He reached his own conclusion by watching what happened to the clients he helped
By Nick Morgan, Founder and President, ICAN Law
Somewhere on a law school campus this week, a student is opening a securities regulation casebook for the first time. Classes are starting. Outlines are blank. The reading looks orderly.
It won’t stay that way—at least not for anyone who spends a year on a real docket.
A wonderful law clerk, Tristyn Meyer from MSU College of Law, has spent the year with us at ICAN. He arrived the way most young lawyers do—having studied securities regulation from a casebook, where the SEC executes flawlessly and the people on the other end barely appear. Then he spent a year representing those people in real cases, and the picture changed.
Watch the full conversation with Tristyn at icanlaw.org. It’s worth your time. But if you take only three things from what Tristyn learned this year, let it be these.
One: The casebook leaves out the part that matters most.
In law school, securities regulation looks cut and dry. The government brings clean cases against people who did something wrong and moves through them exactly as the rules say it should. The agency’s execution is flawless. The actual human beings involved are an afterthought, if they appear at all.
That is not my characterization. It’s Tristyn’s, describing the class he took before he ever set foot in our office:
“What you read in the casebook is that everything’s cut and dry, everything is the way that it should be, and that the government—usually the SEC—has flawless execution in how they bring cases, how they proceed through those cases. And there’s basically no consideration given to the actual people involved.”
That picture did not survive contact with a real docket.
What changed Tristyn’s view most was seeing how little the real world resembles the textbook. He came to describe the SEC, bluntly, as a flawed creature:
“The SEC is an extremely flawed creature, to put it one way. The people that the SEC brings cases against, in many cases, do nothing wrong. And that’s something that the SEC will even admit. And yet they still find themselves on the wrong end of legal action, and their entire livelihoods might be at stake.”
He watched the agency pursue people who did nothing wrong, in cases where the SEC itself will admit as much, while those same people stood to lose everything: the right to be licensed in the financial services industry, or simply every dollar in their bank accounts. These are not faceless institutional defendants with armies of lawyers. As Tristyn put it, “these are regular people who find themselves at the mercy of a large, relatively faceless government agency.”
The casebook is tidy because it leaves out the people. The docket never lets you.
Two: The SEC will admit you did nothing wrong—and come for everything anyway.
The case that made that gap real for Tristyn is the one we worked on together, alongside our very able co-counsel at an outside firm who joined this pro bono effort with us: SEC v. Padilla, where we represent Jamie Quick.
The SEC sued Jamie as a relief defendant. That term has a precise meaning. It means the government is accusing her of no violation, no fraud, no wrongdoing of any kind. The agency concedes she broke no law. But it came for nearly everything she has anyway, through writs of garnishment aimed at seizing her money while she fights to keep it.
You would expect a rational actor to look at those facts and stop. Tristyn expected it too:
“You’d think that a rational actor—whether it’s a person or a law firm or an agency—would see the facts on the ground and stop what they’re doing, or really do anything in their power to prevent this woman from becoming penniless. But that’s just not how it works. And the SEC presses forward at every opportunity.”
Tristyn is careful about where he places the blame, and he’s right to be. “It’s not one person’s fault,” he told me. “It’s an institutional problem, but it still happens.”
But an institution is just a series of choices, and every one of them keeps landing on Jamie. The choices are made by real people. The trouble is that the culture they work in makes it easy to stop seeing the real person on the other side. Tristyn named the cost of that plainly: “It’s just extremely frustrating to see a regular person like Jamie, who everyone involved agrees didn’t do anything wrong, be railroaded by the SEC.”
ICAN’s work to defend her, together with our co-counsel, has been relentless—emergency motions to quash the writs of garnishment, motions to stay while the appeal proceeds, real deadlines measured in days. Tristyn described sitting up until one or two in the morning writing those motions:
“When I’m sitting up at one or two AM writing these motions, I know that it’s for something real. It’s not just a pointless, spinning-your-wheels academic exercise. It’s something that will ideally help a person keep their livelihood.”
