Before landing the top legal job at the Juilliard School, the world-renowned performing arts school in New York, Laurie Carter had planned on going into another kind of performing art–litigation. To finance law school she took a job at Juilliard as director of student affairs, and upon graduation in 1993 she had an offer to be a litigator for the Bronx district attorney. It looked as though her plan would pan out.
But Juilliard’s top brass weren’t ready to let go of Carter. They came to her with the irresistible offer to stick around and build a legal department from the ground up. Nearly 20 years later Carter has become a Juilliard institution, running the school’s now-flourishing legal department while taking on what seem like multiple other full-time jobs–from creating and overseeing Juilliard’s first jazz program to teaching a class on the business of jazz.
