{"id":1251,"date":"2026-10-19T13:15:34","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T20:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalunicorn.com\/?page_id=1251"},"modified":"2026-10-19T13:18:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T20:18:28","slug":"my-story-in-my-own-words","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/rationalunicorn.com\/es\/my-story-in-my-own-words\/","title":{"rendered":"My story, in my own words"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My story, in my own words<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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\u00a0<\/h6>

An Audacious Dream for a Felon to Have<\/b><\/h3>
By Lindy Laurence<\/em><\/h6>

Most people would pay a great deal to keep what I am about to tell you quiet. Lawyers especially. Our profession depends on credibility and integrity. For those who believe the past has the final say on who we are, mine casts a long shadow over both.<\/span><\/p>

Shame is very good at keeping people quiet, and for a long time it kept me quiet, too. But I’ve come to understand that courage is its antidote. Silence does not protect a story from being told. In someone else\u2019s hands, for someone else\u2019s purposes, a story like mine causes a kind of damage that is difficult to undo. So I am choosing to tell it myself.<\/span><\/p>

In 2007, I was charged in Pierce County, Washington, with thirty felony counts of theft and money laundering. The charges were accurate.<\/span><\/p>

I was twenty-four, the mother of a toddler, and the executive assistant to the president of a manufacturing company. My husband was chronically out of work and I was keeping us afloat. I was stressed, exhausted, and living a life that did not feel chosen by me, trying to keep up the appearance of one that was. In late 2004, I began putting personal expenses on my corporate credit card and hiding them in the company\u2019s books. Over the next two and a half years, it added up to more than $1.2 million. I told myself I was building security for my family. To achieve that, I was stealing from my employer and betraying people who had trusted me. I knew what I was doing, and I did not stop.<\/span><\/p>

I still feel deep shame over this. I hurt a great many people, destroyed trust that had been freely given, and wrecked my own reputation. I am not going to dress that up. But I can be ashamed of the actions I took without being ashamed to tell the truth about them. I cannot undo the harm I caused. However, when I look at everything that came after, I am proud of the life I have built. One honest day at a time. That pride does not erase the shame, nor should it. Both are part of my story.<\/span><\/p>

I was found out the day my son was born. What followed were two cases. In the civil case, my employer sued me, and I paid everything back: every asset, every account, every dollar, plus a $200,000 judgment for the company\u2019s legal fees, and then the taxes the IRS assessed on the money I had stolen. In the criminal case, I pleaded guilty as charged to every one of the thirty counts. On August 21, 2008, the judge sentenced me to fifty-seven months, the highest standard sentence the law allowed him to impose. I asked if I could kiss my children goodbye. The sheriff said no. I took off my wedding ring, handed it to my lawyer, and waved to a one-year-old and a three-year-old as they were carried out of the courtroom. That is the memory that still finds me at three in the morning, and I think it should.<\/span><\/p>

I served my time at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor. I had grown up in a church community without much money, and I thought I understood hardship. I did not. Now I lived with hundreds of women who had been carrying poverty, violence, and the justice system on their backs their whole lives. I learned more about how the world actually works in those two years than in the twenty-seven before them. I went to every class they offered. I went to therapy. I took every opportunity prison put in front of me, and there were not many. I did not want to just \u201cdo time.\u201d I wanted the time to count.<\/span><\/p>

Something else happened there that I do not say lightly. I was raised in a faith, and I am grateful for much of what it gave me: the values of service, redemption, and kindness that I still try to live by. But I had also learned that forgiveness was something you asked for and were given. In prison I came to believe that the forgiveness I needed could not be given to me. It had to be built. Nobody could grant me a clean slate; I could only earn one, by getting up every day and doing the right thing, even when no one was watching. Many people find faith in prison and it saves them, and I honor that. What I found there was accountability, and it saved me too.<\/span><\/p>

In August 2010, under a new Washington law for incarcerated parents, I was one of the first five people released to serve the end of my sentence at home on electronic monitoring. I was home for my daughter\u2019s first day of school. On December 27, 2010, the Department of Corrections closed my file.<\/span><\/p>

