Moez Kaba is the managing partner of Hueston Hennigan, the elite trial firm he helped launch nearly a decade ago. He's one of the most sought-after trial lawyers in the country, and he's only 42. His father drove a cab. His parents came over from Pakistan and were undocumented for a large part of his early life. His high school college counselor told him he should go to vocational school instead of college.
I've gotten to know Moez over the past few months, and the thing I keep coming back to in our conversations is a moment that almost didn't happen — a chance subway conversation at the 116th Street stop in law school that completely redirected his career. In this episode, we get into that story, what boldness has actually meant for him from high school through founding a firm, how he thinks about cross-examination as the part of trial with no safety net, the opioid case where he undermined the government's expert with a Terry Gross clip, and what it means to be one of the only South Asian Muslim openly gay managing partners of a firm at his level.
Keep reading below for the full episode and the complete transcript of our conversation.
Top Insights
Below are the highlights of our conversation:
- Pull Up a Chair, Don't Displace Anyone: Moez has spent his career walking into rooms where he didn't see anyone who looked like him — first-generation, son of a cab driver, openly gay, Muslim. His frame isn't "maybe I don't belong here." It's "there's room for me here." And critically, the goal isn't to displace whoever's already at the table — it's to pull up another chair and add something of value. He sees it as part of his job as managing partner to keep adding seats and filling them with people who bring their own perspective to the practice.
- The Cross-Examination With No Safety Net: Moez loves cross because it's the one part of trial you can't fully control. You know your opening, you know your direct, you know your closing — none of those have someone trying to derail you in real time. Cross is wit, speed, and tight impeachment. His favorite kind of cross is the one you deliberately hold back from deposition so no one can prepare for it — like the Terry Gross fresh-air clip his team unearthed to undermine the government's addiction expert in the opioid trial. Set it up, land the punch, sit down. Knowing when to stop is half the skill.
- Trials Are an Orchestra, Not a Solo: Moez pushes back hard against the idea that there's one trial-lawyer style. His own style has more flavor — a little spice, a smile when the team lands a point, voice that moves. Others on his team are flat, methodical, pong. Both work. The mistake is muting who you actually are to match who you think you ought to be. Trials are too long and too taxing to maintain a persona that isn't yours. Find your instrument and play it well.
- Credibility Is the Lawyer's Real Asset at Trial: In a month-long trial the jury sees three people every day — the judge, you, and opposing counsel. Witnesses come and go in a day. You're there the whole time. Every time you stretch the truth, push a witness too hard on cross, or over-claim in an opening, you eat into the credibility account you've been building since voir dire. Moez treats that account as the most expensive thing in the room. You can only hurt your client by spending it.
- Necessity Is the Mother of Ambition: Moez says he didn't go to college and law school out of ambition in the abstract — he went because he wanted to buy his dad a Jaguar and send his parents back to Pakistan to see family. His dad had driven him to Cornell from Chicago in a taxi because they couldn't afford the plane ticket. Everything else — Wachtell, the clerkship, the move to LA, the founding of Hueston Hennigan — was built on top of that. He calls necessity the friendly aunt of ambition. It's a much more honest origin story than most "five-year plan" narratives lawyers tell about themselves.
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Full Transcript
Khurram Naik: It's great to continue this conversation. I've really enjoyed getting to know you, and I think this episode is going to be a banger. I have to say that.
Moez Kaba: Well, you have a lot of confidence in me. So I hope to be able to live up to at least 25% of your expectation.
Khurram Naik: Okay, so we started — you shared an answer last time, and I think of all the things we talked about, that's the answer I kept coming back to. It's such a fascinating pivotal moment in your career. And I imagine you would have had a lot of success in some version of it, but this version and the path it took you on — fascinating. So you made a decision about which firm to join in law school based on a conversation you had on the subway. Can you tell that story?
Moez Kaba: Yeah, sure. It's an interesting anecdote about the role that serendipity plays in one's life — even, perhaps in some respects, even more than talent or skill or just plain hard work. When I was in law school, I was studying at Columbia Law School and I was a fresh-faced law student. No one in my family had ever gone to college, much less law school. I didn't know any lawyers. I had no relationships upon which to rely as one navigates the law school and post-law-school world.
I was born and raised in Chicago, and I had an offer from a law firm for the summer in Chicago — a firm that I thought was great for exactly one reason, which is they paid more money than I'd ever seen in my life before per week. I thought, my God, why would they want — they want to give me money and I can just go back to Chicago. I guess that's what I'm going to do. I also happened to have had an interview and an offer from another firm. That firm was in New York. I had not heard anything about this firm. I didn't know anything about this firm. But I was talking to a friend when I was going down — I was taking the train from 116th Street downtown. And I was saying, oh yeah, I think I'm going to go to this Chicago firm. I did just get an offer from this other firm. It's a New York firm. And they pay a little bit more than the Chicago firm, but what's the difference? And my friend said, what is that firm? And I said, oh, they're called Wachtell Lipton. And I think they're in Midtown.
And this other law student — no idea who he was, I don't even think I caught his name — he says to me at that subway stop, he's like, if you have an offer from Wachtell Lipton to go work there for the summer, that is the firm you need to go work at. And then he gave me a little bit of information about what the firm was and their claim to fame. And entirely on that basis, 100% on the basis of this stranger who seemed to know something about the law firm world — and certainly more than I did — said that's where I should go work. And that's in fact where I went to work. So I ultimately had a clerkship, I ultimately went back and began my legal career at that firm, and the rest is history, as they say.
Khurram Naik: You don't know who that student was?
Moez Kaba: No idea. I do know he was a 3L.
Khurram Naik: Sure, that makes sense. Right? If a 1L told you to go to Wachtell, that'd be really weird.
Moez Kaba: Yeah, exactly.
Khurram Naik: Okay, so let's say you ran into this guy at a Columbia alumni event. And it's the implausible — you ran into the guy. What would you say to him today?
Moez Kaba: First of all, I'm going to say he looks great despite the passage of time, because that's a nice thing to say to him. It's always good to start by saying something nice about people that feels validating for them. You know, the interesting thing about it is I think it's a lesson in being bold in some ways. He didn't know who I was. I could have had a very negative reaction to some guy giving me unsolicited career advice. But in doing that, I think he really unknowingly in many respects changed the trajectory of my post-law-school career. I very well could be sitting in Chicago today working at a law firm in Chicago. Many wonderful law firms in Chicago, by the way, many, many qualifications.
Khurram Naik: Somebody in Chicago is going to be upset.
Moez Kaba: Yeah, exactly. I bet you if I named the firm that I was thinking about going to, you would not be able to recognize it because it's not one of the kind of premier firms that we often associate with the great city of Chicago. My point being, that one kind of unsolicited little piece of advice he offered me, which he had no reason to do really, I think had such a great impact on me. So I would probably just tell him the story. I don't think he would realize what he did. Now, my suspicion — the strong one at that — is he would probably look at me and say, who are you and why are you talking to me?
