Drexel's first law grads commence today

Nicholas Pennington's parents were apprehensive four years ago when he told them he planned to leave his career in hotel management and become a lawyer - until he said that he would be attending Drexel University's new law school.

His father, who owns a machine shop in his native Tennessee, knew the quality of the engineers produced by Drexel. That was enough to win him over, Pennington said.

Today Pennington, the first member of his family to finish high school, will be among 160 students to graduate in the first class of Drexel's Earle Mack School of Law.

The 7 p.m. ceremony at the Kimmel Center will feature a keynote address by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who will receive an honorary degree.

Putting a new law school together was a "trip and a half," Drexel Law Dean Roger Dennis said, because "everything a school has done for decades or hundreds of years, we're trying to do for the first time."

While the university was sorting out its law program, Pennington was fighting his own battles. He is one of only 15 of the 114 students from his high school in rural Oliver Springs, Tenn., to have attended college.

"It was not a high school where a lot of students were encouraged to go on to college," he said.

Also, he said, he learned in his freshman year at Furman University, in South Carolina, that he was dyslexic.

"I was very, very nervous going to go law school. . . . I knew there would be lot of reading," he said.

But Pennington decided not to ask for special considerations because of his dyslexia while taking the law-school admission test.

"When it came down to it, I wouldn't get more time in court, or with a client," he said. "If I couldn't cut it in law school, I wouldn't be able to in the real working world."

Two summers ago, Pennington interned for U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler, in Camden. He worked last summer at the Center City offices of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll.

Graduating in the top 20 percent of his class, he will spend a year with the Delaware Attorney General's Office, after which he expects to rejoin Ballard Spahr.

All he has to do now is pass the Pennsylvania and New Jersey bar exams, and he's not concerned that his dyslexia will stop him.

"I feel like I've overcome that," he said. "I think it's the normal bar-exam stress everyone goes through."