That is the thing a classroom cannot teach: the difference between an argument on a page and an argument that decides whether Jamie keeps her savings.
Three: A small, motivated team can do what big firms can’t.
Here is the part that sounds backward until you look closely.
Tristyn did not spend his clerkship proofreading and fetching coffee. He helped write an opposition to an SEC motion to dismiss in federal district court, in Kapszukiewicz & Healthcare Shares v. SEC—our challenge to the accredited investor rule, the wealth test that tells an experienced healthcare executive she cannot invest in a healthcare company she’s qualified to run. And he is helping write the opening brief in Jamie Quick’s appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, with our co-counsel beside us.
He knows exactly what is riding on it:
“There’s a lot on the line for Jamie Quick… And that is what’s most important to me right now.”
That is significant work for a lawyer of any vintage, let alone one still studying for the bar. Here’s why we trust him with it: a fresh legal mind that hasn’t been trained to stop seeing the person on the other end is a genuine advantage. Tristyn’s instinct to treat Jamie Quick as a real person isn’t a soft skill—in this work, it’s what makes a lawyer formidable.
There’s a broader lesson in that, and Tristyn named it well:
“How much can be done with just one or two or three extremely motivated lawyers or law clerks. If you have the desire and the work ethic and the motivation to help people, even if you don’t have all the resources of a large firm or a mid-sized firm, you can do a lot to help regular people.”
When you’re on a mission to make a difference and have some of the amazing tools available today, a small team can do more than ever. And we’re not doing it alone—ICAN’s core team is multiplied by pro bono co-counsel and a network of allied firms that take on these fights beside us, case by case. This is why support for ICAN compounds the way it does. A lean, motivated operation means contributions go straight into the work—the motions that protect Jamie, the brief challenging the accredited investor rule—rather than into the overhead of a large institution.
A Seed Planted in 1991
I recognize the conviction Tristyn formed this year, because I formed my own version of it a long time ago.
When I was in law school, I spent a summer clerking at the Institute for Justice—then brand new. To give you a sense of how new: when I arrived in Washington, the firm had rented space, hired almost no one, and left the moving boxes unpacked. It had about the same resources ICAN has today, which is to say not many. I can’t claim I accomplished much that summer in terms of law practice. But that clerkship planted a seed—it showed me how much public interest law can do, not only for the people it touches directly but for everyone protected by the legal principles a good case can establish. I never forgot it. It is a large part of why ICAN exists.
So there’s a symmetry I can’t ignore. Thirty-five years ago, a small, scrappy public-interest shop changed how one young clerk understood the law. This year, another young clerk sat in another small, scrappy public-interest shop and reached his own conviction about the SEC—not because anyone recruited him to believe it, but because he watched it happen to Jamie Quick.
To the Students Starting This Semester
Tristyn had a message for the law students heading back to campus right now, and I’ll let him deliver it himself:
“If you can get into a position like this and you can work hard and learn how to leverage the AI tools appropriately, without overstepping any professional responsibility boundaries, I think when you get to the end of your law school career you will be extremely confident and well prepared to do good work.”
Read the casebook. Then go find out what it left out.
Tristyn won’t be with us forever; his clerkship and his law school years are both drawing to a close. But the work he touched will outlast both. A case won in court doesn’t expire when an election turns, or a clerk moves on. It protects the next person, and the one after that. Someone plants a seed in a room full of unpacked boxes, and years later hands the same work to someone younger, who carries it forward.
Jamie Quick is still fighting. The accredited investor case is still being briefed. The boxes, you might say, are still half-unpacked.
And that’s the whole reason we’re here.
Watch the full conversation at icanlaw.org.
Learn more about ICAN at https://www.icanlaw.org/
Author Bio: Nick Morgan is President of the Investor Choice Advocates Network (ICAN), a nonprofit public interest litigation organization advocating for economic liberty, capital formation, and entrepreneurship rights on behalf of small investors and entrepreneurs facing SEC and FINRA overreach.
