Sticky Lawyers
Sticky Lawyers
Creating Communities and Meeting the Moment: An Immigration Lawyer on the Rule of Law
Immigrants seeking visas to start U.S. companies need experienced counsel to navigate the process for themselves, their workers, and their families. Today's guest, Tahmina Watson, is just the attorney who can help them realize their dreams. She is a U.K.-trained attorney and immigrant of Bangladeshi descent who opened a successful immigration firm in Seattle in 2009. But her deep impact on the immigrant community doesn't end with business startups.
In this episode, Tahmina explains how she used pro bono work and a commitment to community-building to create a legal career that assists immigrants in starting U.S. businesses while also building crucial networks for immigrant legal representation amidst chaotic political agendas. She admits that "Tahmina can talk," but her volunteerism, radio show, podcasts, legal writing, and even her nature photography illustrate how grandly this sticky lawyer lives her American Dream.
John Reed: [00:00:00] A couple of notes before we start the show.
[00:00:02] First, we experienced some technical difficulties while recording this episode, so please forgive any glitches you may hear.
[00:00:10] Second, I do my best to stay away from politics when I talk to guests, but there are times, like now, when they cannot and frankly should not be avoided. On the day we recorded, the presidential administration was withholding certain deportation activities from a federal court, threatening to impeach the judge, and barring lawyers from properly representing clients in federal proceedings. That's not fake news. Those are the facts. And we should all be alarmed.
[00:00:41] Now on with the show.
[00:00:57 Here's a timely question for you. What should we expect of immigrants who come to the U.S.? We want them to abide by the law and contribute to society and the nation's economy. We want them to feel safe, find opportunity, and become part of the community. Don't we also want them to find happiness, have families, and become part of the social fabric? Whether you think America is a melting pot or a salad bowl, we can all agree on that, can't we?
Perhaps there's no one better to practice immigration law than an immigrant, one who has navigated the system and now counsels businesses, workers, and families on the immigration process. That's today's guest.
Tahmina Watson is a UK-trained lawyer of Bangladeshi heritage who never thought she would live in the U.S., let alone start her own immigration firm in Seattle. As we'll discuss, she is living her best life and her own American story while helping others to live theirs. Tahmina, welcome to the show.
Tahmina Watson: [00:02:00] Hi, John. I'm so grateful to be here.
John Reed: [00:02:02] So let, let's get right into it. Immigration is a very loaded, very charged word in this country today. To give us context, what does your immigration practice look like?
Tahmina Watson: [00:02:13] I am a business immigration lawyer to businesses that are hiring, retaining talent, foreign talent. I also help people who are starting companies, so they might be expanding their businesses into the United States. They might be starting something brand new.
[00:02:32] I help a lot of religious institutions with religious education or practices, and I also help musicians, and people who are coming here for entertainment purposes. I do a number of different types of visas, so I do all of the work visas minus the temporary agricultural and hospitality type visas.
I do also help families and individuals. Family-based immigration. I help people with naturalization. I do not go to court, but to make sure that my passion to help people is reflected in my work. I do a lot of pro bono organizing in our community.
[00:03:11] You know, you hear a lot about policy, but you know, what is the practical impact of it? I don't think I necessarily understood that until I started practicing at my own firm with which I opened January 1, 2009. And at the time— I live in Seattle, Washington, where there are these big companies that people know about and they hire a lot of foreign talent, and they were being laid off. And when they were being laid off, the question that I got all the time from these people who wanted to start companies was, how do I get a visa to start my own company?
[00:03:44] And all of those discussions really led to understanding how I, as a lawyer, can affect policy. Suddenly I had this moment where I thought, wow, I could help create laws. Why am I not doing that? So that disconnect that I had between law and policy and how to create them as a practicing lawyer started to get bridged, and I became an advocate for policy change, which is how I started to write books and work with lawmakers and really look at how the law or policy that's being created affect the grassroots level.
John Reed: [00:04:21] One of the reasons that immigration, and I'm using air quotes, is such an incendiary term is, of course, the political aspect of it today. What impact did Trump's first term have on your practice?
Tahmina Watson: [00:04:33] You may or may not remember this John, but there were six executive orders that were leaked initially. One of them was the travel ban. but the first two or three were about interior enforcement and border security.
