70. Becoming the Tiger: Twila White on Power, Presence, and the Fight for Justice

My buddy, Matt and I, we tried a number of cases together at Gerry Spence’s trial college at Thunderhead Ranch. And we were in trial for about a little bit over six weeks during the pandemic. It was trying. We only had so many hours in a day to try, actually try the case. Jurors were getting COVID. And we had some challenges from the judge who was very aggressive, for lack of a better word. And I think the jurors had just been watching the interactions throughout the course of the trial and times when they probably wanted to become unhinged. And after the verdict came in, one of the jurors came up to me and he said, “You, you’re a fucking tiger.” I said, “Thank you.” It made me feel so good.

Before she was ever called a tiger in the courtroom, Twila S. White was something even rarer, an engineer who left behind certainty to pursue justice. She carried with her an analytical mind, a storyteller’s heart, and a fierce belief that no one, no matter how small, should stand alone against power.

What it taught me is that jurors, they pay attention to everything and they’re always watching. And some things are not about words. They’re transcendent where people feel emotion and they feel energy. Never put your head down and never turn your back to the jury. You always want to look at them because the eyes are the window to the soul. And when you talk to people, you look at them and you’re communicating. It’s why when you’re out with your best buddy and you see something funny and you guys give each other that look, and if you look even harder, you might lose it because you might start bawling out like you’re at a comedy club. That’s nonverbal communication. The flip side goes when you know that a friend or family member is in pain and they don’t have to say a word to you, and just that one glance can make you go into tears. That’s how we as human beings are connected through emotion. And so sometimes it doesn’t require words. But it was nice to have six weeks of silence and for him to give me that impactful message, something that I’ll never forget.

Twila’s fierceness wasn’t something she learned in law school. It was forged much earlier, shaped by her grandmother’s strength honed through years of battling inequity and elevated by her time at the Gerry Spence trial college. It’s not just skill that made her a tiger. It’s heart, it’s fight, it’s the refusal to look away.

My fierceness came from my grandma. My grandma was a tough cookie. She was the first warrior that I would ever know. And if I live to have as much power and fierceness and courage that she had, and just if I just have it in one pinky, I’ll have whatever I need to get through the rest of my life. And even though she’s gone, and I get emotional thinking it, she was my North Star, but she’s around me everywhere I go. So even when I come across evil encounters or things that are not necessarily positive in my life, I feel like she’s my guardian angel, I feel like she’s always there with me. So even though someone might win the first round, I know she has my back.

Twila didn’t grow up dreaming of a courtroom. She started in engineering, solving technical problems with precision and logic, but it wasn’t enough. She needed a cause to believe in. She chose law not to chase money, but to chase meaning.

As I look back on picking careers, this is my second career. And when I was an engineer, it was like I could do the work. And usually, thank God, everything that I’ve tried to do, I’ve been successful at it. And I was at that time. I was a consultant for a transportation engineering company, but my heart just wasn’t in it. And the choices that I’ve made in my life, they’ve never been because of money. I feel like an oddball in that respect because I’m different. Why am I not wired that way? And I’m not, but what I’ve always felt is that if I’m enjoying what I’m doing, the money will come. And at the time, I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing, and so I was just going through the motions. And I said, “I can’t continue to do this because I’m not passionate about it. I don’t wake up excited about it.”

And so from there, I started this journey. I had this boss who was an Irishman who swore like a sailor. And he said, “Kid, you’ve got this job. Now go out there and figure out what you really want to do.” And he had some expletives in there with his message to me, but it resonated. And so I started on that journey and I said, “Okay, what am I going to do here?” If I continue along the trans trajectory of engineering, I’ll be in management. Oh, that’s boring. But hey, if I become a lawyer, that gives me a lot of career options where I can be a trial lawyer, I can be a politician. Not into politics, didn’t go that route. I can be a consultant. I can do transactional work. There were just a lot of options. And I landed into being a civil rights lawyer, which came right down my alley because then I could stand up for the Davids against Goliaths. And that always, that got me going for a long time.

