Acerca de

About Class Action

The Squads

Meet the teams featured in Class Action

Led by coach AJ Bellido de Luna, this squad hails from San Antonio, Texas, and combines passion with hard work and good times.

Brooklyn Law

A student-coached all-female team of fierce advocates for social justice fights an Ivy League champion.

University of South Dakota

"Midwest nice" has been banished from a team that features four hard-nosed 3L's and pair of Native lawyers. Coach Laura Rose loves to sing.

Dillard University

Undergraduate mock trial team from New Orleans goes on a dramatic run to Nationals to honor their beloved coach Adria Kimbrough.

Why
Mock Trial?

The young, would-be lawyers on Class Action are extraordinary. Bright. Ambitious. Sometimes ruthless. They are poised to enter a justice system that is under intense public scrutiny. And jury trials—a bedrock of a fair justice system—are declining in number. Prosecutors are aggressively pushing plea deals on defendants, whose lawyers (often untrained in courtroom procedure) are encouraging their clients to accept.

But, in the wake of high-profile verdicts like the George Floyd case, trial advocacy training is gaining popularity in law schools. Mock trial tournaments are quickly becoming a necessary and exciting kind of collegiate sport.

Approach

Producers Lisa Gray and Kevin Huffman spent a year recording the grueling bootcamps, scrimmages and competitions with law teams from Brooklyn Law, St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, and the University of South Dakota. You will experience the young lawyers reach near-exhaustion arguing cases in high-stakes tournaments. The team also followed an undergraduate team from Dillard University in New Orleans, that recovered from the twin impacts of Covid-19 and Hurricane Ida to make a Cinderella run at the National championship.

Katie Phang
Host

Katie Phang, a trial lawyer, Anchor and Host for MSNBC and Peacock, guides us through the series.

Katie introduces us to students like Andy Vizcarra, a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Mexico, and have worked tirelessly at their restaurant and in the medical field to put her through law school. And Tyler Volesky, a young Native American politician who is now a law student in South Dakota.

During a fiery civil rights competition, we meet Ellie Sands and Anjani Shah—part of a team of activists from Brooklyn Law—who battle for justice not only in mock trial but in real-life legal clinics. The self-styled “church boy” from Houston, DeAndre K. Bell, plans to run for President in 2040. And the powerful lion of the Dillard team, Lajeanne Shelton, bristles at comments that she’s too aggressive in court.

SOUND ARGUMENT

Sound Argument is a new production company founded by us, Lisa Gray and Kevin Huffman. Our personal objective is to produce compelling, creative, informational and entertaining programming.

Class Action has inherent drama, tackles deep social issues, and tracks committed law students who will soon take on a deeply flawed justice system – exactly the kind of story we love to tell.

Between us, we have over thirty years of experience in the media industry, working on unique and significant projects, making engaging and enlightening works. Together, we co-produced the Netflix feature documentary Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru, and collaborated on a 9-episode series, The System with Joe Berlinger. Lisa produced and Kevin wrote the podcast series A Good End.

We hope you love listening to Class Action as much as we loved making it.

Kevin Huffman
Producer, Director, Writer

Kevin is a creative and experienced storyteller.

Over the course of his 20+ year career he has produced, directed and written dozens of documentaries for Netflix, Showtime, HBO, TNT, A&E, Discovery and National Geographic.

Several of his most successful documentary series, like The Innocence Files, have explored the deep problems facing the criminal justice system in America. For that series, the team embedded the Conviction Integrity Unit in Philadelphia, documenting the re-investigation and exoneration of a man wrongfully imprisoned for 28 years. Killing Richard Glossip took viewers inside death row in Oklahoma and Hard Time was an immersive look behind the bars of several prisons in Ohio.

The series Judgment Day explored the challenges and flaws in the parole systems in Colorado and Wyoming and After the First 48 followed the trials of accused homicide defendants in Memphis, Dallas and Louisville. He is presently Senior Story producer for The Lincoln Project for Showtime.

Learn more at DocStory911.

Lisa Gray
Producer, Editor, Consultant

Lisa is a seasoned non-fiction director, producer, developer, project supervisor, and audio engineer. For over twenty years she’s pursued unique and significant projects, collaborating with clients to make engaging and enlightening works. In that time, she’s created documentaries for many of the top broadcasters including NPR, Microsoft, iHeartMedia, American Public Media, A&E, PBS, PRX, Al Jazeera America, National Geographic Channel, Discovery, OWN, Spike, Logo, Lifetime, Food Network, HBO Documentaries, The Weather Channel, ABC News, Participant Media, Magnolia Pictures, and Sony Pictures Classics.

Learn more at Sound Mind Productions.