[00:04:49] Immediately they took away priorities of deportation. Like everybody's up for deportation, similar to what we're seeing now, but now we're seeing it on steroids. But at the time, that felt bad enough and people were wrapping their heads around what these two or three executive orders really meant. How was it going to impact people on the ground? But that's when we got the Muslim ban, two or three days after that.
[00:05:13] Going back to your own question, what did that do to my practice? It was pretty chaotic. Disturbing. Stressful. I am so grateful to live in a community that loves each other. I'm very, very fortunate to live in a loving community, and so for my practice, it meant that the community was calling me, my clients were calling me. I had also informed law and policymakers that if the Trump administration does win, you are going to need immigration lawyers, and we have them. And so, it really was chaotic with requests for help coming from all directions on case work, community work, as well as policy work. And how I navigated that, I wouldn't be able to tell you. It's all a bit of a blur.
John Reed: [00:06:04] You talk about community, and you certainly are involved in various communities. There's your local community, cultural community, and, of course, the immigration lawyer community. Tell us about those organizations that you've either launched or been substantially involved with and whether they predated Trump 1.0 or whether they were in response to the administration.
Tahmina Watson: [00:06:29] The American Immigration Lawyers Association, and if anybody's listening who is contemplating being an immigration lawyer, you must be a member of AILA. It is an absolute compulsory requirement, in my opinion, for immigration lawyers to be part of that organization. There are, I would say, about 16,000 or 17,000 immigration lawyers around the country. There are 50 chapters around each state. And so, I'm very involved in our local chapter.
[00:06:56] But when it came to the Trump administration, I helped create a new committee called the Response Committee, and it was really about how do we make sure that the bridge between the community and the lawyers is sort of finding a way to connect. And so that still exists and I'm co-leading it with a colleague of mine.
[00:07:19] The organizations in our local area, we have a lot of nonprofit organizations that have always been community-centric. One of them very, very dear to my heart is the Indian American Community Service, and they are very involved in making sure members have the information they need, whether it's immigration, or family law, or anything else. In coordination with their efforts and leadership, we were able to create a new program to give stipends to immigration lawyers to provide assistance.
[00:07:49] The other thing that popped up, I helped create a nonprofit called Washington Immigrant Defense Network. And that was as a result of parents who were separated from their children. And we live in Washington state. The southern border folks were sending people up north. And we had about 200 of these parents sent here. And they were not at the detention center because the detention center, and for anybody who doesn't know, there are immigration detention centers all around the country. And what we saw in the Trump administration that these detention centers were full. At capacity. And that's the goal. And actually, yesterday, I got an email from somebody who works in that arena and said the numbers are getting fuller and fuller by the day. So, it's a matter of time before they hit capacity.
[00:08:38] And so that's what happened when the separation of parents happened. And so, these parents were kept in the federal detention center, not an immigration center. So that's where a lot of the protests happen, and as a direct result of that, we were able to create a non-profit to supplement the work that other people were doing to make sure immigration lawyers could represent these folks in court proceedings with a small stipend.
[00:09:02] I think the thing that I'd ask your listeners to take note of is there's only so much pro bono work that professionals can do, particularly when they have small businesses. And most immigration lawyers are either solo or in small businesses. And if they want to keep their own lights on, they cannot afford to do pro bono as their main way of serving the community.
[00:09:27] And I could see the goodwill to continue to help dwindling as I was working on these issues. And so, a stipend became very important as a concept. We piloted it and it continues, and we've been able to use that model, so to speak, in different ways. So, the nonprofit Washington Immigrant Defense Network has really been a way to fund and train non-immigration lawyers and fund immigration lawyers.
John Reed: [00:09:57] Where did Airport Lawyer come in?
Tahmina Watson: [00:09:59] Oh, yes. Airport Lawyer was a very important, part of the story. So, when the Muslim ban happened, when I created the Response Committee, we were getting all sorts of lawyers to say, what do you think will happen? How do we respond to these hypothetical problems? Well, the problems never unfolded in those particular ways.
[00:10:21] What we did have was a community of lawyers who were ready to jump in, and through one of the immigration lawyers in the committee, he was able to connect with some tech lawyers and tech companies who eventually came to us and said, we want to help when the Muslim ban happened.
