The following was taken from the recent July issue of The American Association for Justice by Steven M. Sellers.
Headlines were peppered with Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and Watergate when Linda Miller Atkinson and Kathryn Emmett launched their legal careers. The turbulent 1970s included a surge in women enrolling in law schools, many of whom challenged the misguided notion that they were incapable of being good trial lawyers. Among them were Atkinson and Emmett, now seasoned and successful litigators who have been members of the American Association for Justice for more than 40 years. After confronting obstacles inherent in a profession dominated by men early in their careers, Atkinson and Emmett persevered with the optimistic spirit that change would eventually come from hard work.
Atkinson, a partner with Atkinson Petruska Kozma Hart & Couture in Channing, Mich., joined the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) in 1973 when she was a law student at Wayne State University Law School. One of three women in a class of 270, she first learned of the association by flipping through the pages of Trial in the law library. ATLAs inclusiveness resonated with Atkinson, but she also encountered resistance from some of her male colleagues in the bar.
“If I had to pick a word that described my first 10 years as a lawyer, it would be lonely,” says Atkinson. Lonely, but hopeful.” She learned a hard truth that her law degree was only one qualification of a trial lawyer, another being maleness. Men did not even perceive there were trial lawyers who might be women,” she explains, adding that people accepted that culture at the time. “At least among our brothers of the bar who were honest, there was some open skepticism about whether women as a group were biologically capable of being trial lawyers.”
She held onto her hopefulness. Even though she sensed defensiveness in some of her male colleagues, Atkinson perceived their willingness to change. She was not alone, and a small number of women members in ATLA soon found their voice. “Gradually, we formed a big enough group that we were able to form the Women Trial Lawyers Caucus in 1977,” she says. “So from the four people in 1974 to the 10 or so that attended that first meeting in 1977, women were growing in the profession.”
Emmett took a similar path. Fresh from Yale Law School in 1970, she was one of seven women in her class of 170. Like Atkinson, she joined the association early in her career. She was working as an associate in the Bridgeport, Conn., law firm of Theodore Koskoff—who was later president of ATLA. She is now a partner with Emmett and Glander in Stamford, Conn. Emmett has the perspective of a litigator and a jurist, having served as a Connecticut Superior Court judge from 1982 to 1988, and her early memories of being a trial lawyer remain vivid.
“At the very beginning, there were experiences that brought home to me that people were not expecting a woman in the courtroom,” she remembers. “For example, in one of the earliest in which I was cocounsel, the lawyers would come in every morning and the judge would say, ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ I deliberately waited until everyone else had said ‘good morning’ in the hope that he would notice that I was not a gentle man. I don’t know if it worked, but I tried.”
Atkinson tells a similar story, with a different twist. “I had trials where there would be two or three defense lawyers who happened to be men on the other side,” she says. “The judge would come into the courtroom to start the day, in front of the jury, by saying, ‘Good morning, gentlemen, and Linda.’ On the surface that isn’t so bad, because he was just trying to be friendly, but the connotation of that contains everything,” she says. When she later explained to the judge that his daily greeting diminished her as an attorney, he was nonpiussed. Atkinson suggested that he use the word “counsel,” and he immediately understood her point. “The reason he didn’t say that is because he didn’t think of me as one of them,” explains Atkinson. “You see, they were still learning—and so were we—how to make it a gender-neutral job.”
A lot of learning has gone on for the last 40 years. For her part, Emmett is gratified by the many strides women have made in the law. But there is still work to do, Emmett says. “To a large extent, as people get further along in their careers, a shocking number of women either drop out or don’t advance or make it to the top echelons,” she says. “There is a long way to go. The bigger cases are not nearly as integrated as early-career jobs.”
Despite these challenges, both Atkinson and Emmett encourage young women to enter the profession. “I have two daughters—one in law school and another in practice—and a daughter-in-law who practices law, so my advice is that it is a great profession,” Emmett offers.
Atkinson agrees. Pausing—and hinting at why she became a lawyer in the first place—she adds, “I don’t think there are too many lawyers. There are too many wrongs.”
—Steven M. Sellers
Resource:
Sellers, S. M. (July, 2014). Two Journeys Toward Justice. The American Association For Justice, pp. 56.