(2 of 4)
As one of 13 black students at a newly desegregated Alabama high school in 1965, Delores Boyd gave a lot of thought to the civil rights movement and her place in it: "I had a sense that the law had a very significant role in whether the movement would fail or succeed." The daughter of a subsistence farmer whose eight children all went to college, she was no star at the University of Virginia Law School. "But I survived and I learned," says Boyd.
After winning a coveted one-year clerkship with a federal appeals court judge, the young lawyer could not get an offer at a black firm she approached in Montgomery; "sexism," she suspects. So she went into partnership with a white male, and when few took her very seriously, she turned on the charm. "I believe one gets more done," she says, "if the approach is down-home country manners."
Boyd did not shy away from tough cases. In one she helped white professors win a discrimination suit against predominantly black Alabama State University, ruffling some feathers in the black community. Boyd is fondest of civil liberties suits, but her heavy caseload also includes criminal, personal injury and domestic relations trial work. She is known as a hardworking, aggressive opponent in court. "She doesn't lose her cool, whether a case is going for or against her," says U.S. Appeals Court Judge Frank Johnson. As a result, Boyd, 33, is now taken very seriously indeed. "Word gets around," says U.S. District Judge Truman Hobbs. "She has arrived and can expect to go as far as she wants."
"A LOT OF THEATER"
Early in her career, fledgling Attorney Rikki Klieman made a major mistake. She failed to prepare fully for a simple bail hearing, thinking that her friendship with the opposing lawyer would help her win. She lost. "I learned then," she recalls, "never, ever to walk into a courtroom without knowing everything I could possibly know about my case." Today Klieman, 35, is among Boston's best defense lawyers, in charge of the criminal trial division at the city's prestigious firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart. Says one of the city's top criminal lawyers, Joseph Balliro: "She's a superstar."
From the age of four, Chicagoan Klieman had her sights on the theater. After her dreams of stardom fizzled in New York City, she remembered a professor at Northwestern University who had urged her to try law. When she said that girls did not become lawyers, he replied, "Girls don't, but women do." Klieman looked in on Manhattan's criminal courts and found that "the law is in many ways a lot of theater." After graduation from Boston University Law School and a clerkship with a federal judge, she went to work as a Massachusetts prosecutor. In 1980, in the midst of the U.S. hostage crisis, professional recognition was assured by her convictions of three youths who had killed a local Iranian college student.