[00:10:37] If everybody's calling me, I need to find a way to do intake. So, I started to really explore Google forms. I wasn't necessarily well versed in that quite yet, but I thought, this is a way I can share it and get information.
[00:10:56] So when the tech folks came to us, I gave them my Google forms and said, these are the information pieces I would need, and they turned it into the website. So, it took one week from the travel ban for the website to become live. And then the following week, the website was connected to 25 airports with pro bono lawyer assistance.
[00:11:14] Airport Lawyer was really a nationwide help. And through the Immigration Lawyers Association, there was a way in which we got signups and somebody was manning the intakes and then dispersing to the airport that needed help.
John Reed: [00:11:28] I remember that period. I came across a few lawyers who had practices that were so far afield from immigration and yet they were going to the airport to do what they could. Immigration is a federal practice, so you don't have to worry about unauthorized practice in the jurisdiction or, or what have you.
[00:11:45] But I think it was this very interesting coalescence between immigration lawyers and non-immigration lawyers to say, let me give you what you need to be of value and use to these poor people. Did you have kind of non-immigration people involved in the Airport Lawyer network?
Tahmina Watson: [00:12:07] For sure. When the travel ban went into effect, I think all lawyers particularly felt this visceral effect of the rule of law is being attacked. And in all these decades, maybe centuries, we haven't necessarily had a ban like this, and I think it touched a nerve of lawyers, which resulted in me writing a book called “Legal Heroes in the Trump Era,” really describing a lot of these stories from my perspective and other lawyers who participated. But non-immigration lawyers were very much like, tell me what I can do without committing malpractice.
[00:12:42] As things were sort of being discussed at the Supreme Court level and there was a stay, and people were still being affected, the immigration lawyers started to just stay by the phone, while the non-immigration lawyers were there on hand.
[00:12:56] That sort of model is what WIDEN eventually became as well because we were training non-immigration lawyers to do the quote-unquote paralegal work. Like lawyers know how to draft, you just need to know the subject matter. So, if we could train them in bite sites pieces about “this is how you write a declaration on immigration,” or “this is how you do a brief, here's a sample.”
[00:13:18] And lawyers are so amazing at organizing—let's exhibit everything. It's very time-consuming work, but the immigration lawyer could guide in doing that, and that's what we were doing with WIDEN.
John Reed: [00:13:29] I'm sure in this early stage of Trump 2.0, it's history all over again. What is frighteningly the same as Trump 1.0 and what is different about 2.0?
Tahmina Watson: [00:13:43] What's frighteningly the same is the anti-immigrant sentiment. What's different is that they are more organized and more aggressive. The dismantling is systemic and it's not just immigration. And I think the scary part is it's starting with immigration. Of course, it started with that, but it's simultaneously happening to other things.
[00:14:06] But the attack that's happening on humans who are immigrants are not going to be contained to just immigrants. And I think we've already seen a U.S. citizen child who was a brain cancer patient. She was deported. I think just yesterday there have been stories circulating of U.S. citizens being detained by ICE. So, I think the escalation of it and the speed at which it is happening is scary.
[00:14:36] I think as lawyers, anybody listening to this who might be a lawyer, I think it's very important for us to take stock and come together and coalesce—a good word that you used earlier—because the rule of law is the foundation of democracy. If they can take the lawyers out of the picture, it's going to make their lives so much easier in dismantling everything.
[00:14:58] One of the articles I wrote last time that I didn't actually get to publish—I was looking for a broader publication and nobody wanted to print it. What led me to writing that article was really that the Attorney Generals of the United States at the time, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, they were referring immigration cases to themselves. And that is not necessarily the done thing. It's not usual. It's very unusual. Even though the Attorney General in all of the statutes would say, Attorney General has authority to do blah, blah. It was used with gravitas. Only when necessary. But when they started to take cases to themselves so they could change policy on immigration, that's when the alarm bells went off for me. Like, why are they allowed to do it and where is the accountability?
John Reed: [00:15:45] You mentioned the bigger law firms—Paul Weiss, Covington & Burling...,
Tahmina Watson: [00:15:49] Perkins Coie.
