PBI:  I know you are first and foremost a wife and mother.  Tell me a little about your family.

LINDA:  Well, I married the man I met when we were 13 at John Burroughs Junior High School, Lance Whitfield.  We have two great sons, Ryan and Nico.  Nico is attending animation school at Advanced Media Vocational Academy and Ryan just started college at Princeton.  Needless to say we are proud parents and excited for them both.

PBI:  What was family life like for you growing up?
LINDA:  It was good.  I grew up with my two siblings Thom and Brenda.  I have a brother and sister on my dad’s side that I didn’t grow up with.  We developed a relationship later in life.  My mom was a stay-at-home mom and a seamstress and my dad was a musician and a Baptist minister.  We lived in a middle-class area and basically lived a middle-class lifestyle.  There were some rough times growing up but for the most part were a middle class family.

PBI:  What lead to your interest in pursuing a law career?
LINDA:  Well, I had graduated from USC with a Business degree and I had an interest in the music business.  I got a job at A&M Records as an assistant; a secretary.  I saw that there were so many women there, at

this time, so highly educated and, for some reason, we were all stuck in the secretary pool.  And there were so many men there that had executive jobs, A&R, Marketing and all, paying big money without the education.  During that time, I met some cool lawyers working at A&M and, through my work, I started learning some things about entertainment law.  I developed an interest and that’s why I decided to go to law school.  I had planned to go back to school so now it was either to law school or to pursue my MBA.  Choosing law school meant I could practice law and do business but with an MBA I could only do business. So, I chose law school.

PBI:  What area of law did you go into when you graduated?

LINDA:  Well I graduated during an economic downturn and I had originally planned to go back to A&M Records after law school.  I had worked for the president of A&M and he was fine with that.  But Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss sold A&M Records to Polygram and they all left.  I did really well in law school and during on-campus interviews so when I graduated I already had a job lined up.  I was hired at a firm that mostly did litigation called Perkins-Coie.  They are a Seattle-based, large firm with offices across the country.  It wasn’t really what I wanted to do but it was a great offer.  

PBI: Speaking on family life, I wanted to ask you about how it was managing that workload at the time you were an attorney.  I mean, I don’t know of ANY attorneys that clock out at 5 o’clock and just go relax somewhere.  So that had to be a huge challenge.

LINDA:  It’s hard.  It’s a lifestyle choice.  I worked at the national firm for only a year.  Part of that was because during that time, my son Nico had been diagnosed with high-functioning Autism and it was really difficult juggling the workload of a large law firm and trying to get everything that he needed.  This was a time when people didn’t really know that much about Aspergers and Autism so I was really having a hard time getting services and getting information.