The New Women in Court

By Bennett H. Beach

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"

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.

Shortly after Klieman decided to move over to the defense table in 1981, she agreed to represent the alleged kingpin of a truck hijacking operation. "My client looked as if he broke legs for a living," she says, and the court clerk quipped that the fellow had a shot at acquittal "only if he wears a sheet over his head." Klieman set out to polish her client's image. She ate breakfast with him in the court cafeteria, so members of the jury could spot them chatting and relaxing. In the courtroom she touched him constantly and allowed him to carry her briefcase. Coupling this effort with a thorough defense, she won an acquittal. Credibility is critical, says the once and still actress. "You have to be able to get along with people at all levels. I have understood that there are different roles that you have to play." She pauses for a moment. "And they all better appear to be sincere."

PROVING IT "OVER AND OVER AGAIN"

"A lot of people want to be represented by a person who is 6 ft. tall and graying at the temples," says Berkeley Criminal Lawyer Cristina Arguedas, who at 5 ft. 2 in. and 29 years is neither. Arguedas offers other qualities. Says San Francisco Attorney Ephraim Margolin: "She has very good presence, is bright as a whip, and very, very fast on her feet."

Arguedas started honing those talents during law school at Rutgers, skipping most of her classes in the last two years to work at New York City's Center for Constitutional Rights. Graduating in 1979, she spent the next two years as a public defender in San Francisco, where she rolled up a stunning 13-2 record injury verdicts, then left 18 months ago to set up a criminal practice. She will not represent an accused rapist whose defense is the woman's consent: "I don't want to be in the position [on crossexamination] of saying, 'Didn't you really want it?' " Most of her clients are drug defendants. One, accused of being the ringleader of West Coast cocaine dealers, looked like a sure loser after his codefendant turned state's evidence the morning the trial began. But after testifying, under Arguedas' careful guidance, that he had been on hand during drug deals only because he was the other man's lover, her client was acquitted--a verdict that surprised even Arguedas.

The chain-smoking, New Jersey-born attorney "totally rejects" the image of the hired gunfighter favored by many trial lawyers, but she concedes, "It is very lonely in court. You are the only thing between your client and prison." The occasional added burden of sexism does not faze her. "As a woman, you have to be better than the men; you've got to prove yourself over and over again," she observes. "But I don't consider that a problem because I would want to do that anyway."

AN ADVANTAGE TO "FEMALENESS"

When she showed up for work as a Chicago prosecutor in 1972, Patricia Bobb fought off a stint in juvenile court, the usual first slot for a woman. Bobb, fresh out of Notre Dame Law School, won assignment to criminal court. She kept on winning: a streak of 22 victories in cases that went to the jury. In 1977 Bobb drew "what we call a heater -- a hot first-degree murder that produced a two-month trial and lots of publicity." Lapsing into the trial lawyer's habit of assessing courtroom opportunity, she recalls, "It had every thing, blood, gore, sex, kinky stuff. It was a great case." Working with two other prosecutors, Bobb nailed the defendants; each got a 100-to 200-year sentence.

Her reputation thus buoyed, she moved into more lucrative civil trial work, initially with Philip Corboy, Chicago's famed personal injury litigator. For two malpractice suits brought by parents of infants blinded after childbirth, she criss-crossed the country, taking out-of-court testimony from 26 doctors, and helped to secure a million-dollar settlement in one of the cases.

"Femaleness can be an advantage," she says. "A male opponent may ease up for fear of swinging the jury to sympathy for you. And I think women may have a better sensitivity to jurors." Now established in her own three-year-old, four-partner firm, she notes, "Until recently, women haven't had role models in the law. How do I act? What do I wear? Women have to learn to be tough, to be noticed but not intrusive."

The daughter of a former New Mexico Governor and married to a law school classmate, Bobb, 35, has no current plans to raise a family. She acknowledges that "I might resent a child for taking me away from what I want to do most." And what she does well. "She's the finest female personal injury lawyer I've ever seen," says Dan Webb, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago. Bobb would be only partly pleased to hear that. "I want to get to the point," she says, "where people say you're one of the best trial lawyers, not one of the best female trial lawyers." -- By Bennett H. Beach.

Reported by Joelle Attinger/Boston and Lee Griggs/Chicago, with other bureaus

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston, Lee Griggs/Chicago This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.