got to Stanford Law School was that I didn’t want to be a corporate attorney, and I’ve held true to that throughout my career, but going to Bill’s labor law class and, and having him describe the facts of the cases and the importance of, of the rules that were created was really influential on me.
Didn’t know what careers were out there. So, but, but it was an issue that I cared about. And, and so Bill sort of helped me see how it fit into the world. Third year, when it came time to start preparing for the future helped me in applying to the National Labor Relations Board. And yeah, I was lucky enough to get a job there and graduated in 81 and Ronald Reagan and president and.
And one of his first acts was to fire all the new hires at the NLRB. So I showed up for work on my first day and was told that I had been terminated. So, so, so after all of this, you were a labor lawyer for all of about 15 minutes. That’s right. Well, not even that because they didn’t actually let us sign in and therefore the union didn’t represent us when we had been terminated on our first day after.
Repeated assurances that we would not be. I think our class was approximately 20 percent female. So it was an intimidating atmosphere. At least for me, I’d never been in that kind of atmosphere of learning before. I was a philosophy major. So so he was one of the professors that really made it comfortable to talk and to make mistakes and to try your best and to think, you know, to be open about what you were thinking and what your reactions were.
And all of that was really helpful. My class started Women of Stamford Law in 1979, and we produced a booklet on the rights of battered women, but as I was thinking of it just builds encouragement to a woman who was a minority in law school at that time was. Just one of the many great things he’s, he’s given law school.
I contacted Bill and told him my sad news, and he immediately started making a list of people who knew that I should get in touch with and tell them to call him or I think in some cases he called them first, because it was the fall of 1981, which was not a great economic time to be coming out of law school.
And. Through his efforts, I ended up interviewing at Morrison and Forster. It was someone in the labor department that got me in the door, but I got a job in the litigation department and started working for Jim Brosnahan, who was doing criminal defense. And so it was sort of this serendipitous shift, but it worked out well for me.
And and I don’t think I would have gotten my foot in the door at Morrison and Forster that late in the hiring season without Bill’s help.