The subway conversation reminds me of Mani Walia's story about a lunch that didn't pay off until a decade later, when it became the foundation of a fund. Same mechanism — one chance encounter you couldn't have planned, doing all the compounding work in the background. Listen to my conversation with Mani Walia.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned boldness. How do you feel like you've incorporated that premise of boldness over time? You know, you're new, you're still trying to figure things out. And then over time, I'm assuming you got bolder and bolder. Tell me about that virtue over time for you.
Moez Kaba: Oh, sure. I think a large part of my success has been traversing uncharted terrain — at least uncharted for me personally. I've said this before. My dad was a cab driver. My parents were undocumented for a large part of my early life. They came over here from Pakistan and overstayed their visa, and then ultimately got amnesty in 1986. So I didn't really have an obvious pathway to get from basically high school through a professional career. And I think you have to be bold in so many different steps of your life as you're trying to achieve something worthy of — South Asians, like, one of the things you often think about is worthy of your family's name or your father's and grandfather's legacy, which sounds more patriarchal than I intended to be.
Look, whether it was even the decision to go to college — that was something that could be perceived as bold. In fact, it was, by my high school college counselor who told me I shouldn't go to college, I should go to a vocational school. Then to go on to law school, I picked New York. I picked a law school in New York City because it's a city that I'd always admired, never been to. To go clerking — to go to a clerkship, which was something I'd not really understood the value of until I did it. Somebody, you know, people said in law school, if you can get a clerkship, you should go clerk. And I thought, okay, that's what I should do then. Obviously, coming back to New York, going to Wachtell. But even ultimately starting the firm that we started now almost 10 years ago, Hueston Hennigan, was a bold move. We were a group of partners at a well-established firm. I just made partner a year earlier. But there was a group of really outstanding lawyers and mentors and people I admired who wanted to go off on our own and see if we could create something new, which is what we did when we launched our firm.
So I tried to incorporate in my own personal development just this being bold, taking risks, believing in yourself and believing in people around you. And I think that's worked out — so far so good. Of course, there are aspects of being bold that are incredibly important as a trial lawyer. Finding your voice in front of a judge or a jury is probably one of the most important things you can have as a trial lawyer, and then using that voice to compellingly tell your client's story in ways that are simple and understandable and, to some extent, relatable, regardless of how complex the case may be. I think that comes from being bold and confident in your skills.
Khurram Naik: I'm wondering — I don't know if you see it this way, but the fact that, you know, none of this was ever in the path you're on. This is the land of opportunity, so this is where this can happen, but it doesn't mean it's feasible. Nothing about this path that you've gone on and achieved was likely to happen given the constraints you were under. So do you feel like there's a possibility that the fact you didn't even know what wasn't possible made you bolder? Like, I don't even know that I couldn't do that.
Moez Kaba: Oh, for sure. There's this really interesting phenomenon where I think you can think to yourself, I don't see anyone that looks like me in this position. And you can think to yourself, maybe I don't belong in that position. Or you can think to yourself, wow, that means there's room for me in that position. I have tended to be the latter rather than the former. And yeah, I mean, it's been perhaps like a foolish level of confidence. But from my perspective, I've always thought it's important that we as lawyers, we as people, we as first-generation Americans or the children of immigrants or whatever we may be, have a lot of confidence in creating the space for ourselves. And then in occupying that space, never believing that there are only a certain number of seats at the table and you have to displace the other person that's at the table. You just pull up your chair, you just add something of value. That's really important. I view it as part of my job in my role as managing partner of a law firm, and just as someone who's now practiced law for a while, to continue adding seats to that table and filling it with other people who are worthy and who are diverse and who bring their own perspective and life experiences to the practice.
Khurram Naik: Going back to that story on the subway — that was part of the serendipity aspect. What do you see as another serendipitous but inflection-point moment in your career?
Moez Kaba: I guess the way I got to this group of lawyers with whom we launched our firm, Hueston Hennigan, was itself in some respects serendipitous. So let me be clear — despite my feeling like, oh, I can fill that space because I don't see anybody else there, I'm fully aware that luck has played a huge part in my career. There are many, many talented lawyers out there. There are many, many talented trial lawyers out there. There are many, many talented South Asian lawyers out there. But a little bit of the right place at the right time, I think, has always kind of been in my favor.
I remember back when I was at my old firm as an associate, one of my partners today called me and said, hey, I'm working on this case with another partner here. And the partner that called me — his name is Marshall Camp — and the other partner he was working with, his name is John Hueston, who's one of the name partners at our firm. And Marshall said to me, you've never worked with John, but this is an interesting case, you should work on it. And I said, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds great. I'll make time to work on it. John then called me and said, oh, I'm looking forward to working with you. By the way, there's a deposition on Thursday of the key expert of the other side. Can you fly out and do that? And I did it. That case went to trial. I got trial witnesses — you know, I did trial witnesses at that trial. We won that trial. It was a very high-profile trial. And all of those pieces all fit together. I continued working with that group a lot more. We continued taking cases to trial together. All of that worked out for me because of two things — because Marshall decided to make that one phone call that day, I happened to pick up the phone that day, and I happened to decide, yeah, I'll make time to do this, despite working on some other matters at that time.
So in part, that's being at the right place at the right time. In part, it's a product of being willing to just say yes and do the work. And again, making yourself available to say I can handle this along with all the other things I'm doing. I really believe that trial — it was a federal jury trial, a month-long federal jury trial in the Southern District of New York that we won — was sort of a key anchor of my growth and development as a trial lawyer. And working with the people I worked with in that case, who I continue to work with today, now almost 15 years later.
Khurram Naik: What was different about that work environment from your previous work environments?
Moez Kaba: There was a lot of friendship in that trial team. Trials are these incredibly intense and testing environments. And it is so important when you go to trial that you go to trial with people that you trust and that you, I believe, like. That is part of what makes our firm really special, because we go to trial a lot, and we also like each other a lot, and we trust each other, and we know that we're going to have each other's backs, and we know that if I'm examining a key witness, I can talk to my colleagues and they'll give me great ideas to make that examination go really well. You're all rowing on the same boat in the same direction, and you're taking turns putting in the hardest work. And that environment — that trial was just a wonderful example of that.
I was an associate at the time, I wasn't a partner. There were multiple partners on the case. But every key witness, every key decision, every key motion, we talked about it together. I was just entrusted to handle multiple trial witnesses. I started off that case with three trial witnesses and ultimately during the trial got two more added. It became this really wonderful thing where you prove yourself, you get to prove yourself some more. But it was in an environment not where I felt like I was constantly being put into tough spots. It was an environment where I felt like the team is with me and they're going to help me and they're going to support me. And they're going to make my examinations the best examinations, and they're going to push me on my arguments and make sure I really crystallize the legal and factual issues I want to present to the court.
Khurram Naik: So how many trials have you had at this point?
Moez Kaba: I think a dozen or so, give or take.
Khurram Naik: And how many of them have been as lead trial counsel?
Moez Kaba: Just in the last two years it's been like six or seven actually. In the last two and a half years. But the vast majority of them — the way we practice is we typically have two lead trial counsel in our cases. So all of the trials I've had in the last two, three, four years, me and another one of our partners have been lead trial counsel.
Khurram Naik: Wait, so let me make sure I got this straight. The total number of trials you've been to has been about 12, and basically half of all the trials you've ever done have been in the past few years. That seems remarkable.
