Women taking the lead in law and law firms: panel presentation by Columbia Law Women's Association, March 29, 2004.

• Position: Panel Discussion

INTRODUCTION BY TONG LI:

Thank you for coming and thank you to all the members of Columbia Law Women's Association and thank you to our sponsor, Kasowitz Benson Tones & Friedman. Today, we are very proud to have such preeminent leaders in the legal profession to come to us. Their achievements have shown and have proven that women are indeed taking the lead in law and law firms. But how did they get to where they are today? That requires some insight, very interesting insight. The first half of our session will be the presentations by the six speakers. The rest of the time will be open to the students. For more information on their backgrounds, please read their brochures and let me just give you brief introductions of our guests.

In alphabetical order, we have Dana Freyer. She is head of the Arbitration and Alternative Dispute Resolution and Corporate Compliance Program practice at Skadden. She is recognized as a leader in dispute resolution and international arbitration. She has been named one of the top fifty women litigators in America by the National Law Journal.

Marcia Goldstein. She is a senior partner at Weil Gotshal and cochair of the Business Finance and Restructuring Department. She has been named in numerous publications of best lawyers in the restructuring and bankruptcy area.

Cathy Kaplan. She is co-head of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood's New York Securitization practice group and a member of the firm's Executive Committee. Ms. Kaplan was named one of the Dealmakers of the Year, 1999, by the American Lawyer.

Yukako Kawata. She is co-head of investment management and the PIE funds group at Davis Polk. Ms. Kawata was the chair of Specialized Investment Funds, the Committee of the International Bar Association from 2001-2003.

Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder. She is a partner at Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman. She was a former justice of the New York State Supreme Court, Criminal Term. She was a founder and chief of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Bureau, co-author of New York's rape shield legislation. Judge Snyder was the first woman to try felony and homicide cases in New York County.

Judith Thoyer. She is co-head of the Mergers & Acquisitions group at Paul Weiss and a member of the firm's Management Committee. She was the recipient of the 2003 Medal for Excellence Award from Columbia Law School.

Please join me in welcoming all these distinguished leaders in law and law firms.

DANA FREYER:

I think I'm supposed to go first. I'm Dana Freyer. I wanted to start out and give you two of the basic, I think, cardinal principles that have impacted my career and where I am today, none of which would have been predictable when I entered Columbia Law School in 1968. The first guiding principle that has stood me in good stead is to follow your passions and your interests, all along the way. The second guiding principle is to remember that the most interesting paths have curves and hills and ups and downs. It's the by-ways that are the most interesting, it's not the highways, the character-less highways we travel, at least in my experience, that we want to necessarily stay on, but it's all the detours and the little side roads that you take along the way and the challenge... It is a great challenge.

I'm just going to very briefly tell you how I got to where I am and what I did along the way and I think it will illustrate why these principles really have formed my career and direction and much of my life. When I entered Columbia Law School in 1968, which, of course, was the height of the Vietnam War, I wanted to be an international lawyer. I came here from the School of International Affairs. Louis Henkin said to me, "Go get a law degree. You can do more with that than a Master's in International Affairs." So I said okay. I took the LSAT a week later and I found out in August that I was admitted. Columbia was the only school I applied to, probably very different from a lot of the thought processes that went into your decision to go to law school.

I emerged from Columbia Law School at the end of the three years wanting to be a legal services lawyer. So, my first career was as a legal services lawyer for my first year. I did that for a year and then my husband and I decided to take off, put our furniture in storage, drive from Europe to Afghanistan, and see the world for a year, which we did. I mention Afghanistan because you'll see how life comes full circle. It's sort of what my current passion is.

Came back, moved to Chicago, followed my husband. I had a child at this point, a baby, [and] I wanted to work four days a week for a legal services or pro bono organization. Couldn't get a job for four days a week, so I went to went to work for a law firm, because that was the only firm, a corporate law firm, that would hire me four days a week. I did that for a few years, moved to New York. I interviewed with law firms and with legal services organizations. I wound up at Skadden Arps in 1977 because it was the only place that would hire me four days a week, and by this time I had two children. That's where I stayed, to this day.

I started out at Skadden in litigation and worked four days a week for about six years, and then was encouraged to move to full-time. Did general litigation for those years, but also became very interested in alternative dispute resolution, prompted by a case that I was involved in. It was an English muffin trade secret case. Yeah, there are supposedly trade secrets in the manufacture of English muffins, but that's a whole other story. Our adversary's counsel encouraged us to try to resolve this dispute through a mini-trial, which was almost unheard of in those days. We utilized that ADR proceeding and I became very interested in the whole ADR movement. Within a year or two, I had convinced my firm that we should really institutionalize our alternative dispute resolution practice and that I should head up that effort. I wasn't a partner at the time, I was a special counsel. They supported me and we did that. From that practice, I really evolved into focusing on international arbitration. As I saw and the firm saw, that with globalization and the increase in international transactions, more and more disputes were going to be resolved through international arbitration, which in fact has become the case.

My practice today principally is international arbitration. The other piece of my practice is corporate compliance and again, this was sort of an entrepreneurial effort on both the firm's part and mine. In the early 90s and 91, when the U.S. Sentencing Commission came down with very tough new sentencing guidelines for corporations (this was of course pre-Sarbanes-Oxley and pre- all these changes in governance and requirements for ethics programs that have just been implemented this past year) there were incentives for companies nonetheless to have effective compliance programs, codes of conduct, and codes of ethics. So I was tapped at the firm to again organize a corporate compliance program practice whereby we could deliver these services to clients of the firm. I have to tell you when I was asked to do this, I didn't know anything about this area. I said okay, happy to do it, we did, and it's become a very successful component of our practice.

I guess the message from both the development of the ADR arbitration practice and the corporate compliance program practice is that these were not areas that I envisioned or anticipated or went to law school for or even went to Skadden Arps for, but it's a question of seizing opportunity and then being willing to say, "I'm smart, I've got a good education, I can deal with this, and I see an opportunity for growth."

It's interesting that I started out in legal services although I originally wanted to do international work. I'm now doing international work, traveling all over the world, handling arbitrations in many foreign countries under legal systems that are civil law legal systems in which I was not trained, and many of these cases have no U.S. connection or component. So, I've come full circle in that regard and I'm very gratified to be doing that. The other way I've come full circle is more of the, I think we all have a personal side, certain passions and interests that we're interested in pursuing, even with the parameters of our career. I've had a longstanding interest in Afghanistan, since I started out, before I went to law school, I was the assistant to the Afghan ambassador to the United Nations. After 9/11, my husband and I and a group of Afghan-American colleagues formed a not-for-profit, the Global Partnership for Afghanistan. We're helping rural Afghan farmers rehabilitate their orchards and vineyards into farmland. It's become very much a full-time passion of mine and again, has brought back that longstanding interest full circle.

My advice, and you'll hear many different approaches to how we all got to where we are and there are, of course, many different models and all of them work, but I think the important thing is not to feel as you're sitting here right now that you're necessarily going to be taking a direct line. Leave yourself open to the sideways movements that ! think will really enlighten your career and enable you to fulfill the interests that you really hold dear.

MARCIA GOLDSTEIN:

I'm going to follow that with a somewhat different path to my career success. I was in college when Dana was starting law school and I say that because you're going to see a four-year difference in our graduation, and I think it did make a difference somewhat in our career path following law school. When I was in college, I was a political...