Law Power 50 A-M.

Byline: Jessica Perry

Allison Berger

Wakefern is the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the country. Factor in corporate structure with all the regulations faced by the food industry and anyone would guess Berger's job is complex. She has been with Wakefern for over a decade, making her way from assistant general counsel to vice president of compliance and risk management to her current title, senior vice president and general counsel.

Joseph Boccassini

McCarter & English, where Boccassini serves as managing partner, has grown to 400-plus attorneys in nine offices. Profits per equity partner increased $66,000 year over year from last year, and firmwide gross revenue jumped $12 million. The firm has attracted some heavy hitters in recent history, including Former Federal District Court Chief Judge Jose Linares, who joined in May after 17 years on the bench. Boccassini was also instrumental in the hiring of Abdul Rehman Khan as the City of Newark's full-time pro bono fellow, the first position of its kind in Newark. Khan will work with the city's corporate counsel to assist underserved residents facing eviction and housing-related issues. There are about 40,000 eviction cases each year in Essex County, and the vast majority of tenants face eviction without a lawyer.

Kathleen Boozang, David Lopez, Kimberly Mutcherson

Boozang, Lopez and Mutcherson run the law schools at Seton Hall, Rutgers-Newark and Rutgers-Camden respectively.Lopez joined Rutgers as Co-Dean in August 2018 and was the longest-serving General Counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In that position, Lopez led the litigation program for the nation's primary administrative agency charged with enforcing federal employment anti-discrimination laws and oversaw 15 regional attorneys and a staff of more than 325 people. Kimberly Mutcherson, a bioethics and health law scholar, was appointed to lead Rutgers-Camden on Jan. 1, becoming the first woman, the first black American, and the first LGBT law dean at the school, according to Rutgers. She was most recently vice dean at the school and her scholarship addresses issues related to reproductive justice, with a particular focus on assisted reproduction and its relationship to how the law understands and constructs the meaning of family, maternal-fetal decision-making and health care decisions for minors. As dean at Seton Hall, Boozang was instrumental in offering law school classes on weekends to accommodate the schedules of students. In the summer of 2016, Boozang asked the faculty curriculum committee to meet to identify alternatives to law school students so they could take classes other than on weeknights in response to their changing needs. Many students are police officers, firefighters, accountants, business and information technology professionals who are working from Monday to Friday and cannot attend classes during the week even in the evenings. In 2017, Seton Hall Law began offering classes on weekend and online.

Craig Carpenito

After the Obama-era U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, noisily refused to step down once Donald Trump became president, and the short tenure of William Fitzpatrick, Carpenito has remained a relatively low profile in the political and business realm. Still, the chief federal prosecutor previously a partner at Alston & Bird LLP where he co-chaired the firm's Litigation and Trial Practice Group is a force to be reckoned with. He has prosecuted a variety of high-stakes criminal targets, including a Hudson County health official who accepted bribes for patient referrals, an accountant who embezzled nearly $1 million from her employer, a New Brunswick accountant who skipped $672,000 of tax payments by filing false tax documents, and most famously, Jersey Shore's Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino over tax evasion charges.

Anthony Coscia

Coscia, a partner in Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf, is also the chairman of Amtrak and one of three trustees of the Gateway Development Program Corp., the nonprofit managing the estimated $20 billion bridge and tunnel infrastructure project. It features the replacement of the 108-year-old Hudson River rail tunnels that connect New Jersey with Manhattan and the Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River. In private practice, Coscia has handled corporate litigation and transactions. At Amtrak, he also chairs the audit and finance committee. His past notable stints include the boards of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority. The Gateway project is critical, not only to Amtrak and NJ Transit, but to the state and national economies as well. That makes Coscia one of the most important economic actors in the region, but one who faces apparently intractable opposition from Washington.

Max...