Moez Kaba: If you ask my husband, it certainly does, since he — we also happen to have a five-year-old son, and so he has done a lot of the heavy lifting on the parenting front. But yeah, one thing to keep in mind is when we launched Hueston Hennigan, we launched it because we wanted to take on those cases that have a higher yield to trial. And so a product of that is going to trial a lot more. This year we're in March. I have trials scheduled for May, July, September, October, November, and December. That's for this year. And trials are being scheduled already for next year. That's our practice. That's what we love. We thrive on that. And that's the kind of people we attract to practice at our firm — those people who want to be in that environment working shoulder to shoulder at 2 a.m. trying to come up with that last key cross-examination question that's going to be the mic drop of the trial.
Moez's description of the group that went off and started Hueston Hennigan — outstanding lawyers and mentors who wanted to go build something new together — is the same kind of move Vishal Shah described when he went plaintiff-side and built his own firm. Both stories are about the moment a group of partners decides the existing platform isn't quite the right shape for what they actually want to do. Listen to my conversation with Vishal Shah.
Khurram Naik: I can tell that you get very — just from your biology I can tell you're very energized by this. Somebody else, another trial lawyer, if they told themselves the same trajectory might just have some sort of dejection or something. But I can tell you're stoked about it. You mentioned cross-examination. Do you feel like that's the focal point? Do you feel like that's the thing you really hone in on at a trial? Is that where you feel like you really show your merit? It was just a random example. Was that really what you kind of hone in on?
Moez Kaba: It's kind of random, but it's one of my favorite things to do. I love all of the aspects of trial. I love giving the opening. I love putting on my witnesses so they can give life to the case and give life to our position. I love closings. But I also think cross-examinations are really fun. It is your moment. To really show the jury that even the other side's witnesses are supporting your part of the case. I feel like with a great cross-examination you can win or lose a case. I just think it's fun and it's challenging.
It's the thing you have the least control over. What I do when I deliver an opening — I know what the opening is going to be. I put it together with my team. When I do a closing, or any of us does a closing at a trial, we know more or less — it's in a more compressed timeframe, but you know what you're going to say. No one is interrupting you. When you're doing your direct examination of a witness, any trial lawyer worth their salt knows exactly what's going to be happening. Across examinations, you don't have any of that. There is no safety net. Your safety net is your wit, how quickly you can turn an unexpected answer in your favor, and how good and tight your impeachment is. Some of my fondest memories of my trials have been cross-examinations.
Khurram Naik: Which trial that you've been a part of do you find yourself revisiting again and again? What's the trial that you keep thinking about over the years?
Moez Kaba: I think about all of them, really. I feel like I learn something in every trial. I learn from the jury, or I learn something from my colleagues or from the judge. We've had some really great judges that we've been really lucky to try cases in front of. But one that comes to mind a lot is a defense-side case we did for a pharmaceutical company that was accused of — not my words — fueling the opioid epidemic. The plaintiffs, which were various municipalities in the state of California, were suing for in the neighborhood of $50 billion. With a B. It was our client and three other pharmaceutical companies, each pharmaceutical company had its own counsel, and we were representing our client in a case that essentially everyone said the pharmaceutical companies were going to lose, because all of the defendants were losing these cases all over the country. We took our case to trial. We had a client who really believed in us and believed in our ability to reveal the truth — the factual truth, but also the legal framework that was appropriate for considering these sorts of cases. And we won that trial.
That was a three-month trial. At the end of it, we won. I think it's still the only, or one of the only, defense-side verdicts for pharmaceutical companies in the sprawling many thousands of opioid addiction cases that were filed. That was a very challenging case. It was taxing because of its length, the number of witnesses, the amount of paper, the significance of the issues. But as a trial lawyer, the way we got to put on that case was a great lesson in winning a particularly tough case — tough on the facts and tough on the law.
Khurram Naik: What's the moment you keep replaying? Maybe it's not from that trial, but is there a moment?
Moez Kaba: Oh yeah, there was. I cross-examined the government's — the plaintiff's, the people of the state of California, that is — their key witness, who was an expert on addiction. She'd been on the stand for quite a long time, repeating and emphasizing and substantiating the points the government had been making throughout this months-long trial. She was a very highly regarded expert, a very highly regarded addiction specialist. And I sort of methodically — at least with respect to my client — we methodically undermined all of her opinions about our client. And we ended that cross-examination — I get credit for it because I'm the guy who got to ask the questions, but it was really a team of wonderful lawyers I work with who kind of put it all together. I ended that cross-examination by asking her whether she would agree with me that everything she had just described about the ills of opioid medications, we should take with a grain of salt because she's an addiction specialist. And so her opinions are necessarily biased, because she only sees the people that have the problems, but not people who have the benefits of opioids.
And you can imagine that, like any expert would, she would be totally taken aback by that. She was like, what are you talking about? I'm not biased. I'm presenting the science. Which was her response. She said, I'm not biased at all. At which point — what we had done is we had unearthed a clip of her on another podcast, actually, Fresh Air, where she was interviewed by Terry Gross while she was promoting a book. And Terry Gross had asked her this very question — because you are an addiction specialist and you only see people who are addicted and not people who benefit, wouldn't you agree that you are biased? And her response to that was, ha-ha, I'm totally biased.
I replay that because there are so many lessons from that one exchange, including the fact that it was kind of the cherry on top of a cross-examination that completely undermined her opinions. It's not just substantively helpful, but it's also helpful just because it's such obvious impeachment of something she just said. But there are other lessons about that from the perspective of being a trial lawyer, which is — you have to know when to sit down. After I said, please play the clip, that was it. I smiled. I said, thank you for your time. I have no further questions. And I sat down. That was a lasting impression of that exam.
And then the other lesson is, you have to know — when you are thinking of cases like a trial lawyer, you are not planning for summary judgment. Obviously, if you can get summary judgment, you should try to get it. But you're always thinking about the trial. What am I going to say when I'm in front of the fact finder, and how am I going to have the most impact? That was an example of something we deliberately held back from deposition so no one would be prepared for it. Even my client wasn't prepared for it. My client, after we got off — the client was obviously very happy with it — said, I was so nervous, I was like, where is he going? Of course he's not going to answer this question. But we had so much trust that we knew you knew exactly where you were going.
Khurram Naik: I love the example. And I love the technique because by definition, it's not something opposing counsel can plan for. There's something you're holding back. They just can't know what you're holding back.
Moez Kaba: That's exactly right. In that case, we had very, very, very good, very talented opposing counsel. And they were grasping. They got up and they said, well — they said about the expert — Mr. Kaba didn't play the rest of that clip, did he? That was the response. Of course, I had the rest of the clip. I wanted to play the rest of the clip, but it wasn't as punchy. I wanted to end with a punch. I didn't want to end with a monologue. And so they said, Your Honor, we want to play the rest of the clip. And I got up and smiled. I said, no objection. And the rest of the clip was her saying, yes, for many people, opioid medications are incredibly helpful. It was literally the point we were making.
It doesn't happen in every case, but you try to find these opportunities in your cases to out-lawyer, out-persuade the other side. That was an example in that case, which, like I said, everybody was essentially writing the story about how they lost it. So everybody turned around and had to write the story of how we won it.
