Philip Pasquarello ’18, an associate at Kline & Specter, was appointed Trial Competition Director at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law in October, marking a return to his roots.

Pasquarello brings years of experience and expertise to the trial advocacy program. As a student at Kline Law, he helped the mock trial team win several prestigious competitions. In 2016 and 2017, he was named Best Advocate in the Tournament of Champions. Pasquarello also helped lead the team to victory in the Texas Young Lawyers Association Regional Championship in 2017 and 2018. He was named Best Advocate on both occasions.

Pasquarello’s biggest mock trial victory punctuated the end of his law school career. One month after graduation, he won Baylor Law’s Top Gun National Mock Trial Competition, the nation’s most prestigious invitation-only mock trial competition.

Gwen Stern, professor of law, director of the trial advocacy program and an accomplished litigator, has known Pasquarello as a student, champion trial team competitor and coach, and now as a trial lawyer. “Phil works incredibly hard and is excellent at whatever he does,” she said. “He just ran our 2020 Battle of the Experts Competition, and ran it with perfection. I am so excited to work with Phil, and our students are very lucky to learn from him.”

Remarking on his return to the Kline School of Law in a new role, Pasquarello said, “I’m thrilled to be serving as the law school’s Trial Competition Director. I love coaching trial advocacy more than anything. I am blessed to have the opportunity to do what I love at the law school from which I graduated, the law school that bears the name of Mr. Kline, for whom I now work at Kline & Specter. Our school has the resources and the talented students to be the top trial advocacy program in the country. I’m going to work as hard as I can to make that happen.”