Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 030: Lora Krsulich on trust, parenting, and teams

Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 030: Lora Krsulich on trust, parenting, and teams

Lora Krsulich is an associate at Goodwin and a rising star. After clerking in the Central District of California and the Ninth Circuit, Lora litigated at Susman Godfrey before joining Goodwin. In this episode, Lora shares her story as a first-generation lawyer and the values that have guided her pursuit of excellence, from the lessons her father taught her on his last day of work to the way she thinks about trust, business development, and building a career with intention.

Lora and I dig into what it means to take ownership of your trajectory, how fear can become fuel, and why trust is not just a nice idea but a competitive advantage. We also talk about the power of being strategic, the importance of pursuing what energizes you, and how first-generation professionals can create their own networks and opportunities from scratch.

Keep reading below for the full link to the episode and the full transcript of our conversation.

Top Insights

Below are the highlights of our conversation:

• Your Father's Masking Tape: Lora's father worked as a lithographer for 44 years, marking every repair he made with a piece of masking tape bearing his initials and the date. That image of quiet dedication became a model for Lora's own approach to work and care.
• Fear as Fuel: As a first-generation lawyer, Lora channeled fear and uncertainty into motivation. Rather than letting the absence of a legal network hold her back, she used it as a reason to work harder, take ownership, and find creative paths forward.
• Trust Is a Competitive Advantage: Lora explains that high trust makes practice more enjoyable and sustainable. The opposite, not being able to trust anyone, is a dark place that undermines collaboration and career longevity.
• Take Ownership of Business Development: Working with a business development coach, Lora learned that client development does not have to depend on a partner choosing you. You can create your own networking events, build your own contacts, and take control of your professional trajectory.
• Pursue What Energizes You: Lora pays attention to the problems that light her up, from depositions to oral argument, and allows her career to grow around those things rather than forcing herself into a mold.

Listen Now

Catch the full episode on your favorite podcast platform.

Spotify

Or click here to listen on Spotify

Apple Podcasts

https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/030-fear-as-fuel-for-first-gen-lawyers-lora-krsulich/id1536579571?i=1000681053968

Or click here to listen on Apple Podcasts

Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: This is Khurram, it's Khurram's Quorum. My guest today is Lora Krsulich. Lora taught me a whole new dimension to the practice of law, and that's about trust. She is one of the most high-trust lawyers I've met, and it shows in her career success. After clerking in the Central District of California and the Ninth Circuit, Lora litigated at Susman Godfrey before joining Goodwin as an associate. She is the first associate on the podcast, because Lora is a rising star. Here's Lora.

Khurram Naik: Okay Lora, I am very excited to have you on here and you have one of the most unique stories of anyone I know in law. One of the parts of your story that I still think about, because it's such a vivid picture in my mind and it says a lot about your trajectory, was the day you went in with your dad for his last day of work. Can you share something about that story?

Lora Krsulich: Of course, and I'll just say, I'm very thankful to be on the podcast and to you for taking the time to get to know me and to ask questions in the way that you do with so much insight and care. So my dad, he worked as a lithographer when he first arrived in San Francisco. He had a community of people who were also working in that same lithography company and who placed him there. He was a printer and he worked there for 44 years before he retired when my sister and I were in high school. So he had us come to work his last day to see where he'd been working. We didn't go there regularly at all. It was this printing plant and I walked in. The thing that stood out to me was he worked on the same printer for the majority of his career, and on that printer were little pieces of masking tape that he'd put everywhere. So this printer was just covered in masking tape, and every piece of tape had his initials on it, like RK, and then the date. And when my sister and I asked him what that was, he said, well, that's just reflecting all the repairs I've made to this printer over the course of my time here. And I love that because it's just such a great picture of what he's done.

Khurram Naik: It really is. And you yourself have been repairing and building all along the way. What was your path into law? Because you're a first-generation lawyer. How did you even come to think about law as a career?

Lora Krsulich: Yeah, so I grew up in San Francisco. My parents are immigrants. My dad is from Croatia and my mom is from Hong Kong. And neither of them went to college. They didn't have lawyers in the family or even people who had the means to hire lawyers. So law wasn't really on my radar growing up. But I was always interested in reading and writing and arguing, I suppose. And I had a teacher in high school who encouraged me to think about law. So I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad and then to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. I didn't really know what being a lawyer meant until I got to law school and started to see the different paths.

