Five of the best and the brightest in a changing profession
In 1869 an lowan named Arabella Mansfield became the first woman to be admitted to the bar in this country. No one could accuse her of starting a trend; as recently as 1960, perhaps 3% of the nation's lawyers were female. Then in the 1970s the bars to the bar began to fall. Today 12% to 14% of the more than 600,000 lawyers practicing in the U.S. are women, and they make up more than one-third of the current enrollment at law schools.
The new pioneers in the profession have been out for a few years now, and their careers are reaching the critical point at which they will start to join the established, in-charge practitioners of the law. Who are these young women? How good are they? What has their experience been in the corridors of legal power?
To find out, TIME looked at women attorneys 35 or under who entered the lists of the most macho specialty, that of the trial lawyer. After talking to some 100 judges, professors and attorneys across the country, TIME picked five women trial lawyers whose reputations put them at the top of their generation. As a group, they are less like the stereotype of their sex than the stereotype of their job: they are fiercely intelligent, tough-minded, intensely competitive, self-assured individualists who relish the fray. The five:
THE GUILE OF "LITTLE OLD ME"
If male lawyers choose to underestimate her, that is fine with Houston's Diana Marshall, 35. "It happens constantly," she says. "And I'll admit, I've won a few cases by planting the notion that little old me wouldn't really take a case all the way to trial, without settling first. I'd spend all weekend preparing for trial while my opponent goes to the golf course." Such guile, plus prodigious energy, has enabled Marshall to become one of two women partners (out of 112) at the giant firm of Baker & Botts. Texas Judge William Blanton remembers when Marshall and another woman lawyer were known disparagingly around the courthouse as "Laverne and Shirley." Now, he says, "I'm sure glad I'm not a young male lawyer having to contend with her."
It is all rather heady stuff for someone from a West Texas world populated by oil derricks and the roughnecks who manned them. "As kids we never talked about what we'd be when we grew up," recalls Marshall, the only member of her family to attend college. "There was just no question about growing up to be somebody." Then her father, an oilfield worker, became disabled. "We wound down to poor," she says, "and I got ambitious." As a teenage typist at local law firms, she started visiting court, eventually worked her way through law school at the University of Texas and went straight to Baker & Botts, where she specializes in contract and insurance litigation.
Married last year to Divorce Attorney Robert Piro, 49, Marshall fears that "the mentality of the 1980s will be to try to limit the number of successful women." Says she: "The men are starting to worry about being run over by hordes of ambitious young women, and the woman who tells me she is not afraid of discrimination is too stupid for me to hire."
"I SURVIVED AND I LEARNED"