Going in-house wasn’t always Elizabeth Levy’s plan. The Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics lawyer actually started out as a mechanical engineer who hopped from a specialty chemicals company to a firm that made semiconductor manufacturing equipment to one that made incandescent lamps, before deciding to go to law school at night in her late twenties. She graduated with a J.D. with honors in 1993, and made partner at Lappin & Kusmer, a boutique IP firm in Boston, in 1998. Then she moved over to McDermott Will & Emery, where she met her husband-to-bea fellow McDermott partner, who had a young son.
They decided that two firm partners would not a family life make, especially if they wanted to have another child. Levy’s husband ended up leaving McDermott to start a solo practice, and she sought out an in-house position. In fall 2001 she settled on one in Medfield, Massachusetts, in Bayer Corporation’s diagnostics divisionan arm of the company that later moved to nearby Norwood, and was then acquired by Siemens in 2006.
