Jaime Colón-Velez carefully considers the words he’ll say to his wife.
She’s standing beneath a guarded fortress moments after casting a spell that allowed her to fly through a crack in its foundation. Although she’s hoping to find a way inside, she doesn’t know what will happen next.
Then her husband speaks. “Darkness greets you. All you see is absolute, impenetrable blackness.”
“I light a torch,” she counters without hesitation.
“Lighting a torch, you can now see,” he grants. “As the flame illuminates the space around you, you behold a large cavern and several tunnels.”
For the next hour, Colón-Velez, 28, will serve as dungeon master as his wife, Annie Cappetta, and a mutual friend continue their quest in the realm of “Dungeons & Dragons,” a fantasy tabletop role-playing game. He’ll later publish their session online via his podcast, “Lawful Evil.”
As dungeon master, Colón-Velez adlibs the story that guides his wife and friend. When he was in middle school, he loved fantasy novels and dreamed of someday becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. But he released that vision after someone told him it would be a difficult way to make a living. He became an attorney instead.
Today, Colón-Velez helps clients of Legal Aid of East Tennessee secure unemployment, Social Security, TennCare and other benefits. Although he loves the work, he says, serving as dungeon master in a “D&D” game allows him to indulge the youth who wanted to one day write fantastical tales about orcs and elves.
What Colón-Velez doesn’t say is the role also gives him the opportunity to control the narrative, which is something he says he’s generally lacked in life.
To illustrate, he offers an example from his days as an athlete at DeMatha Catholic High School in Maryland.
“Sports was a huge part of my life growing up. I played football and lacrosse in high school and thought I’d move on from there with an athletic scholarship.”
DeMatha is widely considered to be a breeding ground for professional athletes. What’s more, Colón-Velez was a student there in 2009, when a Baltimore Sun headline declared “DeMatha reigns with most NFL players.”
Looking ahead, Colón-Velez could see himself shredding the gridiron as a member of the Baltimore Ravens, his favorite NFL team since his family began purchasing seasons tickets in the late ‘90s.
But the dungeon master who lorded over his story conceived a different destiny, he says. “I received a few offers for football from Division 3 schools and for lacrosse from Division 1 schools, but another opportunity called out to me.”
Colón-Velez is referring to the chance to attend Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, which offers a degree in television production. Colón-Velez says his love for reading and writing steered him toward the law after he discarded his hopes of becoming a novelist. Meanwhile, while his father’s work as an engineer at XM Radio (now SiriusXM) – as well as the plethora of movies, televisions shows, video games and music to which his father introduced him – inspired him to study entertainment law.
“I wanted a background in television so I could better represent my clients,” he explains. “It seemed like a good plan, but it’s not what I wound up doing.”
After Hofstra, Colón-Velez attended the Belmont University College of Law in Nashville, which offers entertainment law classes. But the practical work he did while in law school was unrelated to his chosen field and changed his bearing.
“My 1L year was brutal,” Colón-Velez recalls. “By the end of it, I was questioning whether or not I wanted to be an attorney. But I did a mix of litigation work during my summer internship, and that experience convinced me I could do the work. I could be a lawyer.”
Colón-Velez’s first taste of providing pro bono services came during his 2L year, during which he worked for Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. Hoping to continue to help people using the law, he accepted a position as a workers’ compensation attorney at The Higgins Firm, a plaintiff’s personal injury practice in Nashville, after graduation.
Colón-Velez – who was born to Puerto Rican parents – says he derived similar satisfaction from helping Hispanic clients who needed benefits but were fearful of pursuing them.
“It’s tough for Tennesseeans to get help with their workers’ comp cases because attorney fees are limited. It’s even tougher for Hispanic clients, many of who are injured on a construction job and are afraid to bring a claim because they’re undocumented. I find having a lawyer who speaks Spanish, which I can, comforts these folks and helps them to bring their cases forward.”
Colón-Velez hoped to continue in this vein but lost his job on the brink of the COVID-19 pandemic when the firm stopped practicing workers’ compensation law. After his wife received an offer to serve as a clerk to federal judge Travis McDonough in Chattanooga, the couple moved south, eager to embark on a new adventure.
Not long after arriving, Colón-Velez found himself on the opposite side of the proverbial aisle when he accepted a position with insurance defense firm Luther Anderson. It was unlike any work he’d done, but he dug in with what he says is his characteristic enthusiasm.
“Whenever I’ve made a plan in life, things have gone in the opposite direction. But I take it and run with it. My philosophy has been to never be disappointed with the way things have gone but to see every deviation as an opportunity to learn and grow.”
Colón-Velez’s time at Luther Anderson was precisely that, he continues.
“It was a chance to learn how the other half of the system works,” he says. “And it was a chance to learn from amazing attorneys who do great work on that side of the law.”
Although Colón-Velez was not looking to leave Luther Anderson, he applied for a job at Legal Aid after hearing a pitch about doing pro bono work during a continuing education class. Today, he says the latest unforeseen bend in his path is allowing him to stretch his wings wider than ever.
“I take cases from their inception all the way to the hearings and appeals. I love seeing legal matters from every angle and using the tools my experience has given me to help people.”
Colón-Velez says his Social Security clients are especially gratifying to help because of how difficult navigating the system can be, he says.
“Most of my clients don’t know what to do and are afraid the government will garnish their wages or deny benefits if they say or do the wrong thing. Many of them have been fighting the system alone, and having someone on their side helps.”
One client had a clear disability, Colón-Velez says, but the government had denied her benefits. She was nervous and texted him daily in the days leading up to her hearing, but he was able to obtain full unemployment for her.
“She went from having no means of support to having money in the bank every week,” he smiles. “That changed her life.”
Although Colón-Velez’s legal experiences allowed him to slip into a rewarding new groove in the law, there are still lessons to learn, he says. For example, the competitiveness the athletic programs at DeMatha drilled into him has made losing hard, but he’s had to accept it’s part of life as an attorney, he says.
“I don’t like to lose, but sometimes, the facts are against my client. I fought one battle all the way to chancery court, only to be denied an appeal. That was a learning moment for me. Sometimes, I’ll lose.”
Thankfully, Colón-Velez says he can always look forward to a stress-relieving session of “D&D” no matter what a week throws at him.
There’s also lunch after a vexing morning in court. Today, he’s stored his noontime meal in the tin metal confines of an old school “Joust” lunchbox. It looks unlawyerly, he admits, but he thinks it’s “cool.”
“I wasn’t around when the game was popular, but my dad was a stereotypical ‘80s kid and he raised me on this stuff,” he says as he shakes the lunch box to demonstrate that it’s not merely decorative.
As his lunch clunks around inside, he adds, “Now these things give me a bit of escapism from the serious stuff I handle at work.”
One of the hallmarks of “Dungeons & Dragons” are the unexpected places and situations in which players continually find themselves. They’ll begin down one path but eventually find themselves on another, or prepare for one set of circumstances, only for fate to toss them into a surprising battle against a formerly unseen foe.
Hopefully, each leg of the journey prepares players for what comes next. As dungeon master, Colón-Velez also strives to ensure each participant has fun.
He can certainly say this about himself as he’s pivoted to circumstances that are different from what he once envisioned but still contain valuable treasure.
“I have no regrets. I love my job. And I love my wife. I’ve often done the opposite of what I was going to do, but all of those diversions led me to where I am and made me who I am.”