Khurram Naik: Did you have any pressure on opposing counsel to come up with that interview?
Moez Kaba: Not at all.
Khurram Naik: So they just totally winged it. Rolled the dice.
Moez Kaba: I'm sure they quickly tried to listen to it and said, oh, it was cut off — because a lot of people's natural instinct is — and I see this a fair bit at trial too — where you'll read an excerpt of a Q&A from a deposition to impeach the witness, and a lot of people's natural reaction is, Your Honor, they should read the full response, because it's instinctive. You feel like I've got to say something. And sometimes you're better off saying nothing. You're better off just letting it be, because sometimes the full response is worse for you than just the part that was excerpted.
Khurram Naik: Have you been on the other side of that equation, where somebody posed a challenging question on cross and then you had to redirect and you feel like you resuscitated the point?
Moez Kaba: Yeah. So one of the things we try to do — this is turning into trying cases the Hueston Hennigan way, I guess — but one of the things we really try to do with our direct witnesses is we try to cross them harder than they will ever be crossed at trial. That takes a lot of work. I always tell people, the best compliment our team gets after preparing a witness for trial is when they get off the stand and they're like, wow, you guys are much tougher. We love that. Part of that is you try to predict where the other side is going to go, and then you have redirect ready for when the other side goes there. Sometimes — lucky for us, we work very hard at that to make it work, and look, sometimes it does. Sometimes you just have something bad that you just have to take. You have to own it as a witness. You have to accept it. But then you have to explain why it doesn't matter for the purposes of this case. That's the better approach. You don't want to seem evasive. You don't want to lose credibility in front of the jury. So sometimes you just take it on the chin, but you help the jury see that it's not a knockout.
Khurram Naik: It's funny — I'm just realizing something. I was on LinkedIn the other day and somebody posted a question: what's something you've learned as a lawyer that you use in everyday life? I didn't have a good answer at that moment. I couldn't think of a good example. I knew there were going to be several things. But now I realize what I do is — in everyday life, I just say, let's assume that's true. Even if that's true, and then you proceed. It's just, yeah, whatever.
Moez Kaba: I also think — I think it goes the other way too, right? Like what's something that you hold true to in everyday life that applies more forcefully as a lawyer?
Khurram Naik: Ooh, that's a good one.
Moez Kaba: I think having integrity and credibility really matters. One of the things I often think about — and we talk about here — is there are basically three people that the jury sees throughout an entire trial. It's the judge, it's you, and it's the lawyer on the other side. As much as the credibility of the witness matters, the witness is maybe on the stand for a day in a month-long trial. The jury sees you every day. So every day you've got to earn and maintain your credibility. By you stretching too far, or trying to get your witness to stretch too far, or being unfair to a witness on cross-examination, you're eating into that credibility. You want to keep it high from your opening on forward. You want to keep your credibility at maximum. Not because juries just be like, I like that lawyer more, I believe that lawyer more, therefore they win no matter what the evidence is. But because you can only hurt your client's case by stretching your credibility. You always try to be that person in real life. But that's how you should be in the courtroom too. I think it's really important.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned earlier this kind of finding your own voice through trial and finding your own style. And, you know, for whatever reason, what popped in my head was the Beatles — John Lennon, if I remember right, said, when I first started as a musician, I really just wanted to be like Chuck Berry. I just wanted to sing like Chuck Berry. And then he worked with this really skilled producer who just stood in it. I'm like, go in that booth and I want you to sing this song like you would. And just really trained him to find his own voice. What was the process like for you as a trial lawyer? Do you feel like there's been some consistent practice that you've used? Is there some moment you recall, or some trial you feel like, hey, I just made a breakthrough and it changed my approach, my style? Tell me about that.
Moez Kaba: It's really been a process of working on it and refining it trial after trial. I've been really lucky — I mentioned this earlier — I've seen some just wonderful lawyers, and I've seen the way they work. I've seen their style. I've seen what works and what hasn't worked for them. And I tried to embody some of those principles in my approach. But then every trial, it gets better. Your voice gets sharper, your personality, your approach to things gets a little bit stronger. So for me, it's been looking at other people and then saying, like, who am I? Who is my personality? What is my real personality? Look, everybody tempers their personality a bit for trial. But trials are long and they're arduous, and you cannot hide who you are in that. The true you is going to come out in some way.
There are lawyers on our team that are super effective because they are very — they're methodical. It's very militaristic in some way. One, two, three, four. Their voice, their tone is pretty flat. Their back-and-forth is like a game of pong. It works really well. If everybody on the team did that, it's not going to work really well.
So I — you could probably tell just based on this conversation, there's a little bit more flavor, a little bit — since this is a podcast, I guess — there's a little more spice in my presentation style. You have to know when to moderate that. You have to know when to pull that back, and you have to know when to turn it up. My voice changes a little bit more. I tend to smile more when I feel like there's a good point that we just made — not because I'm happy about it, which I am, but because I want the jury to see, because sometimes the jury doesn't know there's been a great point made. They're like, wait, I want to go back and listen to that. Why was Mr. Kaba smiling? Right.
I'll tell you, that first jury trial we had — when I was an associate and I had these witnesses — the foreperson came to me after the trial. And she said to me, I just loved when you were up there. And I said, oh, that's so nice of you. And she said, yeah, you were so sharp and spicy. It doesn't always work, and you definitely don't want to always be spicy. But I just took that, because I was like, I think I was a little bit spicy at some moments during that trial. But you can't start off that way. That's my point. You have to build the credibility to get there. At the beginning, you just have to be perceived as the truthful teller of the facts to the jury. But then who you are comes through. I think everybody would say there's a little bit more flair in my style, but it's been okay so far.
Khurram Naik: I was in trial opposite of Bill Lee at WilmerHale, and he had that more flat style you're describing — more like pong. Such a great description for it. I didn't get it. I just had to believe that everyone said this is a really effective style. So I was so glad you said, hey, there are different styles that work, and it's not any one. And I think it's really good advice. I don't know if you consider Wachtell a big firm — of course, it punches outside of its class — but in a truly big firm, the process is a lot more about standardization and having a formalism, like, you're supposed to be equally good at discovery as you are at briefing, and in fact, every aspect — discovery and briefing — and being good at all of them. And kind of, you know, more of a standardized presentation style. So yeah, it's interesting to hear, hey, really you got to mix it up into your own thing. And it sounds like very early on, you got some feedback that, hey, do your own thing, backed by substance, and earning it pays off.
Moez Kaba: Yeah. And it's a really good point that we've kind of navigated to at this point, right? Which is — when you don't see people like you doing the things that you want to do, you kind of just pick someone else and you're like, maybe that's the way it ought to be done. You can have a tendency to want to lose a bit of who you are to match who you think you ought to be. And it takes some — back to something we were talking about — it takes some boldness to say, no, I think I'm going to be who I am. I'm going to deploy my personality in the right way, but I'm not going to be a lesser version of me. If I have some tonal flair, I need to make it work for my client and for what I'm saying to the jury.