John Reed: [00:15:51] Those firms, I'm sure as everybody has read, they are the subject of executive orders where they've been deprived of security clearance, access to federal buildings, et cetera. Do you fear a trickling down to the smaller, maybe even solo attorney level? Maybe not an executive action against every small immigration law firm out there. I don't want to be all doom and gloom. I really don't. But what do you foresee for downstream attorneys practicing in the immigration area?
Tahmina Watson: [00:16:23] I think it's a matter of time and I think if people were casting their memories back, in Trump 1.0, immigration lawyers were under direct attack. We were called "dirty immigration lawyers." At that time, no other lawyers were necessarily called names, but we were. And we all wore the t-shirts very proudly. I'll have to send you one of my pictures. But I think this time it's scarier because they're just going for the top, so that they could be silenced. And I think just yesterday big law firms came and said, we're not going to actually challenge this anymore, but what does that mean for the lawyers downstream?
[00:17:04] I think it's a very important question you ask. The answer is, we don't know. And I obviously can't speak for anybody else, but I do feel that most of us are probably anxious about what can happen.
[00:17:15] If we can just follow the law and continue to do the job with integrity, we should be okay. And if the big law firms cannot tow the line, hold the line, because of many different complicated reasons, maybe they help us be empowered to do the grassroots fighting.
John Reed: [00:17:35] Let's move into something a little less negative. I'm really intrigued by, and I will admit my own ignorance of, immigration and visas related to startups. talk about that a little bit please.
Tahmina Watson: [00:17:49] I love talking about startup visas. You have to shut me up. When I started my law firm in 2009, and I mentioned policy at the time, I was working with people who had big visions, and there really wasn't a visa that was necessarily directly suitable for the modern-day startup.
[00:18:07] The modern-day startup is that you've got a brilliant idea. You are rolling up your sleeves and you are using somebody else's money to fund the idea, create the product, scale it, and then make everybody a lot of money, but also serving the community in a way in which you've solved a chronic problem or made something better.
[00:18:27] The traditional startup was not necessarily this way. And so, when our laws were created in 1990, the last time we had significant reform, business visas were based on the traditional way of your putting your own money in, your own skin in the game, and that's how you're going to create this better economic situation for all of us.
[00:18:48] The laws have not changed, even though business practices have changed. So, when people were being laid off in 2009 and I was helping them, and the layoff started in 2008, really, that's when my policy passion started about why don't we have a law for this modern day of doing business? So, what I do is use the visas that we have. So, immigration lawyers who do this work, we use the visas that exist.
[00:19:13] It's about making sure that the startup founder's story can fit into one of these categories. And so, the first book I wrote was really about policy change. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I can really make new laws happen.” And then about 10 years later, I've now written a visa guide on how you can use these tips and strategies to make sure that you have the best visa for now. And you might need to change visas along the journey, but you need to do what's right in that moment. And so, startup founders are in all industries. Yes, they use tech, but they might be related to education or agricultural finances. Whatever that startup is, you know, based on, I can help them.
[00:19:58] And they come to me from maybe starting from university, where they might have been in an entrepreneurship program with cohorts to people who have been in the corporate world for years with this burning desire to have their own thing. Or people come from different countries saying, this is where the startup scene is, and I want to be here.
[00:20:20] And so, I help them with their visa options and connections with the ecosystems.
John Reed: [00:20:27] And I imagine it kind of repeats in the sense that you help a startup founder with their immigration status, and they are hiring talent who may be already here on a student visa or wish to come to the United States, and then they have their families that they want to bring with them. So, you're starting with the startup as it were, and then handling all those other issues that come along with it.
Tahmina Watson: [00:20:51] Very much so. And, actually, I struggled with the name of my book, the visa guidebook, for a bit because I started writing it for the founders, and I was like, okay, you are a founder and these are the things you need to consider. But as I was writing, I thought, well, now that they've got the visa for themselves, how are they growing their business? They're going to fall into the same trap.
[00:21:12] And so that's why the name of the book is “U.S. Immigration Visa Guide for Startups and Founders.” And often my clients are American startup founders who have their first hire. And so, the startup could be a founder who's already got their visa. It could be an American founder with their talent that they're hiring. It could be a number of different scenarios.
John Reed: [00:21:34] Let's go back a bit further. You have a very compelling story about not only your journey to the law but your journey to the U.S.