Then came the part nobody writes articles about. I came home to two children who did not quite know me, a marriage that two years apart had not helped, and a family I had to learn how to be part of again. My husband and I went to counseling and did the work, and the work led us, kindly, to a divorce. So in 2012 I was a single mother with a very new felony record, no savings, and no job.<\/span><\/p>

I went back to school and finished a paralegal degree in fourteen months, believing that what I had lived through could be useful to the people lawyers serve. A woman named Laurie Davenport, who ran the Pierce County legal aid office, let me volunteer after I told her\u2014before she could ask\u2014exactly who I was and what I had done. Six months later she hired me. That is where I learned lawyers can be superheroes, watching pro bono attorneys walk into a room and change someone\u2019s life in an afternoon. And that is where I started to think this could be one more way to help people, one more way to build an opportunity for myself. What an audacious dream for a felon to have.<\/span><\/p>

I had it anyway. I spent the next several years at that office, and some of the work I am most proud of involved going back inside the prison every month with volunteer lawyers to help incarcerated mothers with their family law cases. It was the first way I found to give something back to a community I had taken from, and it was not the last. In 2016, the Washington Supreme Court appointed me to the state\u2019s Access to Justice Board, the body the Court created to make the civil justice system reachable for people facing economic and other barriers, and which convenes the statewide network of legal aid providers and advocates known as the Alliance for Equal Justice. I served on it for six years. Eight years earlier a judge had decided what to do with me. Now the Court was asking what I thought.<\/span><\/p>

I also learned something harder in those years. For me, 2007 was the past. A wholly different life. For every new person I told, it was right there in the present, and a great many people did not want the risk, or the association, that came with someone of my reputation. I understood that. I also understood that I could not rely on others\u2019 willingness to take a chance on me. I wanted independence, financial freedom, a name I had built myself, and success that could change what was possible for the people I love. That is the same thing I had wanted at twenty-four. The difference is that this time I was going to earn it. Everything people say someone with my record cannot do, I decided I had to go and do. I knew the standard would be different for me. Every slip, every ordinary mistake, would be read as proof: this is what you get when you trust a felon. So I held myself to a standard I would not have asked of anyone else. I still do.<\/span><\/p>

In 2017 I started at the University of Washington School of Law. I told them everything in my application. They admitted me anyway, and then awarded me the Gates Public Service Law Scholarship, a full ride given to five students a year who commit to public service work after graduation. I did not expect it. I am still not sure I have fully absorbed it. What I found at UW was a community that knew my history and welcomed me anyway. The people who run the Gates Program did more than fund my education: they believed, out loud and in writing, that someone with my past could be trusted with a law license, and they kept believing it on the days I did not. I also found out I was not alone: there were other students with criminal records in those halls. There are more of us in this profession than you would guess.<\/span><\/p>

In 2018, I was in a motorcycle accident that broke my pelvis. I spent months in a wheelchair and more months after that learning to walk normally again. I did not miss a term. Law school was hard. Prison was harder. I felt so lucky to be sitting in those classrooms that I would not let anything take it from me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

When I applied to the Washington State Bar Association, I shared my story again, in fourteen pages, with every court record attached. I had spent three years in law school without knowing whether I would even be allowed to sit for the bar exam. I graduated in 2020, in the first months of the pandemic, and UW gave me its award for the most pro bono hours in my class. Later that year the bar cleared me on character and fitness, which meant I could finally sit for the exam. In 2021 I took the exam remotely, because of the pandemic, and passed by nearly a hundred points. In April 2021 I was admitted to practice law. I went back to UW for an LLM in taxation, because I understood that the people least able to afford good counsel were small business owners and nonprofits, and that tax was where they got hurt most. I finished in 2023 at the top of my class with the Meade Emory Endowed Prize.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Even then, with those credentials, I was turned down for employment positions because of my history. This sent me back to the courthouse. In July 2023, more than a decade after I had completed every term of my sentence, the Pierce County Superior Court vacated my convictions. Under Washington law, the guilty pleas were withdrawn, the charges were dismissed, and I am treated as a person who was never convicted. I do not say that to hide behind it. The law did not erase what I did; it recognized what I had done since. It felt like setting down something I had carried so long I had stopped noticing the weight. The hearing was over a video link, so there was no courthouse to walk out of. I closed my laptop and sat at my kitchen table for a long time. I was lighter than I had been in fifteen years, and I had not forgotten where I came from.<\/span><\/p>

