When Katharine E. Lum received a ticket for her car accident, she unexpectedly found herself anxious when she showed up to court representing herself, as litigants in legal matters routinely do.

“If I was this nervous as a trained attorney, how must they have felt? Especially folks for whom a traffic fine meant the difference between making rent this month or not,” Lum, a judge on Colorado’s Court of Appeals, said to her colleagues on Friday.

But, she continued, the judge in her traffic case treated the litigants with dignity and respect, explaining what was happening in plain English and ensuring each person could realistically pay off their fines. To her, that made all the difference.

“We can remember,” Lum said, “that what we are writing about is somebody’s worst day. Somebody’s last chance. Somebody’s life.”

Lum, the newest member of the 22-judge Court of Appeals, took office in late November. On April 28, she held her formal swearing-in ceremony, known as an investiture, in the presence of friends, family and members of the legal profession at all levels.

In applying to join the bench last year, Lum pointed out she would be in the small minority of Court of Appeals judges who have prior experience handling domestic relations cases, which make up approximately 10% of the court’s caseload. Her lengthy resume included pro bono legal work and mediation, criminal appeals, landlord-tenant disputes and expertise in other technical areas, such as forensic accounting and birth defects.

“The enjoyment I derive from learning new fields of study and my ability to absorb them relatively easily is a personality trait and skill that will translate well to a position as a judge on the Court of Appeals,” she wrote.

Chief Judge Gilbert M. Román noted that Colorado’s second-highest court made national news last month, as the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the First Amendment case of Counterman v. Colorado. The justices reviewed a decision directly from the Court of Appeals. The judge who authored it, Craig R. Welling, traveled to Washington, D.C. to witness the arguments in person.

“We do serious and really important work,” Román said.

He also described one of Lum’s early experiences as a judge, in which she was set to hear oral arguments as part of a three-person panel. However, shortly before the parties were to arrive, one of the panel members called out unexpectedly and there was no time to get another judge up to speed on the cases. Instead, Román explained, there was a “policy decision” that – for apparently the first time ever – the Court of Appeals would hold arguments with two judges and allow the absent judge to review the video before deliberating.

The most senior judge on the panel, John Daniel Dailey, could have described the unusual logistics to the parties, Román said.

Instead, “he turned to our most junior judge and said, ‘Welcome to the court. Please explain to the attorneys what we’re doing and why,'” continued Román. “So she did, and she did an amazing job.”

Two of Lum’s former colleagues in private practice, Jerremy M. Ramp and Steven C. Lass, described her willingness to adapt to new tasks and to help people facing crisis and uncertainty. They spoke of Lum’s house visits to one elderly client, who was unable to use technology, in the early COVID-19 pandemic to ensure he understood legal documents.

During her time leading one of the Colorado Bar Association’s diversity, equity and inclusivity committees, Lum helped revise domestic relations court forms to be more sensitive to LGBTQ and nonbinary litigants. Kara Veitch, who is involved in screening judicial applicants for Gov. Jared Polis, cited Lum’s volunteer work when describing how she “touched the lives of many” in family law.

Attendees at Lum’s investiture learned more intimate details about the judge, including that she is a rock climber, a talented doodler and someone whose sister holds a patent for an invention Lum described as “space rudders.”

Lum touched on her experience at the court to date, disclosing that, even when a panel of judges cannot agree on the outcome, judges on opposite sides of the decision will often alert their counterparts to precedent that supports the opposing argument.

She also invoked her former boss, the late Supreme Court Justice Gregory J. Hobbs Jr., who taught her how to work with collegiality on the “group projects” of writing appellate opinions. She recalled an anecdote of Hobbs, after a difficult legal discussion with his colleagues, saying, “Isn’t this the greatest job?”

“I had one of those moments last week,” said Lum. “My clerk and I were talking through how we were gonna resolve a pretty complicated, novel issue and this smile came over my face and I thought, ‘Justice Hobbs was right.'”

She closed her remarks by describing her time in traffic court and reminding her colleagues that in domestic relations cases, which include matters of divorce and custody, around 75% of litigants do not have an attorney. Lum advocated for judges to be mindful of that imbalance in power and knowledge.

“Even though we can’t always address every argument, we can take care not to be dismissive in our tone,” she said. “Even though we cannot necessarily construct a winning argument for a self-represented litigant, nor can we reject their contention simply because they cannot articulate it like a lawyer.”