Tahmina Watson: [00:21:43] The journey to the law started from when I could even remember. My father was a lawyer—immigration lawyer in the UK—in and in those days, immigration law was not the sexy thing to do. It was very much the community thing to do. And he was very good at it. There were a lot of ups and downs in our lives. We lived in different countries. But I was inspired by that. My mother's father was a lawyer. My mother's brother is a lawyer. My father's brother was a lawyer. There was a lot of lawyering in our family. So, that was inspiration, but it was also like a no-brainer. Of course, that's what I'm going to be doing.
[00:22:23] So that's what I had always aspired to do. And getting to be a barrister, which is a trial lawyer in the UK was actually very, very hard. When I moved back and forth from Bangladesh, London to Bangladesh, and back to London, UK, the education system is different.
[00:22:40] And so, I was a little bit behind from people in my same age group. When I eventually finished my law degree and went to law school in the UK, you have to get an apprenticeship, which is called a pupillage. And you are competing with Ivy League-type school students as well as people who come to it as a second career.
[00:23:03] But I was basically competing with a lot of people, so I didn't get my pupilage the first year and I really threw myself into pro bono work. That's the really, the genesis of my pro bono work, actually. I threw myself into every area that I could to learn, not just to help people but learn the intricacies of the law. And I did education law at the time, employment law, disability law. I worked at various nonprofits to be able to get the experience.
[00:23:31] Lawyering is not just being well-versed in the law, it's also your bedside manner. It's also the soft skills. It's also strategic thinking, critical thinking. And until you have that experience of getting your hands dirty with a case, you won't even know how you need to present the case, how you need to talk to your client, how does your client communicate back with you?
[00:23:57] That period where I didn't get my pupilage, in hindsight, was a gift to me where I was able to dive into many different areas, make a lot of connections, and just not just help my own career. I ran a student group just like I'm doing all these bar associations. I was running a student group at the time, I was helping students, law students get work experiences abroad, and one of them was the death penalty kind of work in New Orleans.
[00:24:25] And there was an organization called Reprieve that was created by a UK human rights lawyer. I make that connection later on. But I had standing room only during those times and I helped so many students get experience, but that's what I was doing.
[00:24:43] And eventually, I became a barrister. I got my experience and my pupilage. And just as I was qualifying, I come to the United States, and I have a blind date with my husband. I suddenly had this open-mindedness that I could possibly live in the U.S. Until then, I was like, no way am I living in the U.S. But it was, it was an interesting time in my life where I was going through so many transitions into my professional career, but also, you know, where is my life going to end up? And I'm very, very fortunate that I met my soulmate. And so it was three years long distance, and then I moved to the United States, went through the immigration process, never expecting to be an immigration lawyer.
John Reed: [00:25:26] I was going to ask you about that, if immigration is where you started.
Tahmina Watson: [00:25:30] I started that, but kicking and screaming. It was the one area of law I did not want to practice. But once I met my husband and moved here, went through the immigration process, took the New York bar, which also limited me in what I could practice in Washington state. When I finally got my green card and my bar license all around about the same time, immigration kept following me saying, here's a job, here's a job. I'm like, no, thank you. Almost like putting a cross up. Like, no, thank you. And then the fifth time I said, you know, I'll just, I just surrender. I'll just do this for five years and then I'll go find the other thing I'm supposed to do.
[00:26:09] But it was day one when I started working in immigration, I thought, gosh. This is everything I've been wanting to do without realizing immigration was the thing that would bring it. And why? It's because it's fast-moving. It is as complicated as it can get. It is changing lives in a very core way. It is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to see a case start from finish, and I didn't want to be a pencil pusher to see just transaction after transaction without getting to an end of a case. That's my law journey and U.S. journey all at once.
John Reed: [00:26:48] It's a wonderful opportunity when it happens when I can talk to a guest on the show who can provide a masterclass in marketing and business development. You've already pulled back the curtain and told us about article writing and writing books and things like that. What did you do to build your business? Let's just talk about the United States first. We won't go back to the UK, but when you decided, okay, this is the thing I'm meant to do, how did you go about attracting clients and also developing your skills further in the process?
