Good Counselor Project Impact Story: The Highlight Of My Legal Career

By Ryan Dardard

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“Lawyers are the high priests of Western civil society,” said Professor Hoff as we perused his collected works of St. Augustine. I did not expect our conversation about maritime law to go this way.  

I was a second-year law student at the University of Alabama, looking for a north star to direct my career. My origin was not a family of lawyers, but rather blue-collar seafarers. Shrimpers to be exact. Longing to return to my home on the gulf coast, I reached out to the professor emeritus who taught me the law of the sea to help get me there. Professor Hoff littered our conversation with references to medieval theology, insisting, for example, that St. Anselm’s concept of “satisfaction” somehow lingers in modern day courts whenever the term is used to remedy contract disputes. I don’t know if Professor Hoff is correct, but I know that I want him to be—because his understanding of law was one imbued with meaning, with nobility.

Rather than embarking on a career in maritime law, I ended up practicing finance and commercial real estate law. I am happy assisting lenders and entrepreneurs in funding projects, mostly because it provides me with the means for my wife to stay home with our son, creating a world of love for our family. But I confess that it has been an adjustment going from the lofty, idealistic conversations of law school (and seminary before that), wherein nobility seemed proximate, to my current professional work. The day-to-day of reviewing surveys and litigation searches, drafting loan documents, and sending closing packages to the escrow agent makes the mundane much more proximate to my everyday life. Despite my best efforts, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo on Christ’s atonement is not yet permeating my client emails. But I want it to be.  

Regarding the mundanity of emails, it was by the task of checking my Gmail—an ordinary task that would prove to envelope an extraordinary venture—that I happened upon a promotion for Napa Legal. I excitedly told my wife about the Good Counselor Project Fellowship: the opportunities to discuss great works of the Western canon, to assist meaningful nonprofits, and to establish a network of lawyers dedicated to realizing the liberty of Christ’s Church. The nobility of the profession felt proximate again.

I quickly realized that the organizers of the Fellowship knew what the program was supposed to be and how to execute it. There was only one place to kick off the program: the emblematic city of American law, Washington, D.C. And there was only one way to pump blood into the Fellowship: sacramental life. The Fellowship organizers knew both of these things, so our kickoff retreat was held in the Nation’s Capital, and the schedule was anchored by the liturgy, confession, and adoration. “Prayer is a political problem,” wrote the great 20th century French theologian, Fr. Jean Danielou, S.J. He meant that prayer is not merely a private activity; it is meant to be the source and summit of civic life. Law is the legal glue that holds the polity together. Therefore, since lawyers are the mediators of law, they are specially obligated to be concerned with prayer, personally and professionally.

After going through the entirety of the program, I gladly risk appearing hyperbolic by stating that the Good Counselor Project Fellowship is the highlight of my legal career. I was reminded of the nobility of law, the nobility that inspired Professor Hoff. This nobility is present not only in the opening statement of a civil rights case or a great constitutional analysis, but even in the ordinary tasks of due diligence during a finance deal.  

Even more impactful than discovering meaning in these daily tasks was the blessing of being incorporated into a virtuous network of very bright, capable young lawyers. Aristotle states that a virtuous friendship is one aimed, not at pleasure or private gain, but at the good. And Aquinas teaches that the purpose of law is to facilitate friendship between man and God, and between man and man. Who would define law’s purpose like this today? Who is working to build a network of lawyers whose mission is the Church’s mission: to achieve the “moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ?” I know that the friends I made through the Good Counselor Project Fellowship are working day-in and day-out to achieve this mission, and they have their eyes on a future wherein the Church flourishes. In this virtuous network created by the Good Counselor Project Fellowship, Napa Legal has provided a down payment that will pay exponential returns in fulfilling the Church’s charge to “infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which one lives.”

May this Good Counselor Project Fellowship, and its virtuous network of faithful attorneys, continue to grow and prepare the future.

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