It’s one thing to practice law, it’s another to make law. Twila would find herself at the center of a fight that would shape the rights of pregnant women in future generations. And it all started with one client and one case dismissed too soon.

I was representing Dewandra Johnson. And Dewandra, she was pregnant, and this job, she needed to take time off for this special time in her life. And she ended up getting fired because of it. And I ended up getting to, I usually become really good friends with my clients. And we started rallying the troops and we got 3, 4, 5, I don’t remember how many, but we started getting other women that had been through the same type of experiences where they were either pregnant and had become fired or they were on fertility drugs, trying to become pregnant, notified the employer and getting fired. And so I was able to use those declarations, submit them to the court. But what did the court do? The court dismissed the case summarily. And I was devastated because I was trying to show a pattern in practice. And what we now call Me Too, so I always tell people that I was handling Me Too cases before it was ever the hashtag.

So we were able to get Dewandra Johnson’s case reversed on appeal, and it became the Johnson versus United Cerebral Palsy case, which was one of the seminal cases where the rule of law stated that we could use Me Too evidence or other victims of discrimination evidence to prove discriminatory intent. And so I was really proud of that. Especially being a civil rights lawyer in the realm of employment, I have found that there’s this sense of apathy concerning women where like I had, when I look at the number of cases that I’ve lost on summary judgment, I think the majority of them have been pregnancy cases. And in all candor, when I got to that part in my life of being a business owner, being a woman, a lawyer, trial attorney, when I had a high risk pregnancy, that was the most challenging time of my life. And it takes me to emotion because I would’ve wanted a system that was more supportive, but I didn’t find that. And that was really unfortunate.

Not all skills are inherited. Some are built, trial by trial, loss by loss, lesson by lesson. Her transformation from advocate to tiger wasn’t overnight. It was a commitment to doing the work on herself first.

Honesty came naturally to me. I had to build on just being comfortable speaking in front of people. They say that that’s the biggest fear there is. People talk about flying on a plane. They’ve done surveys, and the number one is public speaking. So I had to consciously learn. But what I found at the core of it was the more I learned about myself, the more comfortable that was for me, because it’s a journey of self-discovery. Because when we’re comfortable with who we are, it doesn’t matter who we meet, we don’t meet a stranger. Because we know that the universal connections that we have among us, whether we’re black, white, male, female, Jewish, Catholic, whatever distinctions we want to make among people, there’s always a universal connection. Because we all know pain. We all know what it feels like to be betrayed. We all know what it feels like to trust someone and then for them to harm us. So if we focus on a human connection and we have self-discovery, it becomes easier and easier and easier. And that’s what happened for me.

At Thunderhead Ranch, they say, “Real trial lawyers have to work on the horse,” meaning themselves. Before you can connect with a jury, you have to confront your own wounds, your own fears. Twila learned that winning starts long before you stand before the court. It starts when you step fully into who you are.

I did a lot of psychodrama and my journey was really fomented at Gerry Spence’s ranch. He has an amazing trial program at Thunderhead Ranch in Dubois, Wyoming that I attended in 2011. And that experience transformed my life. And that’s where I learned I could just be real. I didn’t have to imitate somebody else. I didn’t have to be someone that, a Perry Mason. I can never be the great Gerry Spence. I mean, I don’t have to imitate him, but as we are told, it all starts with you. It all starts with me. So I can be myself. That voice says, “Why am I subjecting myself to this?” But you know what? We come out of it better on the other side. Because a lot of us, myself included, I was walking around for years disassociated, just trying to be like this perfect Patty, afraid to share my life’s pains, my life challenges, things that I’ve been through.

