For Terrance Carroll, it all began in Washington, D.C. Carroll, a counsel member at Sherman & Howard, was recently reelected as president of the Sam Cary Bar Association.
Carroll grew up in the Eastern Market district of D.C. One of his neighbors, although not a next door neighbor, as Carroll clarified, was former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
At the time of his childhood, in the 1970s and 80s, Carroll said the center of government wasn’t as cordoned off and secure as it is now, and that he would ride his bike down the stairs of the Capitol, an activity that he no longer advises. In addition to his escapades on the stairs, he would also go into the Capitol and observe the mechanisms of power from up close.
“I think by osmosis, by extension, you just get attracted to how government functions and how politics works, and you just get involved in those things, or at least you pay attention, as you can’t ignore them,” Carroll said.
His mother was also very involved in politics, even though Carroll said she didn’t have much of a formal education. She was a PTA president, an advisory neighborhood commissioner and a block captain for the former Mayor of D.C., Marion Barry. And she took Carroll everywhere with her.
“For me, it was one of those things where I was just exposed to it, and I ended up being engaged, in that regard,” Carroll said.
His initial studies would take him south to Morehouse College in Atlanta. Part of the inspiration of the move came from seeing the leaders that went to Morehouse, like Martin Luther King, Howard Thurman and Edwin Moses. But he also noted that the movie School Daze by Spike Lee played a part in his undergraduate decision.
After his graduation from Morehouse, Carroll traded the humidity of the southeast for the elevation of the Rocky Mountains. His destination was Boulder, Colorado, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in political science. While he never finished that degree, he did stay in Colorado.
While going to law school was always something Carroll wanted to do, it wasn’t until 2002, when his mother passed away, that he decided to attend.
“My mother was always my biggest stimulator, and she always wondered why I never went to law school when I wanted to go to law school,” Carroll said. “So I just decided, f it, I’m going to go.”
An Impromptu Legislator
While in law school, Carroll was asked to become a state representative.
At the time, he was former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s campaign manager. Hancock was running for city council at that time. He had also just finished working on Mike Feeley’s congressional campaign in the 2002 elections for Colorado’s new 7th Congressional District. Feeley narrowly lost that election.
When the state House seat opened up, following Peter Groff’s elevation to the Senate to replace the outgoing Penfield Tate, who ran for Denver Mayor in 2003, Carroll said he looked at the options for the seat and was unenthused.
“Some friends of mine were like, ‘Well, you could be an option, if you’re going to talk about not liking the options, then do something about it,” Carroll said. “And I did something about it.”
But his decision to join the political fray wasn’t in isolation. He worked on campaigns during his time at Morehouse, and he remembers being involved in politics for as long as he can remember.
“My ‘first campaign’ was in 1976 when Jimmy Carter ran for President, and I was all of seven years old, and a poor kid in southeast D.C., and we heard that this guy, who was a peanut farmer and was running for President,” Carroll said. “And because we all lived on government cheese, government peanut butter, all of the things, we started going out holding up our own Jimmy Carter signs that said, ‘Vote for Jimmy Carter, he’ll give you free peanut butter.’”
In Colorado, he was involved as early as 1992, when he organized on the Boulder campus for the Clinton campaign.
Carroll ultimately served eight years in the Colorado Legislature, ending his tenure as Colorado’s Speaker of the House. While Carroll said that he’d never run for office again, he is incredibly proud of his service in the legislature and the work he was able to do while in political office.
“The work I was able to do to lay the groundwork for criminal justice reform that was then built upon in later years by members of the legislature, the work I did on education issues, two main things that are really important to me, criminal justice reform and improving educational outcomes for the most disadvantaged kids in the state,” Carroll said. “Those are two things that I really care about and was able to make some major progress on.”
Carroll said he was also involved in almost every major election bill or improvement to Colorado’s election system during his eight-year tenure.
“I’ve always cared about elections and how people vote and how people get access to the ballot box,” Carroll said. “You don’t grow up near someone like Thurgood Marshall and hear the stories of him and Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley and those great lawyers from the NAACP legal defense fund and not care about the voting, and my mother ingrained in me how important the vote was.”
