Karen Artz Ash, national co-head of Katten Muchin Rosenman’s intellectual property practice, has attended New York fashion week shows for the past nine years. You won’t see many other lawyers at the invitation-only events, she said, noting, “It’s not something that attorneys typically attend.”

Ash said she wanted to be a fashion designer when she was very young, but she became interested in the law after her grandfather was killed in a construction accident and she observed a subsequent trial in a wrongful death case.