Lora Krsulich: And when I got to law school, I was really drawn to litigation. I liked the idea of being on your feet, being in a courtroom, advocating for someone. And then I clerked for Judge Gutierrez in the Central District of California, and that was really formative for me because I got to see so many different types of cases and different styles of lawyering. And then I clerked on the Ninth Circuit after that. And those clerkships were really where I started to build confidence in myself as a lawyer and understand what kind of lawyer I wanted to be.

Khurram Naik: And then from there you went to Susman Godfrey. What drew you there?

Lora Krsulich: So Susman Godfrey was a really special place for me. What drew me there was the trial culture. They have this reputation for actually trying cases, and as a junior lawyer, you get a lot of responsibility early on. I wanted to be in depositions, I wanted to be standing up in court, and Susman gave me those opportunities. I was there for about four years and got incredible experience. The people were wonderful, the cases were fascinating, and it was a place where I really grew as a litigator.

Khurram Naik: So let's talk about trust, because that's something that really stood out to me about you. You operate with a very high level of trust. Where does that come from, and how does it show up in your practice?

Lora Krsulich: Yeah, I think trust comes from my upbringing. My parents, they built their lives here by relying on a community of people who trusted each other. My dad got his job through that community. And so trust was always a value in our household. In my practice, I think being a good litigator and working on larger teams now, you often find yourself working with other lawyers and need to figure out, you need to take the time to identify who those people are and learn about them so that you can trust them when you're doing assignments. And I think that translates over into everything. It's something that I like to do, meeting people. It comes sort of natural to me.

Lora Krsulich: And I guess another thing I would say is the opposite, right. Not being able to trust anyone is sort of like a dark, dark place. The question is, do you really want to practice like that? For me, I want to be a litigator. This is my career. I really enjoy it. I do not want to be in a place where I'm not trusting the people around me, or opposing counsel. I'm going to verify when I need to verify, I'm going to check, but I'm going to trust that the people that I'm with, or the people that I've surrounded myself with, are going to act with integrity and advocate for the clients and do all those things we're supposed to do as lawyers. So it makes practice more enjoyable and sustainable for me.

Khurram Naik: I think part of it too for me has been that I've been able to trust more, the more confidence I have in my skill set. I didn't really have a lot of confidence in myself as a patent litigator. I was mediocre at best. But as a legal recruiter in particular, I think it's been a culmination of my interests and skill set, being very people-centric and community-centric. And so I think there too is a virtuous cycle of confidence in your abilities and then ability to trust other people. Because I think a lot of low trust stems from an insecurity about not wanting to be seen as a fraud or incompetent or whatever. And so then not being able to trust other people and putting walls up because you don't want to be seen. The wall is intended so people don't see that you're not doing your work, but then it's a two-way street because you can't see them and connect and coordinate with them.

Lora Krsulich: Yeah. So for you, I mean, it sounds like you got some early feedback that you were good at what you did. You were taking that position very early on.

Khurram Naik: Did you feel, if mastery is maybe, I think mastery is a process, not an outcome. There are stopping points along the way, you know, on a journey there's a stopping point for scenic views to look out from. But would you say that you started to feel mastery pretty early on?

Lora Krsulich: Yeah. There were certain skills that I felt more competent at earlier in my career and some that I needed to build. I felt very competent at depositions early on. It felt like a natural fit to me. If you talked to my friends from high school, they'd say, Lora's always been into this one-on-one interrogation thing. It was something that I enjoyed doing. But some of that maybe was false confidence, because the more and more I practiced depositions and reviewed my transcripts and talked to other people who were more senior than me deposing witnesses, you learn there's a lot of room to grow. So yeah, there was some comfort in that skill, but recognizing there's room to grow there too.

Lora Krsulich: And some of the skills that came less readily were something like standing up in court and doing oral argument. For a while, I just didn't understand what the purpose of oral argument was. I understood the court had the briefs. The court could ask questions if they had them. But we've put everything into the briefs that the court needed to know. What's the purpose of oral argument? And I think as a junior lawyer, I would try to memorize the law and have it readily available and kind of run through the law for the court.

Lora Krsulich: The more times I've been able to stand up in court and do oral argument, I realized that I was overcomplicating it. The point of oral argument is to simplify the message. Where a brief is 30 pages, oral argument is, I mean, really, the court has a limited attention span. So you need to pick, it's your opportunity to highlight strengths of your client's case and to simplify it and make it easy for the court to understand. Just make your client's case make sense. And so it did not come easily to me early on. But I've gotten more used to it and I really like it now. I really like being able to stand up in court.