But if you’re not willing to show people yours, there’s no opportunity for the connection because unless I’m willing to tell you what I’ve been through, I don’t open the door for you to say, guess what, I’ve been through the same thing. And so once I show you mine, you can show me yours, and then we have a connection. And that way it’s like, okay, we’re there, we’re there together. And if you’re not willing to do the personal work, you’ll never step up your game to the next level. I had an attorney email me this morning, just this morning, that he wanted to be a part of an organization because he wants to strike fear into his opponents. And I told him, “If you want to strike fear into your opponent, all you need is your bar license and good old-fashioned trial skills. That should be enough.”

In a world obsessed with titles and prestige, Twila reminds us real power isn’t about where you go, it’s about what you carry inside. You don’t need a bigger stage. You are big enough already.

I think power has to be seized because I think we all have it. It’s not something that’s outside of us, it’s within us. And I remember having an associate, because I used to have lawyers that worked for me. I don’t anymore. I don’t desire to supervise anyone. And I had this lawyer who worked for me, and he came to me and he said, “I’m leaving. I’m going to go work over at this law firm over here. And it’s a bigger firm. And I consulted with my family about it, and it’s big.” And I told him, I said, “Let me tell you something. Always remember that big is never outside, big is inside. Don’t ever forget that.”

And it was funny because I would later go on to see him, and I saw him at a conference and he left in the midst of when we had a big appellate issue pending. And I won that appeal. I won that appeal. And I remember talking to my grandmother about it, and she was like, “Oh, you got it. You’re going to win this one.” And God rest her soul, we won it and it became a published decision. So I thought about that and the concept of him saying, “Oh, I want something big,” and hopefully that message stay with him, that I told him, “You be big. If you’re big, wherever you go is going to be big.” And so hopefully he remembered what I said, and I hope he’s big wherever he is.

Power for Twila isn’t dominance, it’s resilience. It’s waking up after defeat, after injustice, after heartbreak, and choosing to fight anyway. Her power is something she claims every single day.

I had people to try to strip away my power. And I’ve thought a lot of situations that I’ve found myself in like why am I going through this? And I scream, shout, whatever, and I wake up the next day and I keep going and I continue to fight another day. But it does become tiring when a system is not necessarily fair and results don’t always come out the way that they should. So I guess my concept of power would be the ability and the adaptation to continue to keep fighting in the midst of an imperfect and broken system.

True power doesn’t come from blending in. It comes from standing out, owning every part of who you are. Twila’s journey is a reminder that when you step fully into yourself, whether in a pink suit or a fierce cross-examination, you don’t just survive the system, you change it.

When I was in law school, we had our career center that told us the colors we needed to wear to the interviews so we would get picked. So by the time I finished working at the engineering firm, I said, “No one’s ever going to tell me whether to wear a blue, green, purple, red suit. I’m going to rock whatever suit I want to wear.” And so I made a point that when I gave a closing one time, I wore a pink suit. I had my pink St. John’s suit on. I was so proud. And it’s that type of ownership that I feel like the journey of self-acceptance and awareness and saying it’s more about heart than it is about what you’re wearing or what your hairstyle looks like or even the color of your skin that matters. It’s more about you, the person, and the connection that you make with people.

Twila didn’t just become a tiger overnight. She built herself into one through heartbreak, hope, and a refusal to shrink. Her story is a call to every woman in law, own your voice, stand in your power, and fight like hell when you need to. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to LawHer and share it with a woman who’s ready to roar.

I would like to see more women trial attorneys who are trying cases who are in the courtroom, not just saying that they work at a firm where there are male lawyers who are trying cases, but I mean actually trying the case, selecting the jury, doing the opening statement, cross-examining witnesses, and doing the closing and standing up in front of that jury vulnerable and laying out why this defendant or defendants are liable and explaining the amount of the harm and standing there and arguing for punitive damages. That’s what I want to see more of. And I don’t know why we’re not doing more of it. Why are we so relegated to having all of this education, getting licensed by the bar? When I became licensed, it was three days. Now it’s two days. Okay, whatever. You get that license, you’re educated. You’ve got a bachelor’s, you’ve got a graduate degree, you’ve got everything you have inside of you, everything to be a lead. So why don’t you do it?