Tahmina Watson: [00:27:22] When I moved to the U.S. I was working with somebody first. And I didn't really know anything about the business of law. I think most lawyers will tell you that they go into the law to just practice law. It's really an afterthought that, you know, oh my gosh, I really have to pay my bills. And when you're at a big law firm, it's all about the billable time. How do you get savvy about entering your time? But when you are in a small to solo law firm, the dynamics are very different.
[00:27:49] But when I started practicing with this other lawyer, I learned very quickly how not to be a lawyer. She would not communicate directly with people properly. Finances were not necessarily maintained. I didn't get paid for the first six months. She was going through a lot of life transitions, so I didn't necessarily put a lot of emphasis on that.
[00:28:00] But I very quickly learned how not to be a lawyer. All the professional ethics things that we learn about at school. I had a crash course in real life. And so, when it came to sort of figuring out what I do next, I did have offers from bigger law firms, but at that time, I had a taste of being my own boss, and I was also pregnant with my first child. My husband encouraged me. He said, just go out and try it on your own, and if you fail, I'll still love you. I thought, well, what have I got to lose? I'll try this. So, I opened my doors January 1, 2009, and I just didn't realize that my phone was going to be so busy because of the layoffs and the type of work I was already doing.
[00:28:54] But like any business, you've got to sort of continue to figure out how are you marketing yourself, and I think one of the most valuable things you can do is really be as authentic as you can about what you offer. Twenty years later, there are a lot of South Asian lawyers in Washington state, but at the time, the numbers were fewer than what they are now. And I really made an effort to do as much volunteer work in the community. And I was doing it for selfish reasons. I had just moved from one country to another. I was just making my own friends. I was joining every bar association so I could make friends. I didn't really think of it as marketing, I was just building my own community base. I didn't realize until I got married that my husband, who's a patent lawyer, worked all the hours that God sent, and he would carve out time for me when I would visit or he would visit London. So, I had no idea about the kind of work life that he had.
[00:29:55] So I am a new bride and I'm thinking, gosh, my husband comes home 16 hours later, I'm like, let's go out, let's go out. And he'd be like, I can't go out. I'm glad we're still married. I'm glad he just really took pity on me. But all of that community building, without marketing necessarily being the forefront of my intention, became the grounding of what came later.
[00:30:22] I also got very lucky with pivotal moments in my career. So, as I started my law firm, there was a South Asian newspaper that started here and the editor called me and said, will you please write articles for us? And I said, I don't write, I don't know how to write.
[00:30:39] So the editor was fantastic. He'd just give me prompts. Why don't we tell everybody how they can become a citizen? And as the layoffs were happening, one of the articles he asked me to write is, how do we maintain status? And that's something that I had repurposed for over a decade.
[00:30:55] That was the writing genesis. But also, every era has its moment. Right now, we're going through an AI era, and I'm like, I'm still grasping that.
John Reed: [00:31:04] I think that idea of genuineness and authenticity and having personal motives for doing things can have that payoff. And, specifically, I referenced masterclass because if you don't think that business development is relationship building, you're not doing it right. The more genuine those relationships, the better. But at the same time, you did put yourself out there. You may not have thought it was your personal brand at the time, but by virtue of what touched your soul—volunteering and being within the community—that became your brand. You were living it as well.
[00:31:43] I find it so interesting. We talk to lawyers who say, like you did, I don't know how to write. I wouldn't know what to write about. What are you working on today? What did you learn this week? What is interesting to you? Because if you can find your words to explain it, other people will find it interesting. So, forget about SEO and keywords and people finding you through Google searches. Just the inherent honesty of your own exploration of that area of law comes across in the work product that you put out there.
[00:32:15] When did the podcast happen?
Tahmina Watson: [00:32:18] Ah, the podcast happened through a radio station. Because I was so involved in the community, when a new radio station was opening in Seattle, and they were targeting the South Asian community, they came to me saying, connect us to all of this.
[00:32:34] And then they said, well, why don't you do a show? And I'm like, I don't, I'm just a lawyer. Who does a radio show? And the guy said, and I didn't realize this at the time, how he was phrasing it. He basically said I give everybody the crack. Because I wanted him to be on my show and he said, no, I just don't give the people the crack. And I didn't know what he meant at the time, but he basically twisted my arm into doing, he said, just do this for two episodes. If you hate it, no problem. And I had to buy airtime. That was part of it too. And I didn't really want to spend money on something I didn't really know how it was going to work out.
