A crush on a Spanish teacher in middle school, a mission trip to Peru at age 16, and a CNN documentary — Jacob Goad's path to workers' compensation law is anything but ordinary. Jacob is the principal attorney at the Law Office of Jacob Goad and immediate past chair of NCAJ's Hispanic Latino Legal Issues Division. In this conversation with host Amber Nimocks, Jacob traces how his years working in Peru, his blue collar family roots, and his Spanish fluency all converged into a practice serving injured immigrant workers. He also shares his mission through NCAJ's HLD: recruiting young Hispanic Latino lawyers and equipping existing attorneys to serve communities in desperate need.

🎙️ Featured Guest 🎙️

Name: Jacob Goad

Connect: LinkedIn

💡 Episode Highlights 💡

[01:46] From Greensboro to Peru: Jacob describes his journey from working as an immigration paralegal in Greensboro to taking a role as an international delegations coordinator for the Presbyterian Church in Peru.

[02:26] CNN and the Town of La Oroya: A fortuitous meeting with a New York church group — whose youth leader was a CNN executive producer — led Dr. Sanjay Gupta to Peru to report on a U.S.-held corporation's pollution in La Oroya, resulting in a documentary called Planet in Peril: Battle Lines.

[08:26] Why Workers' Comp Connects: Helping injured workers who can no longer provide for their families resonates deeply with Jacob because he comes from a long line of blue collar workers.

[10:02] The Cases That Confirmed His Path: In a previous role, Jacob’s bilingual skills gave him the opportunity to work with attorneys across the firm. Cases involving first-generation immigrant workers left a lasting impression and helped shape his interest in workers’ compensation.

[13:03] HLD's Two-Track Mission: Jacob outlines NCAJ’s Hispanic Latino Legal Issues Division's strategy: recruit young Hispanic Latino lawyers and equip existing attorneys with tools to serve Hispanic clients.

[17:25] Leadership Finds You: Jacob reflects on his path to NCAJ leadership, saying that by focusing on doing the right thing case by case and meeting the people that comes with that, “leadership finds its way to you.”

[18:14] NCAJ — Firm Without Walls: As a solo practitioner with five total staff, Jacob says NCAJ gives him a community outside his firm and provides a wealth of resources always available when he needs them.

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Voices of NCAJ features members of the North Carolina Advocates for Justice talking about what it means to be a trial lawyer, what it takes to be great at the practice of law and how being a part of NCAJ enriches their lives and their careers.

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Welcome to Voices of NCAJ.

We're talking to members of the North

Carolina Advocates for Justice about what

it means to be a trial lawyer, what it

takes to be great at the practice of law,

and how being a part of NCAJ

enriches their lives and careers.

Produced and powered by LawPods.

Welcome everyone to Voices of NCAJ,

the podcast for the North Carolina

Advocates for Justice. I'm Amber Nimocks,

your host and director of

external affairs for NCAJ.

Before we get started with our guest,

I'd like to thank our circle of leadership

members for supporting NCAJ's mission

and this podcast. If

you're watching on YouTube,

you can see a list of circle of leadership

firms at the end of the podcast.

To find out how your

firm can join the circle,

go to ncaj.com/circle. My

guest today is Jacob Goad.

He is the principal attorney at the

law office of Jacob Goad Interim,

and he is the immediate past

chair of NCAJ's Hispanic Latino

Legal Issues Division.

He has been nominated to serve on the

NCAJ Board of Governors and members

will vote on that nomination and

all the other slate of officers at

annual meeting in June at

convention in Wilmington. Jacob,

thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So I'd like to just dive right

in and have you tell us your

career story because

it's not your average ...

I took a break between

undergrad and law school.

Tell me about your experience living and

working in Peru after college and how

that influenced your decision

to pursue a career in the law.

Well, the story starts in Greensboro,

North Carolina where I was working as

an immigration paralegal and I got the

call from the Presbyterian

Church and they had a position

down in Peru for what was called an

international delegations coordinator.

It was essentially pairing US

congregations with local nonprofits in

Peru to support the

local nonprofits of Peru

in fulfilling their

mission and their goals.

