-: My name is Thomas Gregory Sprankling and I'm a attorney
at WilmerHale as Senior Associate.
My specific area is Appeals,
so I do kind of the more theoretical side of law.
Trial work is more about the facts, Appeals are
what is the law that should apply
to a lot of different people.
So the Supreme Court is an appeal, the level right
below that, the Ninth Circuit for California,
for example, would also be a type of a appellate court.
I'm working on a case for Twitter.
I'm involving First Amendment Rights
and whether Twitter can ban white nationalists
from their platform, which is pretty interesting.
But I also do a firm out of patent work, work
for other large companies, and I do some pro bono work.
So I'm currently representing a criminal defendant who's in,
I guess he's being held in Kentucky
but he's been, has an appeal in Ohio coming up pretty soon.
I'm a Senior Associate, I've been around for
about six years.
So the way it works is, often the people higher up
in the team will provide high-level strategy and the further
you go down on the team in terms of seniority,
you'll spend a lot of time getting
to know the factual record, getting the time to learn some
of the law, to read through the case law, do early drafts
on things.
So for something like this,
and I should say the Twitter thing is actually, it's what
I'm working on right now but it's not an appeal,
just a very legal thing.
My role would be to read through the law, understand
it, talk about it with the team, provide some drafts,
some early filings, that kinda thing.
So let's say, you commit a crime.
You throw a rock up in the air and it falls
on someone else's head and they die.
You go to trial.
If you've seen Law and Order, you know,
you'll be up in the witness box, you'll be sitting there.
The trial is about developing the facts.
What happened?
Did you throw the rock?
Did it hit someone's head?
Did they die?
The next step after that would be an appeal.
Then we'd ask about the legal questions.
Well, if you throw a rock up in the air and it hits someone
on the head, is that even murder at all?
What does murder mean in this context?
It's, a lot of my work is in the civil context,
so with companies and things like that, because often
they're the ones who wanna go and hire big law firms
that have a thousand attorneys.
But it's similar questions, you know.
What is, what is the scope of a patent?
What's the amount of damages you should get
when you're being sued, that kinda thing.
And so they're these legal questions that could
sometimes take years.
If you see a lot of patent litigation, the trial, the
original trial was, you know, 12 years earlier,
and then it's gone through an appeal,
and then it goes back down, and then it goes up
on appeal again.
So individual issues are being pulled out
and kind of examined.
The hours can be busy.
That's part of, kind of part of the life of a lawyer.
You are in a service industry, you're trying to help
your clients, you're trying to be responsive and being able
to answer tough questions when they come in.
So my hours are, you know, my ideal day would be about
probably 8:30 to six, 6:30, but I have plenty of days
that are longer than that, I have some days
that are shorter.
And sometime it laps into the weekends and evenings
and sometimes it doesn't,
and it's a little bit unpredictable.