Editor’s note: The American Lawyer’s Attorney of the Year will be announced at The American Lawyer Industry Awards virtual event on January 14. Register here to attend.

Nobody in Pamela Karlan’s family had been an attorney. So she took her cue from a friend of her father’s, a fellow World War II veteran, who gave her a life-changing book when she was entering her junior year of high school: “Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality.”