April Miller Boise knows how to spot opportunity. In 1999, soon after she joined Cleveland’s Thompson Hine as a senior associate from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, she was assigned to help a senior executive from The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company who was using the firm’s conference room for a meeting. The assignment was, frankly, menial: getting him supplies and helping with anything else he might need. But the outgoing Boise struck up a conversation with the businessman, Clark Sprang, then senior vice president, who was so impressed with the young lawyer that he asked her to work on the joint venture he was negotiating. At the time Thompson Hine was not doing any corporate work for client Goodyear, but that soon changed. More deals followed, and in 2007 Boise, by then a partner, headed a 25-lawyer team that helped Goodyear complete a $1.5 billion divestiture. Boise is now the relationship partner for Goodyear.
The firm rewarded Boise for this work and for other examples of initiative and leadership in 2009 by naming her partner-in-charge of the Cleveland office—at 145 lawyers, the firm’s largest. This June, the 42-year-old lawyer also joined the firm’s eight-person executive committee, becoming the third woman tapped for the firm’s top governing group. She still spends more than half her time assisting her clients, which include Goodyear, Lincoln Electric Holdings, Inc., and National Interstate Corporation, an insurance company she helped take public in 2005. “She was a success from the day she walked in the door,” says managing partner David Hooker.