[00:33:14] But the first day I did my radio show, I fell in love with it. The word platform suddenly meant something so much bigger. I didn't really know what a platform really meant. Sort of like the policy, you hear these words all the time, but until it sort of innately hits you, you're not necessarily understanding the value of it.
[00:33:33] And so when I was on this radio station, and I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I can reach people and tell them what they need to know. I loved it. And I really got in the groove of this radio show. It was Tahmina Talks Immigration every Tuesday at 10 o'clock. And they would have these ads on the radio station in between. And I'd be in the car with my kids, and it would say, “And tune in to Tahmina Talks Immigration.” And the kids would be like, “that's mommy.” And you know, just for that, it was so worth it to have my kids just be so proud of their mom.
[00:34:11] So I did that for two years. Every Tuesday I was there, but it also allowed me to pick up the phone and call anybody and say, would you please come and talk about such and such thing? And that helped build the community net wider, actually. The station would give me the episodes back in an MP3 format. And I didn't really know what to do with them. I said, what do people do? And so, somebody at the station said, well, you know, I've heard people put them onto SoundCloud. I'm like, okay, I'll just put them onto SoundCloud. So, they're somewhere. But I didn't really think of it as a podcast because I was doing a live radio show at the time. But there came a point where the station said we have to close down. And when they closed down, I was actually in tears on air because I came to love doing that so much.
[00:34:58] I still had the SoundCloud podcast, but I struggled to figure out how to practically do it. How do you find a studio? How do you get there? You know, logistically it became very difficult. But eventually my husband built me a studio in my house, and now I have two podcasts.
John Reed: [00:35:17] I said masterclass, but unfortunately, you're proving to be an accidental masterclass, that you fell into all the right things.
Tahmina Watson: [00:35:25] You know, I feel very grateful that the universe has chosen me in these very accidental ways to pave a way that I didn't necessarily see unfold in the way it has.
John Reed: [00:35:39] I've always felt that there are certain practice areas, immigration, divorce, family law, criminal defense, estate planning—people law—that are often an individual's first encounter with the law. And attorneys in those areas can make indelible impressions on those people and go on to become the first call for any future legal needs the individual might have. Have you experienced that? Are you a first call for many of your clients?
Tahmina Watson: [00:36:08] Yeah, for sure. For sure. Oh, I need an estate planning lawyer. Oh, it's very urgent. I need this and that. And of course, I'm very grateful that I have a very wide network of lawyer friends. I was the president of a bar association, actually multiple bar associations, but committees on many others, and I'm very grateful to have trustworthy, competent colleagues that I can rely on to make referrals. So, yes, it's a very common thing
John Reed: [00:36:37] As with many of my guests, you and I had the chance to talk before today, and what struck me during that conversation, and it's reverberating here as well, is your incredibly powerful personal outlook. You seem to embrace the good things and model them for others,
Tahmina Watson: [00:36:56] That's so kind of you to say. I don't know if I have a good answer for that, to be honest. It's really about trying to be the best self that you can be, but also live with authenticity and integrity. I think the word integrity is not used enough in our culture, even within the legal community. I think integrity is an important component that needs to be emphasized at law schools, at bar associations more and more, given the current climate. Every one of us are going to die. I want to leave the world with my impact on it. My footprints will be felt.
John Reed: [00:37:35] Let me read some terms that have been used to describe you: servant leader (akin to what you were just talking about), bar association award recipient, entrepreneur (owner of Pinky's shoe bags), and an avid bird watcher and photographer. Where would you like to start on that list, Tahmina?
Tahmina Watson: [00:37:55] Oh my gosh. Well, I could talk about birds all day long. I've realized that I can talk about startups all day long. Birds all day long. I could talk about any of these things.
[00:38:04] You know, when I named my show, Tahmina Talks Immigration, we struggled with a name. We couldn't figure out what would be the right name for this. And eventually a client said, “Hey, Tahmina, I heard you on the radio.” And I'm like, yes, exactly. Tahmina Talks should be the actual trademark name and it is trademarked. And when I went to my patent lawyer husband saying, I think we're going to call it Tahmina Talks, he goes, “oh, Tahmina can talk. Tahmina can talk a lot. She talks and talks and talks.” The answer is, what can I not talk about. The question is which one I want to talk about first.