My children were one and three when I went to prison. They visited as often as my then-husband could bring them, and the goodbyes never got easier. Their crayon drawings were screened out of my mail because the prison considered them a security risk. When I came home, more than one person who loved us told me to say I had been away at school. I understood the impulse, and I could not do it. I had just spent two years learning what a secret costs, and I was not going to build my relationship with my own children on one. So I told them the truth, in pieces they could hold at the ages they were, and I kept telling it as they grew. It led to hundreds of conversations I would rather not have had, and every one of them made us closer. What I wanted them to learn is simple: everyone makes mistakes, some mistakes teach you who you want to be, and character shows in what you do next. They are grown now, and thriving, and they have never once made me regret telling them. If anything, they are the people who taught me that a story told straight loses its power to hurt you.<\/span><\/p>

I joined Rational Unicorn Legal Services in 2023. I bought it the following year, and today I own and run it: a Certified B Corp law firm that does flat-fee, plain-English legal work for small businesses, nonprofits, and cooperatives. I led the firm through B Corp certification myself, because it is a promise someone else checks. I know exactly what shortcuts cost, and I wanted a firm that had agreed, in writing, not to take them. I fulfilled the public service commitment I made as a Gates Scholar, and I take service just as seriously now that nobody is counting. Pro bono work is still part of how I practice. I chose this work on purpose. Nobody builds a business to be broke, stressed, and unhappy. People do it to make the world a little better, to create opportunities for their families, to build a life that fully reflects what matters to them. It is only with economic independence that any of us gets to create a joyful life on our terms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

That is also why the firm has a foundation. The Rational Unicorn Foundation is a tax-exempt nonprofit built for people like the person I was: people with the drive and the ability, but facing barriers I know from the inside. A record, no capital, no one in their life who has done it before. It is new, and what it does first will depend on what those people tell us they need. I am not interested in charity that makes people feel small for needing help. I am interested in opportunity, because opportunity is the only thing anyone ever gave me. And it was enough. If that is you, I would like to hear your story. There is a short form at <\/span>this link<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, and I read every one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

I owe this life to everyone who gave me an opportunity. Not a favor\u2014never a favor\u2014just the chance to show up, work hard, and prove myself. Laurie Davenport at the legal aid office. Sal Mungia, who opened half the doors in Tacoma for me and now sits on the Washington Supreme Court. Ann Spangler and the Gates Public Service Law Program, and the faculty and staff of UW Law, who took a chance on me when a reasonable person might not have, and who have been in my corner ever since. My family, who did not stop loving me when it would have been easier to. The Rational Unicorn team, who have known this story longer than the public has, and who show up every day to build this firm with me anyway. And my granddad, the kindest man I ever knew, whose first name I took as my last so I would have something to live up to.<\/span><\/p>

I want to say something to the people on the other side of stories like mine, the ones in a position to take a chance on someone. If you are deciding whether to hire the person with the record, admit the applicant with the past, or trust the lawyer with the history: I am what that decision can look like almost twenty years later. I have spent every day since trying to make good on the chance they took.<\/span><\/p>

If you are reading this at the bottom of something you did, I need you to know three things. Your mistakes do not define you, but how you fix them does. Nobody is going to hand you the life you want, and no shortcut will get you there; the only road is work. It is long. And at the end of it there is a life that is not just salvaged but genuinely yours, because you shaped it with your own hands.<\/span><\/p>

My firm\u2019s tagline is \u201cUncommonly Possible.\u201d People sometimes ask where it came from. It came from this. I am what that phrase means, and nothing about it happened by accident.<\/span><\/p>

Somewhere right now there is a person with a record and an audacious dream. I hope someone gives them the opportunity. I hope they take it. And I hope they tell their story themselves, before anyone else gets the chance.<\/span><\/p>

I am not ashamed of mine anymore. I am telling it to you myself.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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