Khurram Naik: Let me make an analogy. So in a brief, maybe you have several arguments and you've organized them in terms of importance and that's clear. But then as you say, there's something about oral argument where you can really simplify and clarify your stronger arguments, and maybe that's your approach. Is there an analog to career? You mentioned, hey, there's something you're strong at, something that wasn't as strong at. One approach would be shoring up the things you aren't as strong at. Another approach would be doubling down on things you're strong at and making for yourself a simple story about who you are. Here's a simple story about who I am and what I'm good at, and that's the thing I'm pursuing. So is that the route that you take professionally, or has it been more multi-pronged?

Lora Krsulich: Yeah, it's been a multi-pronged approach to professional development. So what I've started to do is think through, I don't know if it was on your podcast or another podcast I was listening to, but someone said you have to pay attention to the problems that you work on that energize you. If you're working on a problem that you just feel like, I don't want to do this, and you're struggling with engaging with it, then maybe that's not the type of work that you should be doing. But if you have a problem where when you're working on it you're energized, you like doing it, you like focusing on it, that's where you should focus your attention.

Lora Krsulich: For me, depositions, obviously I really enjoy that process, figuring out how to deal with a difficult witness and get admissions. That's something I could do in my free time. I really like that stuff. And then oral argument, standing up and presenting and simplifying an argument, that also motivates me. So I'm not focused on one thing in particular in terms of the way I advocate, but I've been paying attention to the things that I really enjoy doing. And I'm allowing my career to grow around those things.

Khurram Naik: I don't know if that answered the question, but that's really an answer. I think that explains what I'm doing myself. Before law school, I was the president of my undergrad alumni chapter. And in that, I cared about meeting people. I was pretty new to Chicago. So it was my way of meeting people. It was a small enough group of people, wasn't an overwhelming number. So it was in many ways ideal. I had organized events and I had to learn how to network with professionals, peers, or other alums with varying professional success and seniority. And so that was my first exposure to the concept of networking. I taught myself networking through that.

Khurram Naik: Because of that, when I went to choose law school, I was able to choose a law school where I had a full scholarship in Chicago. And so I said, okay, well, I can do that or the partial scholarship for the very strong state school that we have in Illinois. So I went with the Chicago one because I'd be downtown Chicago, I'd be able to network, this new thing that I'd learned. I was excited about putting that into action. So I networked my way into big law. And then I networked my way from there to my lateral move to my current practice. So this core skill set of networking has been with me for years. And of course, it's the core skill that facilitates my work today as a legal recruiter. I could be getting better and better, and there's so much room for me to be getting better in that. But I think to my surprise, I found I didn't ever expect myself to be a manager, but now I've made a couple recent hires. So now I've found myself to be a manager. And yeah, that is energizing me.

Lora Krsulich: So you've just explained to me why you're making the decisions that you're making, because you didn't really understand it yourself. So why are you pursuing these things instead of doubling down on things that are already strengths?

Khurram Naik: I think because I've got to say 80% of where I'd want to be. And yeah, there's a lot more value I could be getting out of pushing it up to 100% or 90%, and arguably that's a higher ROI activity given how far that skill has gotten me. But we're human beings. We have to be motivated by things. I have found something else that is higher ROI in a different dimension. And I think we can be surprised at what turns out to be high ROI in the long run. You don't know in advance. So I think it is a good idea to round out some of your skills.

Lora Krsulich: Yeah, so again, I think I really like your idea of pursuing what is interesting to you in that phase, because a career is long. And so there's no need to feel like it's some sort of whack-a-mole thing where you just have to master everything all at once. You just pursue something for some period of time and say, okay, what's the next thing.

Lora Krsulich: And I think I put a lot of pressure on myself earlier in my career to be the best litigator and present that way. And then over time, I've been giving myself more grace and realized, like you said, careers are long. A group of us were talking about this case and pointing out that the lead lawyers were all in their mid-60s. And so you think, to get to the peak of your career, it takes some time to build up the comfort, the connections, the facility with the law and where you're arguing. Giving yourself the grace to do that. But recognize that it's going to be a long time. So if you're just constantly hitting your head against the wall, not enjoying what you're doing, that's misery. You don't want to practice that way. You have to think about what you're going to enjoy and then give yourself the grace to get better at it.

