Environmental attorney learned his trade as student lawyer working on I-94 expansion project

Attorney Adam Taylor’s first introduction to law as a career came at home, around the family dinner table.

When he was 9 years old, his mother, Elizabeth Taylor, who then was an English professor, was going to law school at night.

“She’d come home and talk through what she did around the dinner table,” said her son, a 2014 alumnus of Wayne State University Law School. “It was fascinating to me – the way you’d think things through and analyze them.”

Taylor is an environmental attorney today working for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and his mom, too, is an attorney now, specializing in education employment law. Now they both “talk things through” around the table when they’re able to get together and share a meal.

Taylor, who grew up in Monroe, and his wife live in Austin, Texas, a city he says is “like Ann Arbor, but warmer.”

He moved there after passing the Michigan Bar Exam.

“When I moved down to Texas, I wasn’t licensed there as an attorney,” he said. “I obtained a job with the agency (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) working for the Office of the Chief Clerk. I was the agenda coordinator for the commissioners. It was a non-attorney job, but I took it in the hope that I’d become an attorney here and to gain experience in environmental law. I took a chance.”

His gamble paid off. After Taylor took the Texas bar exam and became licensed, he was promoted to the commission’s Litigation Division in the Office of Legal Services.

His year working for the commission as agenda coordinator gave him invaluable experience and insight, he said.

“I was able to see how the other arms of the agency work, how everything fits together,” he said. “My chance to interact with the commissioners themselves, the Office of General Counsel and the different sections at TCEQ was very helpful.

“Now, with the Litigation Division, if there’s a violation of Texas’ environmental law – for instance, a gas station is not performing leak testing on their tanks – it gets referred to me. I take it through the administrative process to try to resolve it through a default order, agreed order or proposal for decision. If I cannot obtain an agreed order, it goes before an administrative law judge for an evidentiary hearing. My job is to prove up the violation at the hearing. The judge will then issue a proposal for decision that will be sent to the commissioners for approval. Default and agreed orders are also sent to the commissioners for approval.”

His experiences at Wayne Law also paved the way for his job as a litigator.

Taylor was involved in the Mock Trial program during all three years of law school. He won first place in fall 2012 and winter 2013 competitions and was the co-chair for the program in 2014.

One of his most memorable law school experiences stems from the 2013 competition, he said.

“It is a thrilling experience when you’re out there in front of the judges arguing against other teams and having to make on the spot evidentiary arguments; it’s very enjoyable and educational,” he said. “It’s still with me now. I think now when I have a case: What did I do then? What worked and what didn’t?”

In summer 2012, he worked as a student attorney for the Washtenaw County Office of Public Defender and had a chance to argue for clients then, too.

Another valuable law school experience for Taylor was his two semesters working as a student attorney with Wayne Law’s Transnational Environmental Law Clinic under the direction of Assistant (Clinical) Professor Nick Schroeck.

“My job with the clinic was to research the Interstate 94 expansion project’s final environmental impact statement,” Taylor said.

He met with community groups to hear their concerns about the freeway project and wrote a legal letter to state agencies on behalf of the those groups, including the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center of which Schroeck is executive director.

“I learned more about environmental law that way,” Taylor said. “That experience of seeing the day-to-day work of an environmental lawyer was invaluable.”

Taylor began his collegiate studies thinking he’d like to be an engineer, but changed his goal along the way to becoming a teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in social studies and history for secondary education at Eastern Michigan University and went on to teach English as a second language in South Korea for a year before the seeds sown at the family dinner table took root and led him to law school.

He chose Wayne Law after visiting other law schools.

“Wayne Law felt like home to me,” Taylor said. “I liked the way the professors interacted with students.”

He’s now exactly where he wants to be career-wise.

“I want to develop what I do now,” he said. “I’d like to further my experience down the road, but I’m happy right now. I love being here.”