A League of Their Own

• Author: Amanda Robert
• Pages: 66-67

66 || ABA JOURNAL APRIL 2019

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A League of Their Own

Margaret Cassidy founded a group to connect and boost female lawyers

By Amanda Robert

Margaret Cassidy didn’t know much about running

a business when she decided to leave Pricewaterhouse-

Coopers to start her own law fi rm, but she did know

about the power of a group of women.

She grew up in a small town in Ohio and saw her stay-

at-home mother invite friends over to drink co ee and

get things done. They collected school supplies for inner-

city kids, organized meals for the homeless at shelters

and for the elderly in their community, and looked to

each other for advice and encouragement.

Cassidy, inspired by their resolve, connected with

other female attorneys in solo and small-fi rm practice in

Washington, D.C., and brought them together to discuss

their businesses, share successes and provide referrals.

Now, more than six years later, her group, the League of

Women Lawyers, has more than 100 members who com-

municate weekly via email and meet regularly for happy

hours.

“I had that in me: If I can harness the relationships of

my friends, we can really get a lot of

stu done,” Cassidy says. “I think that

was in the back of my mind when I

started.

“On the face it seems like we’re a

bunch of lady lawyers getting together

to drink, but in reality, we are harness-

ing that community, that support, that

idea-generation—and all of that ambi-

tion and energy has really propelled us

forward.”

SETTING UP SHOP

Cassidy knew she wanted to be a

lawyer after she heard a prosecutor

and a criminal defense attorney speak

in high school. She loved reading—particularly about

criminal activity—and writing, she says, and she was

attracted to what “sounded like the greatest job in the

world.”

“I declared to my family that I wanted to go to law

school, which was somewhat unique because neither of

my parents had even gone to college,” she says. “But I

had made this declaration, so I went o and I did it.”

She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh

School of Law in 1993 and clerked with Ohio’s 12th

District Court of Appeals. She returned to Pittsburgh to

work as an assistant district attorney in the Allegheny

County District Attorney’s O ce and be near her then-

boyfriend and now-husband, whom she met in law

school.

Cassidy prosecuted serious assault and homicide cases

for several years before joining the Pennsylvania O ce

of Attorney General. As senior deputy attorney general,

she investigated and prosecuted complex cases in the

areas of public corruption, ethics violations and securi-

ties fraud.

She decided to make another change, and in 2007 she

moved in-house to GE Transportation. She worked as

the global compliance counsel, making sure the company

followed the law when it sold its locomotives around the

world.

Cassidy left GE when she and her husband moved to

Washington, D.C., a year later, and she became the gov-

ernment ethics and compliance leader at PwC. She says

she served a similar purpose, helping the company avoid

fraud and corruption.

While she enjoyed her practice, Cassidy says she

always wanted to own her own business. She noticed at

both GE and PwC that their smaller business partners

often didn’t have someone internally helping them han-

dle fraud or corruption issues. She

considered how she could meet that

need.

“I thought I could help small busi-

nesses who couldn’t a ord a ‘me’ full

time as they do business with fed-

eral government contracts, or if they

sell overseas,” she says. “That would

be my primary business, and then,

of course, with my prosecution back-

ground, if a company or individual

got under investigation for fraud or

corruption, I could represent them.”

Cassidy worked out a deal with

PwC to continue working for the

company while starting her own

fi rm, Cassidy Law, in late 2012. She didn’t know exactly

how to start, but she found a D.C. Bar course that taught

the basics of opening a law fi rm (which, she says, it still

o ers).

She met a few other women who had also left big law

fi rms or companies and invited them to meet for lunch

and happy hour. They talked about practical matters,

such as who they were using as a bookkeeper or what

type of printer to buy, and they also referred clients to

each other.

“I had my practice, we had an intellectual property

lawyer, we had a nonprofi t lawyer, we had a family law-

yer, we had a lawyer who wrote contracts,” Cassidy says.

“I started getting calls for business, and if I didn’t handle

it or know how to do it, I would refer it to other women

in the group.”

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