The practice of law has changed tremendously over the past three decades. When I graduated from law school as one of 13 women in a class of 360 students, women lawyers — especially litigators — were not commonplace. Typically, we were limited to fields like trusts and estates and family law. When I interviewed at the district attorney’s office, they prohibited women from working murders or other felonies, and the U.S. attorney’s office wouldn’t let women work on criminal cases. Most large firms would not hire women, either. I chose an atypical job, becoming a litigator in a plaintiffs’ personal injury practice. Even then I was warned not to let people know I could type, because the fear was that they would start using me as a secretary. When I joined the Women’s Bar Association, there were only three women justices in the entire New York state supreme court system, and none of them were appellate judges.
Women entered the profession in larger groups in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, opportunities for women lawyers had improved considerably. During much of that time I was teaching in law schools — first at Fordham, and then New York University. But in the early 1980s I also started working as “of counsel” at Skadden, defending products liability and mass tort cases. The sheer amount of change really struck me as I walked into a courtroom to argue a motion, and both my adversary and the judge were women.