We're all professionals. You have to come into things with the right approach. You have to know what environment you're in, what context you're in. But I just think it's really important to be true to who you are and what you bring and your perspective. Our juries reflect a true rich diversity of the communities in which we're living. Their experiences and what they bring to the table and how they react to things is very important. If everybody's singing the same song in the same tune at the same time, there's nothing for people to latch onto that might be like, oh, that's an interesting point, I might want to pay more attention to that.
The best analogy I can think of for a really effective trial team is an orchestra, where there are different instruments. They all come together in harmony, and each of us is our instruments. My point being, if you play the violin, if that's your thing, just play the violin, just do it really, really well. You don't have to play the trombone because everybody else is playing the trombone. I think for people like us and for South Asian lawyers, we may have our own styles, we may have things we bring to our approach and delivery from our backgrounds or upbringings, whatever it may be. I would just urge people not to lose that. Just make that work for you in a trial context.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned, of course, you've had this relationship with John Hueston. And now you are the managing partner at the firm where he's a name partner. I can imagine if he wanted to keep the firm in his vision and just run it the way he wants to, he just would have remained as managing partner. So there's a reason why you're managing partner. Clearly you are playing some instrument or some tune different than John. You've kind of emphasized the ways you guys have come up together and trained together. What are the departures or different styles, either to trial work or managing a firm, from John?
Moez Kaba: So interesting. John has never been the managing partner. Brian Hennigan, the other partner of Hueston Hennigan, was our managing partner for our first eight years. I like to describe our partnership as like the US Senate, in that everyone has the same vote. We try to do a lot of things by consensus in terms of our approach to the firm. The managing partner basically is one among many. Yes, you in some respects can set the agenda. And yes, you have a level of influence, perhaps, because the partners elect the managing partner. They entrust you with making key decisions for the firm and opining on things that matter to the practice, that matter to the people, that matter to our contributions to the profession.
John, Brian, so many of the partners — I can name all of them because they all add something pretty unique to our practice, and they add something that I think is really helpful for our clients. They have all been mentors for me, even the ones that are more junior to me in many ways. I try to go into every case with an open mind to learn something about how they want to do things or what they think worked. John in particular has been just a wonderful example of being a successful trial lawyer. He's been doing it for longer than I have and he's had really wild success. In so many instances — when I told you earlier about bringing a seat to the table — he has brought that seat to the table for me. We're not just partners, not just — is he the name partner and was he the managing partner of this firm, not just have we been at the firm from our founding and growing it together — but we are also really close friends. That's what makes the practice so much fun. I always tell him, I want to do every trial. Let's do every trial together. It's not possible, just because we have so many cases and so many clients. He's got to do some. Marshall, Wyn, Allison, Doug, Mickey, Kristie, Joe — they all have to do some on their own. But it's really fun to practice law when you're doing it with people you consider friends and mentors and just good people. So I think that's part of it. But yeah, anybody who's seen us in action will tell you we have different styles. They just happen to complement and work well together.
Khurram Naik: I've heard a lot about the successes you've had at trial, but tell me about some of the more challenging moments. Tell me about — was there, I hear maybe in the first trial, maybe another trial — what's the moment you had the most fear or anxiety, or you had a partner throw it at you? What's the moment in which you felt that at a trial? Or have you never felt that?
Moez Kaba: I certainly have felt that. I don't know if it's fear. But I think it's concern. And if you are not concerned or kind of spun up before you're going to trial, then we should be really thinking about what you're doing. Because I have that feeling in every trial. Every day I walk into that courtroom, I have like a knot in my stomach. I'm like, oh my God, this is what's going to drive me to make sure this day goes really, really well. I was talking to one of my associates the other day, who was like, oh my God, you seem so comfortable in court. You seem so comfortable doing this, or taking this witness, or whatever. And I said, wow, I'm putting on a good show. Because every single time — I took a deposition two days ago of the key witness for the other side in a case, and I had a knot in my stomach throughout the entire deposition, because I was like, I really need these clean admissions. Which we got. But it's part of what drives me, at least — yes, it is probably unnecessarily stressful, because I do not have it in me to turn it off and say, whatever happens will happen. I just don't have that setting. I don't have that setting on my dial. But I think it's what's made me, in some respects, so driven. This desire to constantly be like, okay, these 10 things could go wrong, so let's make sure we're prepared for none of those 10 things to go wrong.
Just going back to that first trial — I had my very first witness of that trial, who was the first witness of the trial. He was not a witness we controlled. He was a third-party witness. And he said something that was completely unexpected and not very good for us. In that moment — it was my first trial witness as an associate, with all these people watching — I had a knot in my stomach. But I had thought through, okay, I'm going to move to the next thing. I'm not going to dwell on it. Why am I not dwelling on it? Because nobody else probably noticed what he said. And I have no control over him. He's going to say whatever he thinks he wants to say.
I learned two lessons. One is that just as important as it is to know what questions to ask is to know what questions not to ask of a witness at trial. That was a lesson I learned in that moment. I got a little wet on my skis. The other one is, nothing is so fatal that happens — if you move on, everybody else moves on too. The people I was working with — my team knew what happened, but their reaction was like, that's great, we handled that really well. Nobody even — I don't even remember the question and answer anymore. That's how insignificant it ended up being in the grand scheme of things. But you use every one of these opportunities to learn something. You learn from your colleagues, you learn from your client, you learn from the other lawyers. That's what I try to do still.
Khurram Naik: I think it's true that you've never lost a trial — at least as lead trial counsel. But I think, aside from that, I think maybe never lost a trial period.
Moez Kaba: Knock on wood. Yes, that is correct. But every great trial lawyer — you can't be afraid of losing. You have to give it your all to win. But you can't be afraid of the loss, because then you're never going to — it's actually something I talk to John about a lot, and we talk about amongst our partnership a lot. We take on really, really tough cases. That's kind of the point. That's our practice. If you're going to take on the tough cases, your willingness to take them on means you have to be prepared that it's not going to all go your way, but you've got to fight every day to make it go your way. So the real lesson for folks who are maybe listening is, you can't be afraid to lose, because then you're not going to take on the hard cases and really challenge yourself. Some losses are inevitable. But let's put them off as long as possible.
Khurram Naik: Okay, so I've never broken a bone, right? And, you know, it's common for kids to break bones. So now at this point, the idea of breaking a bone is terrifying to me. I just can't wrap my head around what they look like. And to your point, I think the wrong reaction would be, well, just stay in my bedroom for the rest of my life. But obviously I have to expose myself to stressors, consistent stressors, to challenge my body's strength and my bones, all that stuff. But I guess I don't particularly have a very good game plan for what if I break my shin — like, how am I going to react to that? Because, I'm sure, it would be like an emotional thing, like, is my leg ruined and whatever. How do you — you're a preparer. Tell me, what are the prepared things you prepare for? Like losing a trial. How do you — what is your mindset or how do you frame that? Because you have to accept that not everything is in your control. And a judge — how are you doing it?
