Erik Ramakrishnan & La Belle Province

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 49 No. 3
• Publication year: 2023
• topic: Business of Law,Contracts,Trademark,Labor Law,Immigration Law,Civil Procedure,Real Estate

Erik Ramakrishnan and La Belle Province Vol. 49 No. 3 Pg. 8 Vermont Bar Journal October 2023

by Kim Velk, Esq.

Erik Ramakrishnan and La Belle Province

KSV: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed, Erik. As you know, for this feature, we talk to attorneys who have interests and passions outside of the practice of law which help keep them balanced. When I heard that one of your passions was visiting Quebec, I knew I had found my subject for this feature. Full disclosure -I'm deeply linked with Quebec myself, and I'm sure lots of our readers are as well! You mentioned you go up to Quebec about every other week, is that right?

ER: About that. Sometimes possibly more often. I live about two miles away.

KSV: Great. We're going to want to know all about your favorite places and your tips but let's start at the beginning. You're one of the lawyers in our VBA Incubator project, so I know you are from California - is that where you were born and raised?

ER: I was born and raised in Michigan. I moved to California when I was barely an adult and lived there for over twenty years before moving to Vermont a year ago. My brother works for the City of Burlington and moved to Vermont a decade ago when he was first hired. My parents followed five years later, so the pressure has been on for a while to find my way here, too.

KSV: Where did you go to law school?

ER: Santa Clara University School of Law.

KSV: And can you tell me about your legal career to date - a little summary about what you have done professionally and are doing now?

ER: Yep. I started my professional life as a teacher. I taught special education classes in Fremont, California for about five years. If you recall the whole Enron crisis and the devastation that did to California's state budget, which brought down Governor Davis and put Arnold Schwarzenegger in office, that's when I was teaching. To balance the state budget, the Legislature enacted the infamous "Triple Flip" and "VLF Swap," which were clever ways to get around state constitutional mandates for minimum education funding. Long story short, it was a terrible time to be a teacher, so I ran away kicking and screaming, and ended up working

for the Santa Clara County Tax Assessor for a year. (Like your friendly local listers except you work in a three-story office in a tower block.) There were talks about layoffs, and as the last in I was slated to be the first out under union rules. Someone told me once when I was a teacher that I should be a lawyer because I had a good understanding of our labor agreement, so on a whim I applied to Santa Clara and got accepted even though my LSAT score wasn't fantastic. I ended up graduating fourth in my class, but right in the middle of the Great Recession, so it took a while to find...