I’ve been obsessed with trivia as long as I can remember. I always hoped that my trivia skills would get me on Jeopardy! one day—but I never expected them to help me practice law. As it turns out, they did both.

A Passion for the Trivial

I’ve always had a strange compulsion to collect interesting factoids. My kindergarten drawings were diagrams of the tallest mountains, rarest gemstones, and biggest dinosaurs. In grade school, I was the nerdy kid studying the encyclopedia at recess while the other kids played kickball. I dreamed of meeting Alex Trebek the way my classmates dreamed of meeting Michael Jordan. By some stroke of luck, my high school's athletic league treated "academic quiz bowl" as a varsity team sport — technically, anyway, if not in terms of social status. Later, I competed in intercollegiate tournaments, where the questions got tougher and the competition got fiercer. Ultimately, I scored a berth in the College Jeopardy! championship, where I appeared for four nights on national TV, finished as first runner-up, and finally met Alex.

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