Moez Kaba: Look, the most important thing is feeling good about what you've done in that courtroom. The most important thing every single day is never finding yourself content with just having had a good day. You don't want to just have a good day. You want to have a good week, and you want to have a good month. One of the things we talk about here is we want to win every day. We want to try to go in and win every day. And that's why, even after some of the hardest parts of trial, or the middle of it where you feel like, man, we killed it for the last two weeks — okay, we can see, by the time you get towards the end, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. But it's that middle part where you're like, wow, we really killed it for the last two weeks. But then you're like, we cannot rest on that. We've got to kill it this week too. We cannot let go when you get into the drudgery of the trial. A lot of lawyers kind of put witnesses into the middle that can go up, down, left, right, sideways. But you can't get lazy in a trial — intellectually, creatively, strategically, analytically — and continuing to push through that.
At the end of the day, what we talk about with our trial teams — we get around, we talk together, we talk every night, we talk with the team at the end of a trial, and we say, did we feel like we put on our best case? If you feel that way, then you can be more prepared for it. It hurts and it stings and it's something that you never want to repeat again. But you can be prepared for it because you feel like, we put on our best case. What we cannot be prepared for is if we made self-goals, if there were foot faults, if there were errors that were within our control — unforced errors. Then you don't feel good about it.
So put everything you can into putting on the best case, and then a jury may not agree with you and a judge may not agree with you. But what you've got to think about is, did we do the best that we could do? Then if you don't win something, you sort of have to — yes, you salt your wounds and you're unhappy for a while. That's natural. But then I think you have to turn around and think to yourself, okay, what might we learn from this experience? How do we avoid this again?
By the way, one of the things we do as a law firm — even when we lose, we do these firm-wide talks where people talk about what did I learn from this trial. When you win a trial, we all get the whole firm together. People talk about what did I learn, what's a great thing that we saw, what's a great event that happened, so everybody can learn from that experience. We do that when we lose a trial too. We get together and we talk about what we learned, and we congratulate the trial team. We talk about their personal sacrifices and we talk about, you know, what if we had done this thing, or what if we had done it that way. We use every opportunity to just become better lawyers, which is just important to continue growing our firm and our practice.
Khurram Naik: Trial work is just so damn hard. Like you said, there are lots of talented trial lawyers. And you mentioned this concept about out-lawyering other lawyers. How do you do that? The universe of people that are operating at your level — it's a small universe, and all those people worked really hard, went to great schools, or didn't go to great schools but worked really hard. What is the edge that you have among people that work in the company you partner with? How do you find your edge?
Moez Kaba: It has nothing to do with me. It's the people that I work with. All day, every day, seven days a week. I will tell you that it is the other partners I work with, the associates I work with, and the staff I work with who are relentless when we are in trial — relentless about uncovering that last nugget, figuring out that last little thing that's going to set us apart from the other side. It just goes back to things I was talking about earlier. Trials are a team sport. You have to all be working together, and you have to be able to rely on each other. Yes, you often think about it — yeah, there's like the one person talking, you're the person that did the examination, you're the person that did the opening or the closing — but it's this whole group of people that we work with. I've just been really, really lucky at my firm that I work with just exceptional people, from the partnership to the attorneys to the staff. Then you take that work and you make it your own, and you use it, and you add your perspective, and you do a lot of editing and a lot of organizing around that. But I think in many respects, the edge is the other lawyers and staff at Hueston Hennigan. And in some respects, at least, it is a bit of luck.
Moez's opioid-case cross — methodically taking apart the government's lead expert with a Fresh Air clip nobody saw coming — reminds me of how Priyanka Timblo described the inside of her $101M verdict, and what it actually feels like to be the lawyer everyone else expected to lose. Being underestimated is its own kind of weapon if you know how to use it. Listen to my conversation with Priyanka Timblo.
Khurram Naik: Okay, we kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but there's this running theme of boldness now, and some of it was tied to the things that you didn't know were possible. And I think boldness is very related to ambition. So tell me — what's the story of ambition until today? Like, when did it begin? What was the first time you really got motivated to really understand, okay, here's really my potential? I'm starting to grasp my potential. Anyway, I think you supposed — your high school counselor said, hey, you should work in the trades or something. Which would be fine, but maybe wouldn't have realized your potential. What's the story about ambition? And if there's like a Y axis and X axis — Y axis is level of ambition and X axis is time — what does that chart look like from, say, law school until today?
Moez Kaba: Yeah, I guess I — I think you have to go back a little bit before law school. I don't know that I would describe it as ambition as much as necessity. Which perhaps is a more primal form of ambition.
Khurram Naik: Necessity is the mother of ambition.
Moez Kaba: There you go. Necessity is the mother of ambition. Exactly. Or at least the friendly aunt. We've talked about it a little bit — I'm really proud of my roots and my upbringing. But growing up in Chicago and not having a lot of resources to rely on, but being a part of the community, really made me feel like, I've got to do more than whatever my parents, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles did. For me, I really remember when I was looking at college and then deciding to go to law school, I had a singular goal. It was not to be some famous successful person or even to be a trial lawyer or a winning lawyer. I had one goal, and my one goal was to buy my dad a Jaguar.
Because all growing up, my dad drove taxi cabs everywhere we went. He drove a taxi cab. When I was dropped off to Cornell, we did not have the money to buy me a plane ticket. My dad drove his taxi from Chicago to Ithaca, New York, to drop me off. And I just always remember, like, I've got to do something for my dad. What am I going to do? It just seemed to make sense to me that you could go to law school. If I could get into a law school, I was going to go. And then one day I'm going to buy my dad a Jaguar, and I'm going to buy my dad and my mom tickets to go back to Pakistan, where they could go and do nice things for their family.
It had really nothing to do with any ambition other than I didn't want to grow up with the limited resources that I had growing up. I didn't want my future to be restricted that way. And I wanted my parents to be able to enjoy at least some of the incidents of having been in America for, you know, 20-plus years at that point. So that is really what was driving me. And in some respects, like you look back on it — so unfulfilling that there was no greater altruistic or professional purpose. But there really wasn't.
Then I just kind of fell into these things in some respects. It's so weird to talk about — the guy on the subway told me, go work at this firm. I went and worked at that firm. Somebody said, you should go clerk if you can clerk. I thought, okay, let me go clerk. Where should I clerk? I thought, hey, I've never been to LA. I've never lived in LA. I'm definitely not a Californian. So I was like, I'll try to go clerk in Pasadena. Flew out, clerked in the Ninth Circuit. Then I was like, all right, I'm going to go back to New York and work at this law firm, because that's what one does. The first thing I did when I got to Wachtell after my clerkship was go to trial. Which is a very rare thing in the New York legal market — to go to trial. And I went to trial in Delaware before, at the time, Vice Chancellor Strine, who has since left the bench. One of the trial witnesses was a witness I got to depose. I just was like, wow, this is exciting. This is fun. Let's do more of this.
Then, despite my earlier protestations, my then-boyfriend now-husband was like, let's move to California. That was a great year that we had in out West, and we did. So I was like, all right, let's move to California. I went to Irell. I started working with people, got to go to more trials. Then I thought, I really love doing this. I really love the feeling of working with people so closely. And I want to be like that. I want to be a great trial lawyer. I want clients to call with their hardest cases, their most intellectually challenging or factually complex cases. I want to represent them. I want to figure out how to tell their stories to judges and jurors.
