(2/4) “A few months after Eduardo’s case I went to a music...

(2/4) “A few months after Eduardo’s case I went to a music festival. It wasn’t normally my kind of scene. It was on the Jersey Shore. There were a lot of glowsticks and temporary tattoos. But I was twenty-six. I had to do something on the weekends. Everyone in my group seemed to know each other except for me and a girl named Kristen. We were the ‘bring-alongs,’ so we kinda got stuck together. Kristen’s only 5’3”. And she’s soft-spoken. But I soon learned that there’s a really big person packed in that small body. Her friends call her ‘KBad’ for a reason. She studied political science at Princeton. She spent two years in Mexico working for the DOJ. And she’s really, really passionate about changing the world. We did the dancy thing for awhile. But after dark the festival turned into a techno rave kind of situation: fire dancers, light show, the whole thing. Kristen and I ended up finding a tent outside the main action, with an opium den vibe. There were lots of Moroccan throw pillows. We laid down on the plush red carpet, and our conversations got pretty deep, pretty quick. At some point I told her the story of Eduardo’s case. I explained that it had opened my eyes to the power of ‘pro-bono’ work. Pro-bono means ‘for the public good.’ It’s essentially community service, and every lawyer is supposed to do 50 hours per year. But it’s a frustrating process. The system is email-based. It’s outdated, and disorganized. There are millions of low-income people who need legal services, but it can be hard to find the right case. So many lawyers just give up. I asked Kristen: ‘What if we invented a better system? If we could increase ‘pro bono’ hours by even 10 percent, that would be 6.5 million hours of free legal services.’ We could create a justice machine. We went back-and-forth until 4 AM. Honestly I thought we were just riffing. But two weeks later I got an email from Kristen. It was a pitch on why we should work together. God, it was so ‘KBad.’ It included a 14-page powerpoint, and each slide featured one of her skills. Later that week we scheduled a call, and we had a negotiation. It was a done deal. We were definitely going to do this. Whatever this is.”