Behind every successful legal career is a series of decisions that never made it onto a résumé. Cited Authorities features conversations with accomplished lawyers, and the leaders who shape their field, about career inflection points, professional judgment, reputation, leadership, and the real stories behind professional success.
Excellent legal careers are not accidents. Hear the stories of how they were built.
Seun Williams on Moving From Prosecution to Defense and What Juvenile Court Teaches
Seun Williams, a partner at the Law Office of Thomas E. Pyles, P.A., joins Alexander Powell to talk about moving from prosecuting cases in Prince George's County to the defense table, what juvenile court teaches a lawyer, and what he learned arguing before the Supreme Court of Maryland.
This is the Public Edition. The full conversation continues for subscribers: citedauthorities.substack.com/subscribe
Show notes: citedauthorities.com/episodes/seun-williams
Get every new episode and the sho...
1 Oct 2026
Melissa L. Wiley on Tax Controversy, Teaching, and Judgment
Melissa L. Wiley, a partner at Kostelanetz LLP and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law, joins Alexander Powell to talk about tax controversy, teaching, and the judgment required for effective advocacy. CHAPTERS 0:00 Welcome to Cited Authorities 0:22 Math, music, and an actuarial career 3:08 From reinsurance to Georgetown Law 4:41 Marty Ginsburg and the road to tax controversy 5:19 Why the law is so often a second career 6:25 "I fight the man" 8:02 Teaching tax research and writing at Georg...
16 Sept 2026
Andrew T. Wise on What Public Defense Teaches a Trial Lawyer
Andrew T. Wise leads the White Collar Defense practice at Miller & Chevalier. He has tried more than 50 cases to resolution, and he started as a public defender at the DC Public Defender Service.
Today's episode is about trial craft, client trust, and what public defense teaches. Andy explains how fact development and case theory carried from indigent defense into corporate investigations, how you earn the trust of a client who did not choose you, and why he tells young lawyers to find t...
2 Sept 2026
Rod J. Rosenstein, Former Deputy Attorney General of the United States
Rod J. Rosenstein is a partner at Baker McKenzie and co-chair of its national security practice. He previously served as Deputy Attorney General of the United States, U.S. Attorney for Maryland, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division. Today’s episode is about judgment, justice, and humility. Rod distinguishes a prosecutable case from a case that merits prosecution. He walks through the questions a prosecutor should ask before charging: “Can I?” “Must I?” and “Sho...
20 Aug 2026
Ben Tompkins: From DOJ Prosecutor to Defense Counsel
Episode 13 of Cited Authorities. A conversation with Ben Tompkins, former trial attorney in the Justice Department's Tax Division and former Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles. Tompkins is now a partner at Nardiello Turanchik Tompkins. We talked about why he left class-action defense for the Tax Division, a high-profile Internal Revenue Code section 6103 donor-disclosure case, and teaching trial lawyers at the National Advocacy Center. We also discussed the DOJ's recent structu...
6 Aug 2026
Power Is Fire: Jeffrey Pfeffer on Why Good Work Is Not Enough
“Power is a tool. You know, it’s like fire.” Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he has taught since 1979. He created Stanford GSB’s Paths to Power course and is the author or co-author of 16 books, including 7 Rules of Power. We begin with power, agency, self-advocacy, and why good work remains invisible unless someone makes it visible. Pfeffer also explains why relationships and distribution may become...
23 Jul 2026
Terry Lemons: White House Reporter, IRS Insider, Baseball Historian
Terry Lemons spent more than 26 years at the IRS, 11 of them leading communications for the agency. Before that he covered the 1992 presidential campaign, Congress, and the White House as a newspaper reporter. Today he handles public relations at Frost Law, and he just wrote a book about the 1926 St. Louis Cardinals. He joined the IRS in 1998, right after the Roth hearings had put the agency through the wringer, and he stayed through six commissioners from Charles Rossotti to Danny Werfel. A...
8 Jul 2026
C. Evan Stewart: Wall Street Trial Attorney, Historian, and Author
C. Evan Stewart practiced law for more than 47 years, most of it in securities and financial services litigation, and retired from Cohen & Gresser in 2025. He tried major cases in private practice without ever working as a federal prosecutor, which is rare on Wall Street. He taught for three decades at Fordham, Cornell, and Brooklyn Law School, has written roughly 300 articles, and has written for the New York Law Journal since 1990. His books include The Worst Supreme Court Decisio...
24 Jun 2026
John Pontius – From the JAG Corps to Founding a Tax Law Firm
John Pontius is the founder of Pontius Tax Law, PLLC. He started as an Army JAG officer, deployed to Iraq with the 1st Armored Division, earned a Tax LL.M. from Georgetown on the GI Bill, and worked in the international corporate tax group at KPMG before starting his own firm eight years ago. We talk about building a tax controversy practice, the three-question test he uses to decide whether to take a case, how military training shows up in running a small firm, and what he'd tell a yo...