So that's been a real huge part of the career. It's like working with the group of people that decided to start their own law firm. How does that happen? When does that happen? When we did it. And we've been really lucky and, hopefully, really hard work and a little bit of skill plays a part in that. But I don't have that same need anymore — to get the Jaguar or to send my parents to Pakistan for vacation. Now it is really about continuing to do really great work and work with really great people, and help other people here have those experiences. And there's something so rewarding for us who have been partners at this firm for a while about seeing our younger, more junior lawyers have that light bulb moment in trial where they're like, wow, this is awesome. I want to do this. When they get to cross-examine or direct-examine their first witness and they're like, this was amazing. I want more. That is just incredibly rewarding.
Khurram Naik: So I think there's two possibilities, and maybe both could be true at this stage. You've accomplished so many things by now. You mentioned partner of this 10-year-old firm with this string of wins. There's two possibilities from here. One is — and maybe both are true. One is your response is, I've done so much, and so this is going to make me a little more conservative in some sense, because how much higher can I get? Managing partner working with all the people I ever care about, and we're growing and adding new partners to my team, and trade up the associates like you're saying. How much better can you get from here is one way to look at it. So there's a risk of loss. On the other hand, the point is, you're playing with house money. Hey, you know what, I've accomplished beyond what I could even conceive of. My greatest ambition was to get this Jaguar, which you can buy now. So which of those two — is one truer than the other? How do you see it?
Moez Kaba: Well, I certainly do not believe I've accomplished everything that is accomplishable. I feel like — you know, another feature —
Khurram Naik: You've done so much by any reasonable stretch. You've done so much.
Moez Kaba: Yeah, but look, there's this thing that's been written about extensively — this whole imposter syndrome idea, where I catch myself in this all the time, where I'm like, is this all just serendipity and luck, or is this something real? Like, is there skill that underlies all this, or have I really just consistently been in the right place at the right time? So there is this constant — you got to prove yourself. You got to win. There's no having won in this profession. There is always winning. Perhaps I need just deep and long therapy for that. But that's the way I think about it.
I'll tell you two things that really motivate me today. One of them is, we're now at 80 lawyers. We'll probably be at 90 lawyers this year at our firm, with offices in Southern California and New York. And I just think it's so important for us to build a firm worthy of a legacy. That is not something you do in 10 years. That's not something you do with just having done what we have done as a group here. There are 90 lawyers and many staff members who have entrusted us with their future, their professional future, at least, their career. We still are getting incredibly interesting cases from our clients that we want to deliver on. So there is no, like, it's neither being conservative nor being like I've got house money. We're actually still in the process of building this building. So let's make sure all of the floors that go above are just as good if not better than the floors that are below. And not just for us, but for everybody else who's occupying this space. So I think about that a lot. That's a big part of what motivates me even today professionally — the clients and the people that I'm working with.
The other thing we did as a law firm — I know Khurram and I have talked about before — is we decided to start this foundation, this public-interest foundation called the Social Justice Legal Foundation. The Social Justice Legal Foundation attempts to do for public-interest issues what we do for private clients — which is take on cases and try to create good precedent. So what the Social Justice Legal Foundation does, which is entirely funded by our law firm — it doesn't seek any outside funders — is a group of really great recent law school graduates from a handful of schools who are fellows. It's led by a wonderful, wonderful lawyer, a South Asian lawyer, her name is Sarah Haji, and a group of professional full-time attorneys. They take on — right now they've got three or four, to be more accurate — cases where they are pursuing criminal justice reform or the protection of immigrants being held in detention, for example. There's just some really interesting cases that they're taking on. That's another fun new dimension of the practice — working on cases that may have some lasting social impact beyond wrapping up, getting your bill paid, and moving to the next matter.
So those are the two things that I think about. And, by the way, I'm 42. Like, there's no resting at 42. There's at least some time left on this runway. I've got more things to do.
Khurram Naik: Do you have any sense for — when you talk about the future trajectory of the firm and the impact that you want to make — what do you picture? Is there some predecessor you look to and say, that firm had an impact, lasting impact, as a trial firm? How do you think about that?
Moez Kaba: Yeah, I think there are a number of firms that have just become real cornerstones of the legal community that are not 200 years old. I mean, we talked about one — Wachtell Lipton is not that old of a law firm, but they came onto the market, they filled a need, and they're remarkable in how they did that. And Quinn Emanuel is another example. It's not the same model that we have. They're much larger than I think we would ever want to be. But that's a firm of a relatively recent vintage that has accomplished great things. There are other examples of this — Susman Godfrey, you know, Keker Van Nest. There are some of these firms that I think are just — they've just done really great things over a long period of time. And I think really added a lot of breadth to the availability of great law firms out there. So for me, yeah, we're 10 years old. I like to think we play in the big leagues. We want to keep doing that. So that 20, 30, 40 years from now, when the leadership of the firm looks entirely different than it does now, people are still like, oh my God, that's a Hueston Hennigan lawyer. We better watch out. We better bring our A game when we're going up against a Hueston Hennigan lawyer.
And then at a more personal level, there are some really extraordinary South Asian lawyers out there. We've talked about some of them — Neal Katyal, or Judge Srinivasan, or Paul Grewal. There are some really fantastic accomplished legal luminaries out there. The US Attorney Hamdani, like you're talking about — people who have accomplished great things and will leave a legacy just because of having done that. Because of their contributions in the spaces in which they operate. So for me, I — by the way, I don't know any of them personally — but I look up to them, and I feel like having built such respect for themselves in the spaces that they occupy is something that I would like to do in the little space that I occupy.
Khurram Naik: I've interviewed Alamdar, so you can listen to that another time. I'll send it your way. But, okay, I want to pick up on the South Asian part a little bit. When you talk about legacy, you're already making headlines today. And the thing about impact is that society perceives you in a certain way. So I want to make this a venue and a format for you to react to some of the headlines, because you have maybe the most colorful or unique headlines that I've ever seen written about any trial lawyer. So, two sets of headlines, and what's your reaction to them. The first one — there's an article about you: Moez Kaba, a first-generation Pakistani Muslim, reps clients from the LGBT community to a Koch brother.
Moez Kaba: Well, it's accurate. It is an accurate headline. I think that headline speaks a bit to my practice — at least my practice at that time. But I think it also speaks a little bit to the uniqueness of who I am. People want to write stories about unique things. That headline was pretty early in my career, though. So I feel like I didn't have too much else that I could say the headline should be about.
Khurram Naik: Okay, all right. So a more recent one. Hueston Hennigan gets its first South Asian Muslim openly gay chief.
Moez Kaba: Yes, also true. So factually accurate headline. That's a more recent one. Look, I respect the framing of it, because I think for many it's a historical thing. For our firm, at least, there aren't that many South Asian managing partners. There aren't that many gay managing partners. A dear, dear friend of mine, someone too — who I just think is a fantastic, fantastic accomplished lawyer — Kalpana Srinivasan, who's the co-managing partner at Susman Godfrey, is one of the South Asian managing partners out there. But you don't hear about a ton of them. There's meaning to highlighting the unique demography of someone — for people who are reading that to say, wow, I'm an openly gay person who's entering the law, I'm a South Asian person who's entering the law, I'm both of those things, I'm a Muslim, I come from a modest background. There's a lot of power that comes from perception, basically. I can see myself in you. So in that respect, I think it's really important.
