Not many people get to work for their alma mater, but Sue Wright, professor emerita of lawyering skills, counts herself among the proud and lucky few.
“I am a rah-rah SC person,” says Wright (JD 1987), who retired from USC Gould School of Law after 11 years of teaching in the Academic Success program. “It’s been fun to attend events on campus and to be around the students. I feel like I was in the right place and found the right job.”
Wright became a full-time lawyering skills professor at Gould in 2012 after a decade as a lecturer, teaching Pretrial Advocacy and 1L Legal Writing and Advocacy. But her USC association goes back all the way to when she enrolled in the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. She eagerly took part in one campus activity in particular — the renowned USC Trojan Marching Band, where she played the clarinet.
“I had been in a not-very-good 30-piece high school band, so it was exciting to join the TMB, which is so well-known, and be an ambassador for the university,” says Wright. “And like many college activities, you make friends for life, and that’s also where I met my husband [Craig Steele, JD 1992, who played trombone].”
An avid sports fan, Wright enjoyed playing at football games and men’s and women’s basketball games. She also marched in the Rose Parade, once traveled with the football team to Japan and played in the opening ceremonies for the 1984 Olympics at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
When Wright and Steele saw their daughter Kelly — also a USC and TMB alum — play at the famed Hollywood Bowl, which they had also done several times, the full experience hit home.
“In school we probably took for granted some of the amazing gigs, so it was wonderful to see Kelly perform on a big stage and realize how lucky we were,” she says.
After graduating magna cum laude from Annenberg, Wright enrolled in USC Gould “because I didn’t know what else to do,” she says with a laugh. At her first job out of law school, working in litigation at Latham and Watkins, she realized the appeal of researching and writing. She later worked in-house for Atlantic Richfield and then part-time at a boutique firm in Pasadena while raising three children. When one of her husband’s partners suggested she take over the Pretrial Advocacy course he had been teaching as
a lecturer, she found she loved it and stayed for five years.
After teaching in the 1L writing program as an adjunct with Jean Rosenbluth, now federal magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Wright accepted a full-time position in the Academic Success program, co-teaching with Professor Cap Coleman and Professor Emeritus Rob Saltzman.
“When I worked with Rob and Cap, we would recap every class, which taught me a lot,” she says. “They are both amazing, talented and caring people. Working with them was like taking a master class in teaching.”
After her own experience practicing law, Wright understands how important writing skills are to communicating in the right tone to a variety of audiences in myriad documents.
“New law students may not understand this, given that lawyers in the movies are shown standing up in court and having important meetings, but in reality, lawyers spend a lot of time putting words on paper,” she says. “And it’s hard to get good at [writing]. I tell my advanced writing students ‘You will work on this for your whole career.’”
Wright considers developing the Gould Preview pre-orientation program with Professor Laura Riley (JD 2010) three years ago to be her most memorable Gould experience. She’s proud that the program is fulfilling its goals to introduce incoming students to law school fundamentals while also building a community with their classmates. Developing the program also introduced her to more of her Gould colleagues.
“I worked with so many more people at Gould than I had before,” she says. “Events, communications, admissions and more were very involved. Gould Preview was a real community effort.”
For now, “retirement” still means teaching for Wright, at the San Luis Obispo campus of the Monterey College of Law and at Gould, driving down with Steele several weeks in the semester to teach Advanced Legal Writing on Fridays and take in USC football games on Saturdays.
For Wright, nothing beats seeing students growing and developing in law school.
“In Academic Success, some students take a little longer to figure out law school than some of their classmates and it’s so rewarding when those light bulbs go on,” she says. “They don’t always know they can do it — but you know they can.”
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