Khurram Naik: I want to go back to your approach for getting admissions out of a hostile witness. Can you share some of your trade secrets? What's your approach?

Lora Krsulich: Well, let's see. I think patience is very important, and knowing the documents is very important. And also following, listening and following up on the answers. I'm just throwing things out now. And also watching the witness's body language and whether they want to tell you more from their answer. I found all of that very important. I also think it's really important to be in the room with the witness. This is something that people have been debating more in the post-pandemic period. I do think it's really important to be in the same room.

Lora Krsulich: Khurram may not believe it, but I once had a witness where I was so in tune with them that I knew when they needed to go to the bathroom. We just kind of looked at each other like, okay, can we get a break? We were very in tune. And that witness actually asked me to go out to lunch after the deposition. Just on the same page. I think that ability to read body language, get in the same headspace as them, understand where they're coming from, read all their documents, I think you can be very effective at getting good admissions from that. So that's what I've done. I think it works.

Khurram Naik: I think something else that ties in is, like, hey, there's no reason why you have to wait to acquire skills. Something that you haven't waited on is business development. That's something you've taken seriously. You've originated clientele and work. Tell me about how you came to want that and then how you pursued it.

Lora Krsulich: Yeah, so great. As I got further along in my career, I looked around at the partners that I was working with. And I recognized the confidence that partners had when they were able to develop their own business, their own client relationships. And I knew that I wanted that. I wanted to be the person that a client could call, and I'd be their contact. If they had an issue, they knew they could call me. And I thought I'd be good at it because I'm calm, I'm understanding.

Lora Krsulich: So I knew I wanted to do that. And I'll do an aside. When I was clerking, my co-clerk Abigail Orcutt, her dad is Bill Orcutt, and they were extremely generous. Her dad, who's passed, was extremely generous. He'd have us clerks over, and the way they opened up their house was very moving to me. The way her dad talked about client development was like bringing people in to be part of the family. That always stuck with me, and how important that is. That was my first kind of personal interaction with a big law partner while I was clerking, and to witness what he did and how he handled that with his family was really inspiring to me. I always kept that in mind as something that I wanted to do when I was thinking about client development.

Lora Krsulich: But being a first-generation lawyer, I didn't have people in my family who were lawyers or even people who had the means to hire lawyers to do the type of work that we did. So looking forward in my career, it was a huge question. How was I going to do this? I wanted to do it, but how? I didn't think I had a network that would just organically feed me business.

Lora Krsulich: So I had this great fortune of a friend from college who referred me to her friend Megan Senese at Stage, where she has her own business working with senior associates and junior partners, figuring out how to develop business and how to network. And some of the ideas that have come from my meetings with Megan, I just love them. It makes networking make sense to me. In the way that we talked about doing things that you find joy in and that you like doing, working with Megan has become one of those things.

Lora Krsulich: One of the things we talked about was this idea. I used to go, I mean I still go, to these big bar association events. And you sort of feel like, there are tons of people in the room, how am I going to get to know anyone? But this is how I'm supposed to network, I'm supposed to meet people. With Megan, her idea was, okay, let's set some specific goals around those big events. Maybe it's two or three people I want to get to know well enough at that event to follow up with and network. That's the goal. It's not meeting everyone in the room or passing business cards. It's having a tangible goal when you go there.

Lora Krsulich: And then also, how can we develop our own networking events? You don't have to rely on the bar association to develop your networking events. You can invite people over to your house for dinner. You can organize a prix fixe dinner at a restaurant and coordinate people to come together. Taking ownership of some of that networking. It was like a light bulb. As a first-gen lawyer, this is something that I can do. I can definitely do this. I like going to dinner. I like having people over my house. I like all these things. So once I started to work with her, I recognized that client development was something that I could do even as a junior lawyer. And I like doing it. So I've been doing it more regularly.

Khurram Naik: Yeah. And I have to thank you again on the topic of high trust. I have to thank Megan because she's the one who introduced us. She was high trust in that she had identified me based on my LinkedIn posts. We didn't know each other at all. And then you in turn trusted her and trusted me when we connected. So it was just a really nice experience of this virtuous cycle of trust that we all experienced.

Khurram Naik: Was there any relationship between the things you learned from Megan or generally in business development that have impacted how you practice?