You had a really powerful

experience working with these

communities and got a lot of attention

brought to them. How did that happen?

That happened when I met this ...

It was actually a church

from up in New York City.

One of the members of the church was

a member of a very active congregation

that was passionate about social

justice issues and she happened to

be the leader of their youth group.

And so their youth group wanted to

come down and to shine a light on some

pollution that was going

on in the town of La Oroya.

La Oroya is a small town that's just

over the continental divide in the

Andes of Peru. They heard

about the story of La Oroya,

a US held corporation that

was polluting down in Peru.

They came down.

One of their youth group leaders

actually was an executive

producer at CNN. So it was

kind of a fortuitous meeting.

You wound up being the

subject or that story,

that group's involvement in the town in

Peru wound up being the subject of a CNN

report. Is that right?

Yes. Yeah.

So Dr. Sanjay Gupta came

down and did a report on the

issues and did interviews with all

the stakeholders in that environmental

dispute.

I spent a couple of days with Dr.

Gupta going around from place to place

and interviewing people,

introducing him to the stakeholders.

It became the subject of a documentary

that was called Planet and Peril

Battle Lines.

How did that occur for you that you

had gone down there to do this work

as a sort of ...

It was an administrative role being

in and then you wound up being

a spokesman and really spreading the word.

That must have been not exactly

what you were expecting, right?

Sort of morphed into that.

I thought that my role was more

going to be one of connector and

interpreter helping local

congregations fulfill their

desires and then it morphed into this

international role where we could do

some advocacy.

That sort of got my mind thinking more

and more about advocacy in general.

It was probably because of my

language ability that that presented

itself.

I had the opportunity to sort of use

my language skills and help people to

understand what the issues were in a way

that they had not previously understood

just by reading the news or by being

in the United States congregations.

We have a filter through which we

see the news and whatever's happening

politically here or whatever is

happening on the world stage,

any kind of big issues that are going

on sort of become the news of the day.

My role was to shine a light

specifically of what was going on in Peru

and make sure that people understood it,

not only from a linguistic perspective,

but from a local knowledge perspective.

And you also wound up being

interviewed on CBS for some

coverage of the aftermath of

an earthquake. Is that right?

Yes. I was part of a nonprofit

down there called Joining Hands.

Joining Hands was a nonprofit that

did work to combat hunger throughout

South America, but in particular in Peru.

And so joining hands asked

me if I wouldn't mind

responding to the earthquake

that happened in Ika Peru

at that time. CBS called my phone,

asked me what was going on

when I was down in Ika and I

was taking pictures of the devastation.

It was over a seven point

Richter scale earthquake,

just structures demolished

all over the place,

things that I never want to

see again, frankly, in my life,

just the human suffering

and death that came from it.

And so CNN called me and

asked if I might speak

about what was happening to so that the

world would know and ultimately so that

A could be brought to those places.

So I was on the CBS evening news

one time when that happened.

How did or the sort of decision

to go to law school emerge

from the experience that

you had working in Peru?

Yeah. So at that point in my career,

I had an undergrad degree from

UNC. I was trying to, in my 20s,

figure out how to best use my education

to benefit the most amount of people

that I could.

And the idea of advocacy

continued to be the common thread.

And so when I returned from Peru,

I had worked for a nonprofit

organization doing housing advocacy

called Greensboro Housing Coalition.

An opportunity presented itself

to me to work for a law firm.

I worked for Lisa Lanier at Lanier

Law Group for a while as a paralegal.

And then from that,

I grew close to an associate attorney

there by the name of Peter Van Roten.

We would play beer pong on Friday

afternoon, talk about his cases.

And I was like, if Peter can do it,

then I'm pretty sure that I could do it.

And so I felt inspired to take the next

step. And that's when I applied for a

North Carolina Central's evening

program and started my studies there.

After you graduated,

you found yourself moving towards the

workers' compensation practice area?

Yes. In fact, before I had graduated,

Lanear Law Group had bestowed on me the

privilege of being the workers' comp

dedicated paralegal at that time.

