Jodi Hanslick

I attribute my success to my friends and family, and the resilience I developed growing up. I grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota in the 1980s, and I didn't get to watch Saturday morning cartoons - I always had to work. Being Korean and not white in rural Minnesota during that time wasn't the easiest thing, so I developed this resilience from how people treated me, recognizing that I was different, but persevering through it and making it through. I've learned from my friends, my mentors, and everybody I've worked with - you're always learning, and sometimes you learn good things and bad things, but you always recognize what you can take from it. I had one of my direct reports who applied for a promotional position, and when they were feeling discouraged, I told them that every job, you will always learn from your supervisors. Sometimes it's good things, and sometimes it's bad things, and the thing to take from the bad ones is you recognize what you never want to do, and what you can do in the alternative. So it's really about that resilience, having good people around me, and giving people opportunities that they might not have been given otherwise.

The best career advice I've ever received is to relax before reacting. One of my friends always tells me I need to reduce my level of caring, but the better way to say it is just trying to relax before reacting. I think it's about taking all the information in before responding, because depending on what you might have going on in your personal life, you might not react in the same way as if you're thinking about it in a calm manner. So I've learned to just pause as people bring problems to me and make sure that I understand everything before I respond. That's important too because if you respond to an email and maybe you didn't read it all the way, you might realize later that you missed part of the email. So it's really about making sure that you understand before you're giving a response.

I think the most important thing is to not be discouraged as best as you can. Keep applying, keep trying, and always ask good questions and learn. I will not lie - learn Excel. Excel is probably one of the most underappreciated applications that I don't think people realize the value of. When I was doing accounting work, I learned Excel and a lot of formulas, which helped me learn how I can write code in Python. The fact that I don't come from a computer science background or have a software engineering background, but I just did accounting work and know Excel pretty well - that's opened so many doors for me. So always look for your opportunities, be respectful, and don't be afraid to ask questions.

In my current job specifically, one of the biggest challenges is that we're still very new as an agency. Even though the agency's been around a couple years now, we didn't have staff until about a year ago. Most of our paralegal staff didn't even start until September last year, so they've been here about 8 months. When they all started, our office doubled in size, and we're still under 30 people. So there's the challenge of being a new agency and managing that growth, and trying to give the paralegals and attorneys a more typical attorney-paralegal working relationship, because this work is not typical - we're not going through discovery requests or a claims period or going to a lawsuit. We're just going through 100,000 cases that might be eligible cannabis convictions. Overall in litigation, I think everybody always talks about AI and how they're going to use it, and there's this unknown that people need to understand. You see these hallucination cases where ChatGPT or whichever AI program made up a case that doesn't even exist - but is that ChatGPT's fault, or your fault because you didn't check your citations? It's about understanding how you can use AI to benefit you and make it better. When you have litigation with massive amounts of documents - hundreds of thousands of pages - can you really afford to have somebody looking at every single one, or can you work out with opposing counsel that you can use AI and certain features of your e-discovery platform to help narrow down what you're going to be looking at?

I think honestly, it's a lot of integrity and honesty. We all make mistakes, we're all human, and having that patience and grace to understand that sometimes people just don't know is important. You want to make sure that everyone is given an even playing field where they've all been given the same instruction. Some people might need a little bit more hand-holding and retraining, so it's about understanding what's the best way to work with everyone and how you can achieve that. It's also about taking responsibility and accountability for the things that you decided and did. Maybe you made a decision and it wasn't the best one and it didn't work out - just acknowledge that, but then also understand that you did the best that you could with the information you had at the time. For me, it's probably about learning from my mistakes or learning from other things rather than just plowing on through. If you don't acknowledge that you've made a mistake, you start to not recognize that you can make mistakes, and that's the hardest thing. It's about having integrity and having work product that you can be proud of.