Carol C. Villegas said she finds her work as a litigation partner in the New York office of Labaton Sucharow personally satisfying, since she often represents clients who are symbolic of her father, a blue-collar union worker for a phone company for more than three decades.

Villegas and her Legal 500 firm primarily file securities class actions on behalf of investors that allege they were harmed by fraud, with the majority of her clients being pension funds and unionized retirement systems.