High school debate teams seen as path to recruit new lawyers

It would be perfectly understandable if attorney Mike Langford, professional mediator and one of the owners of the Mediation Group in Indianapolis, wanted to spend his free time doing something as different from his day job as possible.

But that isn’t the case. When he isn’t hashing out civil litigation cases, he puts in numberless hours helping to coach both the debate and speech teams at Avon High School.

Langford founded the debate team five years ago, and his wife is the head coach of Avon’s speech team. The two caught the debate bug when they were students at New Castle High School and participated in its speech and debate programs. Langford said it changed his life.

“I thought it was a wonderful experience,” he said. “It opened up doors. I ended up becoming an attorney in large part because of the experiences I had in high school through speech and debate.”

Other Indiana lawyers tell similar tales—though it would be a stretch to say that attorneys “giving back” by getting involved in speech and debate programs is some sort of trend.

There are only perhaps half a dozen attorneys (no one keeps track) among the hundreds of coaches at Indiana middle schools and high schools. Which in turn is only a sliver of the approximately 145,000 students and coaches participating nationally according to the National Speech & Debate Association.

Still, the natural connection between debate, speech and litigation seems to create some pretty obvious opportunities for recruitment to the profession.

“I have had several students tell me they’ve enjoyed the speech and debate experience so much that they would love to turn it into a career,” Langford said. “And the most obvious career is typically law. I’ve written law school recommendations for some of my students.”

Indeed, the path from debate competitions to the law is already well worn. Supreme Court justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were both debaters. The entertainment world also has some debaters among them, including talk show host Stephen Colbert, director Jordan Peele and actor Brad Pitt (to name just a few).

Trevor Wells, partner at Reminger Co. in Merrillville, thinks high school debate programs present a golden opportunity to attract students to the legal profession.

“Based on the sheer number of people who end up debating and then going to law school, I think it’s kind of like a debate-to-law pipeline,” Wells said.

He thinks many of the kids who enjoy the sport fit a decades-old profile—go-getters who have trouble with public speaking and want to get over it in the most direct way possible. Students who don’t like speaking in front of crowds but don’t feel motivated to correct the problem usually just don’t sign up.

“When we’re pitching speech and debate and mock trial at freshman orientation, I think the ones who would rather die than speak in public just pass on over us and go to the volleyball team or whatever,” Wells said.

He was one of those go-getters, though he participated, by his own admission, not so much to get better at public speaking but because he “enjoyed beating people.” He debated in high school, but became a coach by happenstance, when he learned about an open position at Valparaiso and signed up.

Since then he’s gone all in, even learning to drive the minibus the team uses to get to meets around the state. These days he can spend 20 to 25 hours a week on coaching, contest preparation and, of course, piloting Valpo’s trusty minibus.

One of his regular passengers is his own daughter, Valparaiso senior Lottie Wells.

“People love —or maybe fear, and they just won’t tell me when dad drives the bus,” Lottie said. “Last year, on the way to a tournament in Mishawaka, he ran over the middle of a roundabout. I swear we got airtime. That incident has gone down in history.”

She won’t be following in her father’s professional footsteps, however. Though she considered going to law school, her plans have changed over the past couple of years.

“I’ll always have a great respect for the law, but I’ll be doing my undergrad in kinesiology,” Lottie said. “From there I’ll either go into physical therapy or to medical school.”

Attorneys have played a role in establishing or reviving school debate programs. Langford founded Avon’s debate team, and the same sort of thing happened for Tony Fehrenbacher, partner at Manion Stigger, a Louisville construction law firm. He coaches at Evansville’s Reitz Memorial High School—a program he and his wife built more or less from scratch.

“I competed in speech and debate at the high school and college level, and I wanted my children to have the same experience,” Fehrenbacher said. “So my wife and I started a program at Reitz Memorial. In our first year in 2019 we had five students. Now we have just over 50.”

He’s watched the students under his tutelage benefit from one of debate and speech’s most famous attributes—forcing its practitioners out of their comfort zones. Kids nowadays spend a great deal of time texting each other and reading or listening to snippets of information (or misinformation) on the Internet. Speech and debate, Fehrenbacher believes, can help them take their first step into a larger, more intellectually rigorous world.

“Students today are so used to playing video games and texting that they’re not comfortable with communicating one-on-one,” he said. “Speech and debate forces that personal interaction between students as well as with adults such as coaches and judges. They have to communicate with their colleagues as well as adults in a persuasive manner.”

Even with only half a decade of coaching experience under his belt, he’s still seen plenty of shy students transition into someone who can stand in front of an audience and deliver a speech they wrote in 30 minutes and memorized in seven. He’s also had kids ask him, based on their speech and debate experience, about getting into law school.

“I think constant interaction with an attorney gives them this unprecedented look at what an attorney does,” Fehrenbacher said. “They understand, in general, how we operate and what we do. I absolutely think coaching is a great way to get more attorneys into the profession.”

It’s certainly piqued the interest of Janani Devendran, a sophomore at Avon High School (Langford’s stomping grounds) and a great fan of speech and debate.

“It’s gotten me interested in politics and definitely has made me think of law school as a potential option after high school,” Devendran said. “It’s definitely made me think.”

Fehrenbacher strongly believes that getting more attorneys involved in speech and debate coaching could help more kids to develop an interest in legal careers.

“We’re looking at lower numbers as more and more attorneys retire,” he said. “I really think that lawyers spending time with high school students doing this sort of activity is a great way to encourage kids to get more involved in the legal profession and possibly create more lawyers.”•