Everyone Deserves a Lawyer
While in the legislature, Carroll also began his legal career. His first job was at the now defunct firm Isaacson Rosenbaum, where he did litigation and public law, which he noted isn’t much different than what he’s doing now.
“Early on I was doing the litigation side of it, and now I do more of the transactional, to the extent that you could call it transactional, but the other side of election law and campaign finance and government ethics and things like that,” Carroll said.
His career has always been focused on how people influence the government, and he said he’s always cared about the intersection of law, public policy and politics.
He followed his time at Isaacson Rosenbaum with a long stint at Greenberg Traurig, then spent several years alternating between in-house work and private practice.
One case that sticks out to Carroll and reflects his priorities happened early on in his career, when he represented a woman and her family in a wrongful eviction case. It was his first trial, and while he didn’t win, he said their case was so compelling that the landlord backed off and they were able to keep the client in her home.
“Those types of things are very important to me, making sure that folks have the ability to have their grievances redressed in the court of law regardless of their ability to pay,” Carroll said.
More recently, he’s been appointed as pro bono coordinator at Sherman & Howard.
“Pro bono is one of the ways that lawyers ensure, or should be one of the ways that lawyers ensure, that folks with not a whole lot of financial means are still able to access the justice system and get the legal assistance that they need,” Carroll said.
A Return to Political Work
Before his return to private practice at Sherman & Howard, Carroll spent four years working for two nonpartisan political organizations, Unite America and FairVote. His focus at those groups was working to improve democracy and to make sure that people have access to democracy.
“After 2016, I was like, ‘S—’s broken, and how do we fix this?’ Because if we don’t fix it, if we don’t make people believe in democracy again, that democracy can work for them, we’re going to keep getting more and more people disillusioned with democracy,” Carroll said.
“It’s one thing to say we’re a democracy, but it’s another thing for people to have legitimate access to the levers of democracy and have the legitimate ability to participate fully in democracy,” Carroll added.
These jobs have taken Carroll all over the country, where his work has included getting state versions of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed and explaining to people how ranked choice voting and open primaries work.
“The bottom line for all that work for me was also, ‘how do I continue to create space for people like my mother and little Black ladies and younger Black people, how do I continue to create space for us to fully participate in democracy,’” Carroll said.
Vision for the Sam Cary Bar
As Carroll returns to the helm of the Sam Cary Bar Association, he told Law Week that right now, less than 1% of lawyers in Colorado identify as African American or Black.
“Clearly there’s an issue that has to be addressed,” Carroll said. “Not saying who’s to blame, not sure that there’s anyone to blame. That’s less than the actual number of Black people who live in Colorado according to the Census, which is somewhere like 6% of the population is Black in Colorado.”
Carroll noted that it’s harder for people to believe they’ll have access to justice if they can’t find a lawyer who looks like them.
“That’s a problem, and one of the ways that we can fix that is making sure that the legal community reflects the larger Colorado community and that’s one of my goals, is to increase the pipeline of Black lawyers and Black legal professionals,” Carroll said. “And that also means that we have to work with the law schools and try to address, ‘Why is it hard to get folks to even come here for law school?’ And then when they come here for law school, ‘Why is it hard to retain Black attorneys in Colorado — why are they leaving?’”
He added that the real number of Black attorneys in the state had dropped from over 300 to 221, even as the state’s population has grown.
To help with this, Carroll wants the Sam Cary Bar Association to be a place for professional development and connection for Black lawyers living in the state. Part of that effort will be to increase the mentorship program of the bar and to create role models for young attorneys based on their desired career paths.
“Whether you want to be a public defender, whether you want to be a prosecutor, whether you want to be in private practice, be that BigLaw, medium-sized law or small law, we have to have people be able to look out the window, look down the street and see someone who looks like them doing the job they want to do,” Carroll said. “That’s where the mentorship comes in, that’s where the role modeling comes in, and I want to create more concrete ways to make that a real thing.”