10 Jun 2026
Pamela Gilbert: The Attorney Fighting for Consumer Safety
Pamela Gilbert spent years pressuring federal agencies from the outside, at U.S. Public Interest Research Group and Public Citizen's Congress Watch. Then she ran one. As Executive Director of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, she answered to Congress, industry, and a career staff, and learned what changes when the outside advocate becomes the implementer. In this episode: the path from Tufts activism to Ralph Nader's network, how a small, underfunded agency drives outsized impact ...
28 May 2026
Glen Frost: Building Frost Law and Practicing Tax Controversy
Episode 7 of Cited Authorities. A conversation with Glen Frost, Founder and Managing Partner of Frost Law. Glen is an attorney, a CPA, and a Certified Financial Planner, with an LL.M. in Taxation. He is admitted to practice in Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, and before the U.S. Tax Court, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and the Supreme Court of the United States. He started as a solo practitioner and built Frost Law into an 80-plus person m...
13 May 2026
Fred Brown – Leading UBalt Law's Graduate Tax Program
Episode 6 of Cited Authorities. A conversation with Fred Brown, Director of the Graduate Tax Program at the University of Baltimore School of Law since 1990. Fred started as an electrical engineer at Rutgers, went to Georgetown Law for his JD summa cum laude, then to NYU Law for his Tax LLM. He spent two years at Shaw Pittman in DC and taught as an acting assistant professor at NYU before joining UBalt in fall 1990. He has coached UBalt Law's tax moot court team for over 30 years and co-autho...
30 Apr 2026
Ebony M. Thompson – Baltimore's Attorney, Fighting for Her City
Episode 5 of Cited Authorities. A Saturday-afternoon conversation with Ebony M. Thompson, Baltimore City Solicitor. She is Baltimore's chief legal officer, and the first woman and first openly gay person to hold the role in the city's nearly 300-year history. We talked about a career that runs from a Baltimore public-school internship to City Hall: economics at Brown, the Marine Corps Reserve, wealth management at UBS in Midtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, a successful real esta...
15 Apr 2026
Ellis Duncan: Leading Georgetown Law's Graduate Tax Program
Ellis Duncan is the Director of the Graduate Tax Program at Georgetown University Law Center. He built his tax career through Ernst & Young's M&A group in New York City and hedge fund work at Ropes & Gray. In 2011, Ellis had a networking meeting with Albert Lauber, then the director of Georgetown Law's Graduate Tax Program, to ask about transitioning into government. Ellis walked out with a job offer as Assistant Director of the Graduate Tax Program. After Judge Lauber was appoint...
1 Apr 2026
Robert C. Bonsib: 300+ Jury Trials & What They Don't Teach You in Law School
Robert C. Bonsib is the co-founder of MarcusBonsib and a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He has tried more than 300 jury trials across state and federal courts, beginning his career as a prosecutor in Prince George's County, Maryland, in 1974. He served as an Assistant United States Attorney, and as Deputy State's Attorney under the Honorable Alexander Williams Jr., before entering private practice. He is a recipient of the Heeney Award for Lifetime Excellence in Criminal Law...
18 Mar 2026
Lisa D. Sparks – First in Her Family, First in Her Class
Lisa D. Sparks was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. At age 22, she graduated from law school as valedictorian. She built a construction litigation practice, served as a JAG captain, and guided a software company through a private equity buyout as general counsel. Lisa walked into her first day at a 1,000-employee construction firm expecting to be in-house counsel, only to learn she was now the Chief Administrative Officer. In this episode of Cited Authorities, Lisa...
4 Mar 2026
Christopher J. Monte – Award-Winning Prosecutor
Before he became an award-winning homicide prosecutor, Christopher J. Monte was a classical musician in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In this series premiere of Cited Authorities, Alex and Chris discuss Chris's path from music to law, their time working together as prosecutors, how Chris prosecutes high-profile cases, and his career advice to law students and new prosecutors. Sign-up for the Cited Authorities Newsletter SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Website: citedauthorities.com
23 Feb 2026
Season One Preview
Cited Authorities is a new interview series hosted by Washington, DC tax attorney and former prosecutor Alexander Powell. Behind every successful legal career is a series of decisions that never made it onto a résumé. Every episode we talk to accomplished attorneys to hear those stories. Season One guests include: Rod Rosenstein, Partner at Baker McKenzie, Former Deputy Attorney General of the United States; Pamela Gilbert, Partner at Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, Former Executive Director and ...
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Contact Cited Authorities
Guest appearances
Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Host of Cited Authorities?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