Lora Krsulich: Yes. So there's this concept of taking ownership. Taking ownership and being proactive. That has been very important for how I practice. Take something like client development. I had always thought that client development meant a partner taking an interest in you and introducing you to their clients, and you building a relationship with them through that. And then when that partner leaves the practice, you would take on that relationship. That's what client development meant to me. And it didn't feel like I had a lot of control over that process at the time. The partner had to see something in you through something that you've done. The client had to like you, but maybe they just had to like you for who you were. You didn't have to do anything.

Lora Krsulich: Working with Megan, I've realized there's a whole lot more that you can do if that's the path you choose to make that successful. You could be the one that is reaching out to the partner and reminding them of the things that you've done or the things that you want to do. Telling them, hey, I'm thinking about this particular contact, do you have any ideas for how to connect with them? You being the one that's putting that on your plate to reach out. And apart from that, just not relying exclusively on someone to take an interest in you. Starting to develop your own network and personal contacts, posting on LinkedIn, becoming a person who talks about the issues that you care about. All of that is within your ownership, your ability to do that.

Lora Krsulich: And I think that's so important. Things don't happen to you. You can take them on yourself. I've learned that through the process of iterating with Megan and figuring out what's going to work for me. And applying that to litigation, you can think the judge knows the law. In patent law, they know patent infringement law, they know the way it works. But the way you present it, the aspects of the law that you highlight, can influence that person. So what can you do to influence the way that the judge thinks? Taking back some of that ownership. Advocating in every way that you can. Working with Megan has allowed me to realize how much ownership I have over the trajectory of various aspects of my career.

Khurram Naik: And then tell me about what led you to Goodwin. I mean, you were growing and progressing at Susman, getting this great trial experience. What even had you considering making a change, and then how did you land on Goodwin and patent litigation?

Lora Krsulich: Yeah. So the person I talked to you about earlier who kind of introduced me to Susman told me at the time, think about your career in three-year chunks. Think about what you want to get from your career in those three-year chunks. When you're thinking about different career choices, think about them in that way. Which choice will best position me after this period of time? Three years is an arbitrary number, but think about it in a chunk.

Lora Krsulich: When I had my second son, Bennett, I committed to myself that I was going to start that process of thinking through the next stage of my career. I had been at Susman for about four years at that point. I was in my fifth year. And I committed myself to thinking through, okay, I want to make partner, and I want to litigate. Where will I do that, that will make me the most effective, that will let me grow?

Lora Krsulich: So I did a lot of that conversation in the year. Bennett was born January 1st, so I kind of let that be my motivation. And then I did a lot of thinking with friends and colleagues and partners and different people. I don't think we started working together until like November at the end of that year. So it had taken some time.

Lora Krsulich: There were things that I wanted to look for from the next part of my career that were really important. One was this idea of being a partner to business. Having, being a lawyer that understands the way that business works, that can help a business from various aspects. This idea of partnership and getting to know the people at the client that you're working for was really important to me. The second thing I was looking for was collaboration within the organization. Multi-faceted teams, teams of science advisors, people at various parts of their career, and this emphasis on collaboration and mentorship. I thought that would help me grow as a lawyer from where I was and into a long career. And then the IP focus. I'd always been very interested in science and technology. Having done a couple of IP cases at Susman, it was something that I wanted to do a deep dive in and focus on. Because it was interesting, and I also recognized that if you become really skilled at the law, you can go far with that in terms of client development. I saw my expertise as being someone who could translate technical terms into simpler concepts. And that process lent itself well to IP litigation where you often have to translate technical concepts in a patent to a jury.

Lora Krsulich: Those are the types of things that I was looking for, and I was sort of open to that when we started working together. Through that process, you introduced me to different firms and helped me think through the strengths of some of the firms, the people that I was hoping to connect with in the different departments and units. And Goodwin was just a great fit for those things that I was looking for.

Lora Krsulich: Having such a large business law department that takes companies from their early stages all the way through IPOs and all the growth, and that collaboration between business law and litigation was something I was like, oh, this could be a really nice fit. Because I could see myself as a counselor, as someone helping long-term clients. The collaboration is a focus at Goodwin on cross-unit collaboration and mentorship and promoting professional growth. There are tons of workshops and trainings as you come along. I've at least done a public speaking workshop and then this transition to leadership workshop. So I can see huge benefits from that in my career, growing and growing.