[00:38:22] But I would love to talk about birds. And it's so interesting because, you know, we all have seen birds. We know what birds are. But how many of us really have noticed birds and felt passionate about birds? I walked my entire life like a zombie, not necessarily noticing birds until COVID happened. And when COVID happened, there were two law firms in my house and two kids having elementary school lessons. None of it was fun because we had to figure out how to do that on the fly. We didn't have enough Zoom connection. The cat's tail would be in the Zoom calls all the time. Luckily, I was never a cat myself. You know, there were lots of challenges. And in hindsight, I wish I had videoed every room and every conversation.
[00:39:24] But I used to go to the deck to take a few moments to myself. That's when I had started to take note of birds. And taking notice of birds, turned into taking photos of birds first with the cell phone, then with the little dinky camera, and then the camera just getting bigger and bigger to the point where now I am, taking days out of—I go to conferences or whatever, I'm going, whichever city—I take a day out just for me so I can take photos of birds or then birds actually became anything that moves. So, squirrels are game. The magic of nature really just made a really big appearance in my life during COVID, and that has expanded and expanded and expanded.
[00:40:13] And what I realized is nature is magic for me and it's healing. And we all grow up with these cliches and phrases, nature heals. Just like I mentioned, policy didn't really make much sense, so platform didn't make much sense until it really, you know, came into my life. “Nature Heals” also had a brand new meaning to me as I was getting into that world.
[00:40:40] And so now I have a photography website. My photos are being sold at various different locations. I am going on spontaneous trips. So, this happened just last week. A friend of mine said, “Hey, do you know there are migratory birds in Nebraska? There are thousands of them.” And my friend's encouragement or just, she was just giving me information, but it swirled around in my head for so long that I eventually cleared my calendar, got the permission from my husband because the kids need to be shuttled around in three different places in one day. So, I'm going to Nebraska next week to see Sandhill cranes. I'm living in the middle of deadlines and all sorts of other chaos. But I really wanted to do that for my own heart and my own soul and my own happiness. And I'm going to go see sandhill cranes. Birds and photography have been transformative in my life.
John Reed: [00:40:55] So from immigration to migration, you've made this journey.
Tahmina Watson: [00:41:39] Totally. And I'm writing the book in my head. I don't know how it's going to, you know, unfold in the end, but I have manuscripts that I'm sitting on, kids books that haven't really necessarily seen the light of day yet. But, yes, it's just my immigration to migration. That's fantastic. Yes.
John Reed: [00:42:00] Tahmina types. That's, that's the next one.
Tahmina Watson: [00:42:06] I love it. Well, actually, I am thinking of, you know, things in the future. How do I make sure all of the things I'm doing are out there in a, in a cohesive way? So, Tahmina types sounds like a great title for that.
John Reed: [00:42:16] We will add a long list of links to this episode's show notes to allow people to learn more about you, your practice, your community work, your books, your podcast, your photography. It may actually be the longest list that we've ever assembled for any podcast guest, but I will be honored to do it.
[00:42:34] Tahmina, thanks for being here today. It's really been a privilege getting to know you and to get to know about you. I'm excited to see where the next chapter of your career and personal life takes you. So please keep us updated.
Tahmina Watson: [00:42:47] Thank you so much. I'm excited to see where it goes, too. I think the universe is probably going to plant things in my way that I didn't expect, and I'm just going to say yes. First of all, thank you so much for having me and for doing what you're doing because I think all lawyers need this, particularly in this moment in time where the rule of law truly is on shaky grounds, but the future of the law and future lawyers. So, thank you for what you're doing to make sure all of that information is out there.
John Reed: [00:43:16] You're most welcome, Tahmina.
[00:43:19] Hey, listeners, regardless of where you found us, whether that's Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever, could you please take a moment to click the follow button or maybe even hit subscribe. That way you'll be sure to learn about new episodes, and you'll also be letting us know you're a fan. Maybe you'd even give us a review. We'd certainly appreciate that.
[00:43:39] Until next time, I'm John Reed, and you've been listening to Sticky Lawyers.