And so I really enjoyed that work

at that time and it was just a

continuation of what I had

previously been doing as a paralegal.

So all told I probably have been

involved in workers' compensation

since around 2009 or 2010

first as a paralegal.

What about the practice

do you find fulfilling?

Well,

I believe that the profession of being

an attorney is a noble profession to

begin with,

but there is something to me that

really connects with who I am about

helping people who have been injured

and who are unable to provide for

their family and filling that

gap with honest compensation for

people who are disabled as a result

of their industrial injuries.

That really connects with me

because my family taught me to be

a hardworking person. I come

from a long line of those.

Thinking back about my great-grandfather

who came back from World War II and

worked for a construction company and

then my other grandfather who was a Korean

War and then came back and

worked in various things,

but nothing blue collar labor

primarily throughout their history in

Southwest Virginia and

your everyday people.

My grandmother who worked in the

cafeteria at her son's school,

my other grandmother who

worked in a factory making

sweatshirts and things like that,

I come from blue collar people. I think

that makes a difference because when I

think about my clients,

I think about my family and

how this would impact my

family if they were one

of my family members.

Was there a case or a moment

or a particular client that

early on or at any time in your career

where you knew that this is exactly what

I should be doing, I know I've made the

right decision to pursue workers' comp.

And I believe it happened

likely in my freshman year as an

attorney.

I was working at the Law Offices

of James Scott Farrin under the

guidance of several mentors.

There's too many to name there.

They had me paired not with one attorney,

but like all the attorneys

because I was bilingual.

And so I had the benefit of seeing

different styles and selecting from those

styles the one that I wanted

to incorporate in my practice,

which was extremely valuable.

But coming back to your question,

the cases that come to mind are

cases that involve people who are

probably first generation

immigrant employees who

no longer have use of their legs or no

longer have use of their brain and the

way that they did before and then

seeing how the benefits that were hard

fought actually made a transformative

diference in the rest of their life.

Being a part of that and then feeling

on the other end of the client attorney

relationship,

the appreciation for not only

the legal work that had been

done by some of my more senior

colleagues at that time,

but also the ability to understand the

work as it's happening in their own

language.

I guess your familiarity with

Spanish-speaking clients and the

issues that they are facing in

particular fuels your involvement on

the Hispanic Latino Legal Issues Division.

Yes.

I think that it's partly due to the

work and the issues that I'm seeing from

day-to-day. I think also it just

has to do with my background.

I think that when I got back from Peru,

I got involved in advocacy on behalf

of immigrants in the United States on

immigration issues.

Never been involved really in immigration

law other than being a paralegal,

but I know that there's a big cross

section of workers' compensation and

immigration, personal

injury and immigration.

The issue of immigration cuts

across so many areas of practice and

the laws relating to comprehensive

immigration reform have not

really come to fruition.

There was a period of time where there

was a Republican and Democratic Senator

who came together with proposal to

make real substantive comprehensive

immigration change in the United States

and our leaders couldn't get it done.

It was McCain Kennedy Bill and we as a

nation could not get it done. We shot

it down.

And so everything since

then has been in my mind

an injustice to our immigrant communities

who are having to live in the shadows,

who are raising families here

and who don't have access to the

same resources that are working poor due.

How is the HLD division or HLD,

how are you able to try to help your

fellow attorneys meet those challenges?

What's the work going

on there that's helping?

There's a few things.

One is that we try to engage

law school students at the very

beginning,

getting them involved and

passionate about representing

Spanish-speaking claimants,

specifically targeting young

Hispanic Latino lawyers and

saying,

"We know that you could probably go and

make a gazillion dollars in corporate

law, but our Hispanic

communities right here,

they need you in day-to-day legal issues.

Would you consider a career in X, Y,

other categories?" The things that we

need Spanish-speaking attorneys in are

things that we all need representation

in, things like wills and estates,

property, obviously immigration

law, even personal injury,

workers' compensation.

