Ms. Potter, Tyler’s 2nd grade teacher loved to remind him when he would visit her as an adult – that the teachers at Riverdale Elementary affectionally nicknamed him “Motormouth” and that regardless of what grade he was in, he could always be counted on to befriend the outcast kid in class. It could be said that well before joining the Office straight out of University of California School of Law, San Francisco in 1999 – before graduating from University of California, Berkeley in 1996 – or even before being able to spell the words “public” and “defender,” Tyler had the heart and the (motor) mouth of one.
What wasn’t clear in the 2nd grade was how computers and the smartphone would change the world first, for better and now, for the worse. So even though Tyler found his calling in court – lending his voice to society’s outcast as a trial attorney, in 2007 he transition from a line attorney to a manager of the newly minted “Technology Unit” and then eventually adding the office clerks to form the “IT and Clerical Unit” a few years later. In this position, Tyler takes his understanding of all the pieces, processes, and people necessary to defend a client and looks for ways to apply the office’s limited technology budget in a manner that maximizes and empowers the work of defending individual freedom.
If Tyler won the lottery tomorrow, he’d quit this job like unresponsive app. After making sure his Vietnamese immigrant family were financially set and writing a sizable donation to cancer research, he’d buy the latest iPad Pros and iPhones for everyone in the Office plus some AirPods Maxes for the Clerks. He’d set aside a decade’s worth of money in a trust for the developer who works with him building the Office’s case management system called “Gideon.” (Their goal is to make it available nationally for free to all Public Defender offices.) And then the next day, Tyler would come directly into the Office as a volunteer doing exactly what he does now.