My other reaction to that — and to some of the similar very demography-oriented headlines — is that it can take you a bit to understand why that is the only framing as opposed to just one of the framings. All of those things are very much a part of who I am and have contributed to who I am today. But I've also gone to trial a lot. I'm also a trial lawyer, and not just like I went to a trial — by the time I became managing partner, I'd done many trials. So that could just as easily have been a headline about being a trial lawyer — Hueston Hennigan's next trial lawyer as managing partner, or whatever. That feels a bit more tied to the merits of your accomplishments as relevant to the role than the newness of who you are as relevant to the role. We have to embrace, and I do — and I think most people do embrace — who we are in terms of our perspective, what we bring to the table in terms of our life experiences. But I think it's also important to not allow us to be defined first and foremost by my ethnic background, my sexual orientation, et cetera. You don't read that — I looked at some other articles where I saw the headlines and it was like, such-and-such, you know, blank lawyer, new managing partner. You don't really see that unless there's something new about the person who's gotten the role — namely, they're a different race, a different sexual orientation, et cetera. So that's a very long answer to say I'm very appreciative for the attention. I just hope that as we progress as a society, the merit is given as much attention as the novelty.
Khurram Naik: Do you feel that — so the first headline is pulling out, you know, LGBT representation as well as — and sorry if I'm not pronouncing right, I think it's pronounced "Koch," maybe I'm wrong. Is there something novel about that — about those two fairly different groups of clients? And so is there just some novelty about that? And maybe the bottom line is, I'm a trial lawyer, I like trials, like complex cases, difficult cases. Maybe that's into the story. Or, hey, you know what, honestly, we get paid. And so, you know, that's the answer. What's your take on that?
Moez Kaba: Yeah. It's "Koch." It's one of the Koch brothers. And it wasn't a particularly political case actually. It was the case that I was talking about — the trial that I did in New York early on. It was for Bill Koch, one of the Koch brothers. And it certainly is not like, you know, we have paid — we do the work — that's never been our approach. Frankly, our law firm turns down cases all the time. We turn down clients who are willing to pay whatever the rates are, all the time. Partly because we're busy and partly because it may not feel like the kind of fulfilling work that we would like to do.
The purpose of that article was more about explaining the breadth of the type of clients. The LGBT interests — for basically my entire career, I've chosen pro bono matters that are close to me in some way. I'm an openly gay man, so I've done pro bono work that is connected to LGBT rights and equality. I'm the son of immigrants, so I've done pro bono work connected to establishing and protecting the rights of immigrants in America. I'm Muslim, I've done pro bono work designed to help protect Muslims. In that range, I have fought for and argued legally for marriage equality and employment non-discrimination for LGBTQ people. In the immigrant ground — I had a pro bono case where we sued the US Department of Justice because they had shut down an immigration hotline that people that were being held in immigrant detention could call for free to get legal services. That had gotten shut down because people in immigration detention actually have less rights in some respects than people that are in prison. They don't get that free phone call. Which is the case we filed and won in the central district.
And then on the Muslim front, I have fought to defend an anti-bullying initiative. There was an initiative passed in the San Diego school district that basically said, there's a real problem with bullying Muslim kids, and we want to make sure we're paying special attention to that problem. And we want to educate our students about, for example, Eid — if people are fasting, that's not something you should be bullied about. Because a lot of times you would hope that educating people will help make them less bigoted. There was a group that challenged that initiative. The school district had a timid response to that challenge. We were retained pro bono. And we fought to protect that initiative — to say that initiative was not only constitutional but actually entirely consistent with the California Constitution. And we won that case.
So in that respect, a lot of my pro bono work has been tied to these very specific personal identity things. And I think that's what that article was touching on, on the one end. And then I'm sure there was a little bit of an attempt to make the Koch representation seem like the other, but it wasn't in that case. That was a representation about — it was a fraud case. It was a fraud and contract case, which actually, the longer story about that representation is very interesting. It's been written about in books, it's been Netflix'd in documentaries. There's a book called The Billionaire's Vinegar that was about this. It was about fraud in the high-end wine market.
Khurram Naik: Yes. And I understand my father, if he were still alive today, thinking that his son is talking about the real scourge of counterfeit wines in the $25,000-plus-per-bottle market, would be shocked.
Moez Kaba: But it was a real problem. Our client's case, and really that win we had at that trial, and then some appellate wins we had, really helped turn around and clean up that market quite a bit.
Khurram Naik: So the Netflix documentary, or the biopic — who do you want to play you?
Moez Kaba: Oh my God. Who do I want to play me? Hopefully some South Asian actor. But here's the problem — there aren't that many to pick from, are there?
Khurram Naik: The answer is, you play yourself.
Moez Kaba: I play myself. Yeah. Let me, let me fit that into the schedule. Let me play myself. Actually, Riz Ahmed. How about that? He's a great talent. Pakistani actor.
Khurram Naik: Yeah, he's good. Okay, so this theme of not enough South Asian representation keeps coming up. We certainly have some forebears to our generation — you mentioned a bunch of them. Very impressive. And they were kind of the pioneers. Now we're on a different boat. We're still coming. There's still another generation coming up behind us. But maybe I'll start with — maybe not enough — we talk about people that are ahead of us, we talk about people we mentor, but maybe not enough we talk about peers. What is it that you want your peers to know about the practice, or raising our ambitions as a community, or coming together? What message do you have for your peers?
Moez Kaba: What a good question. Not something I think about often enough, I'm sure. But I think there's a lot of power in acting collectively and thinking about how do we support one another and how do we support younger lawyers that are coming up through the system — through law schools, clerkships, and whatnot. So what I should be doing more of is connecting with my South Asian peers and talking about — how do we make meaningful differences, and just keep these connections. They will inure to our benefit, I'm sure, in ways that we don't yet know.
It's always interesting to me — there are so many communities in which even my colleagues here are like, oh yeah, I know this person from high school, we went to high school together, now this is what they're doing. I can call that — kind of, I've got a connection there because, you know, we were in the Federalist Society together, or whatever the case may be. You have these connections. It used to be like, I know this person because we golfed together, or we were in the country club together, or whatever. Look, I think that has been the model for some lawyers to great success, to great client-generation success. I think that's something South Asian lawyers should be doing even more of. I think what you're doing is a great model of this. I think what other organizations are doing is a great model of this — creating that community and understanding that there are ways that we can and should help each other and help others. So yeah, I guess that would be my primary message — let's seek out opportunities to work with each other, and towards things that we care about. They don't always have to be structured. But, as I say that, I fully acknowledge and understand that I am part of the problem because I'm not doing enough of that myself. What's that old — the call is coming from within the house — or whatever. So I get that.
Khurram Naik: I see the flip side of that, the glass half full, which is you are contributing to the solution by being part of it. If my podcast is part of the solution, well, you're on the podcast.
Moez Kaba: Yeah. There we go. See, see how you just turned that around. I've learned from you that, you know, you just — that's when he stops talking. So I'll just stop right there. This is great, man. So glad we did this.
Khurram Naik: I'm too. Thanks for coming on.
Moez Kaba: Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it, and I'm very impressed with what you're doing. So keep doing it. Thanks, man.