Lora Krsulich: And then the IP focus. The IP litigation unit at Goodwin is just very tight-knit. We do a lot of different cases, trademark, patent, copyright. I remember talking to Neil and Brad about wanting to develop a litigation unit that has a lot of people who are focused on science, but also has these general litigators who can go in between. The fact that you have this mix in this business unit has been really nice for me. So it just worked out. It was a great fit. It was very difficult to make that decision, having felt at home at Susman and loving the people there and loving my colleagues there. But I did take the leap and I'm really happy.

Khurram Naik: It seems to me that part of your story is inverting things that on their face really seemed like weaknesses into strengths. The fact that you're first-gen, then, okay, heavy community bent, then you said, well, I want to create that. So then with business development, same thing. I don't have somebody who's just going to hand off business. Whether or not this concept is a fiction that someone's going to hand out business, there are some who do come with relationships or are embedded in some sort of social ecosystem that's going to facilitate that. And then also this point about not having a technical background. Any number of other patent practices would just say from the outset, we don't want anyone who doesn't have a technical background. But you have inverted that into a strength to say, hey, the fact that I don't have a technical background means I'm not going to get hung up in the minutia and the details. I can see the big picture and simplify the story. So it seems that this has been a recurring theme throughout your career, inverting weaknesses into strengths. I don't know if that resonates for you.

Lora Krsulich: I think yeah, I guess so. But the other thing is you see a problem. I see a problem in IP litigation for jury trials in particular. Maybe you need technical litigators if you're at the PTO and you have patent examiners and you're talking to them. They have science backgrounds and they're steeped in the science. But if you are talking to a jury of 12 people who are randomly selected, who have no background in patent litigation or the specific science that you're talking about, you need people who also are new to the science and have a fresh perspective to translate that over. So I guess it's an opportunity.

Lora Krsulich: And I listened to a podcast where someone said to me, you're highly strategic. And I took offense to that. I was like, what does that mean? I'm not calculating. I'm not Machiavellian. And that's the way I had interpreted that word. And she's like, absolutely not. You have to own that word. You have to take that word back. Being strategic just means being thoughtful and thinking through what your skills are and how they match up to what you want to do.

Lora Krsulich: And so I would absolutely say that I've done that work. I've thought about going back to what I enjoyed doing as a kid and what I value for my own work. Thinking through those skills and matching them to the type of work that I want to do. I want to do, and I've narrowed it and narrowed it as we go. Being an IP litigator who focuses on jury trials is a strategic decision that I've made based on an evaluation of my personality and my particular skill set. I could have done any number of things, and this is where I've landed because I thought through it. And maybe later in my career, I'll think about something different. But I think this is a great match for where I am right now.

Khurram Naik: What about ambition? Being ambitious.

Lora Krsulich: Yes. You know what comes to mind is this idea of being a gunner in school, in law school, and you never want to be the gunner. So it's like, oh God, am I going to just admit to being a gunner? But you have to be ambitious to stay this long in big law. You have to want something more for your career. You have to have a vision. And so yeah, I do think I'm ambitious.

Khurram Naik: What do you see for yourself in the next six months? What are you excited about?

Lora Krsulich: I'm very excited about continuing to build relationships with other lawyers at Goodwin in the IP litigation unit and in our business law department. It's very important for me to feel at home someplace, to continue to build those relationships. So that's where I'm focused. And then more and more training, more and more exposure to jury trials. I'm looking for any cases that are going to trial. I've been thinking about how to take advantage of my proximity now being downtown to the district court. Thinking about spending some time there, continuing to network with Judge Gutierrez who's now moved to JAMS and picking his brain about different things. And I'm also going to take a NITA training, the national trial advocacy training, in February to continue to develop my trial skills. So I'm excited about all those things.

Khurram Naik: That's a great mix. Lora, I'm glad that we sat down to talk and share your story, because I think it's so inspirational for so many, first-gen or otherwise. I really admire the way that you approach practice. You are extremely hardworking and down-to-earth. But then also you do have this strategy and ambition as well. So it's an amazing cocktail. I'm really excited to see what your future looks like in the coming years.

Lora Krsulich: Thank you so much, Khurram. You said you were putting your bet on me, and I just want to make you proud. So thanks so much for taking the time to sit with me and interview me. I've really enjoyed it. And I regret that our time was up, but I'm glad we did it too.