Karla smith of montgomery biography books

Career paths sometimes turn suddenly, in places where we least expect.

For 1995 University of Virginia School of Law graduate Karla Smith, a judge on the Montgomery County, Maryland, Circuit Court, it happened on a long bus ride to Canada in 1994.

She was riding from her family home in Rockville, Maryland, to a family reunion in Toronto, where several of her ancestors had fled on the Underground Railroad.

During the journey, her cousin, a prosecutor in Montgomery County, suggested that Smith intern in the state’s attorney’s office for her second-year summer.

Intrigued, Smith decided to apply. “That’s where I got the bug,” she said.

After graduation, Smith started on the lowest rung of the prosecutorial ladder, working in the Montgomery County district court, which handles only small claims cases and criminal misdemeanors, earning $12,000 a year and living at home.

After 10 months, she jumped at a bette