There's plenty of Spanish-speaking

attorneys out there in those

fields, but when it

comes right down to it,

fluent Spanish-speaking personal

injury or Spanish-speaking workers'

compensation, you might

have staff that are fluent,

but there's a limited number of

attorneys who are really using their

skills and areas of what I would

consider desperate need. That's

my goal is first to get young

people engaged and then secondly,

essentially educate existing

attorneys on what we can do to equip

them to have the tools to make a

difference in the Hispanic community.

It sounds like becoming a fluent

Spanish speaker has had a profound

impact on your life and your

career. How did that happen?

It was a circuitous route

that I took to get there.

It all started probably in middle school.

I was in Southeast Guilford

County and we had an exchange

teacher from Madrid who

came and taught and she was

actually really good friends with my

language arts teacher who's now Dr.

Christopher Scott. Her name was Laura.

Launa was at that point in

my life as an adolescent,

the most beautiful woman that

I'd ever laid eyes on as silly

as that sounds,

that was big motivation to learn

Spanish back at that time. From there,

it sort of went on to

opportunities where my minister,

Dr. Keith Offman,

invited me to go and help interpret

for a dental clinic that was happening

on the Amazon River in Peru when I was

16 years old and the elders of my church

thought it was a bad idea that

I would go and there was a whole

thing and they said,

"We don't think that he should go.

He's too young." And then Dr.

Offman and probably some other

people stood up for me and were

like, "We think this is a great

opportunity. We think you should go.

" After I went to Peru, it really

changed the way that I look at the world.

We're a big, big world. The United

States is a portion of that.

It's an important part. It's a place that

I call home. It's a place that I love,

but there's other places

that I love as well.

And we as a country at times

in the United States are a bit

myopic about how we look

at culture and other

cultures outside of the

United States and the weight

upon which we put the way

that we do things around here.

Having a crush on the exchange teacher

really opened new doors that you

couldn't have anticipated. That's awesome.

Do you still keep in touch with

her or did she vanish into history?

Absolutely. She vanished into history.

I would love to reconnect with her

someday and just see how she's doing.

I heard through Dr. Scott,

who I do keep in contact with,

that she's doing very well and that

she and her family live in Madrid

and are doing extremely

well. So Dr. Scott,

tell her if you see this one day

that I said hello and Geracias

Portola.

Awesome.

So you are getting ready

to begin your tenure as a

member of the NCAJ Board of Governors

after the elections in June.

How long have you been a member?

How did you find the path to

leadership in the organization?

Well, I have been a member of

NCAJ before I became an attorney.

I started out as a paralegal member,

it's coming up on 10 years of being an

attorney, so that whole time at least,

and then some. Then finding

my way to leadership,

I think in a way leadership

finds its way to you. Have goals,

you want to do the right thing

each case by each case and you put

your next best foot forward and you say,

"What's the next best thing that I can

do in a case?" And then you meet all

these wonderful people when you do that.

When you meet all these

wonderful people as you say,

"What's the next best thing I could do

in this case?" Then leadership comes and

it finds you.

And what has being an NCAJ member meant

to you personally and professionally?

Well,

it means the difference of having

a community outside the walls

of my own firm that is

sort of like a firm to me

that I don't have. I'm a small firm.

We have a total of five of us

who work in my firm and yet I

don't feel that way.

I feel like I've got a wealth of

resources and this large sort of machin

that is always there if I

need it and who I hope that I

can always be there for as

long as I'm an attorney.

We are glad that you have been an

NCAA member for so long and I'm

excited to see your tenure on

the board begin. Congratulations.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Jacob,

thank you so much for being on the podcast

and I will look forward to seeing you

in Wilmington at convention.

Thank you, Amber. I look

forward to seeing you there.

And if anyone listening watching has

in Wilmington, June 24 through

27, you can go right now to

ncaj.com/convention-2026.

Thanks everyone for listening and

if you're watching on YouTube,

don't forget to subscribe to this channel.

Thank you for joining us on

this episode of Voices of NCAJ.

For more information on the North Carolina

Advocates for Justice and how to join

or support NCAJ,

please visit our website at www.ncaj.com.