Woman of the Year Judge Ann K. Covingtonmolawyersmedia.com/wp-files//wja2010.pdf · Woman of the Year Judge Ann K. Covington page 24 W W The 12th ... Effie F. Day ... Women’s Justice

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2 April 2010WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW omen’s Justice AwardsThe12 th Annual

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n Staff

this, our 12th year of the event, we’re introducing several firsts.

First is our expanding the Women’s Justice Awards to all of Missouri. It’s the natural next step of a celebration that over the years has steadily grown in reach and prominence. That’s particularly so in the last few years, as we’ve reached out to a greater cross section of the legal profession and the justice system. From those changes have followed greater numbers of nomina-tions, greater attendance and, more to our purpose, greater awareness of the women and achievements we honor each year. We’ve built on that momentum to take the awards statewide.

Another first: We’ve brought the event under the banner of Missouri Lawyers Weekly, using our statewide flagship for this statewide launch. The Women’s Justice Awards began as a project of the St. Louis Daily Record. They sprung from the observation, more than a dozen years ago, that when it came time to recognize achievement in the local legal commu-nity, some of the most accomplished and inspiring leaders rarely got called to the stage. But that was then; the Women’s Justice Awards are now.

This year we don’t just go big. We also Go Red. For the first time, we’ve affiliated the Women’s Justice Awards with a charitable cause, the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign. The idea comes to us by way of BKD CPAs & Advisors, ac-tive supporters of Go Red and as this year’s Presenting Sponsor — another first — ac-tive supporters of the ideals, and the wom-en, these awards celebrate.

But first, some firsts

Leaders of tomorrowSheena R. Hamilton ...................................... 4Portia Kayser ................................................... 5

rising StarNikki Cannezzaro .......................................... 6Melanie Daily DeRousse ............................. 8Charity R. Elmer ........................ .................. 10Mischa Buford Epps ................................... 12Bridget G. Hoy ............................................. 14Erica L. Nuyen .............................................. 16

Legal ScholarCarol Miller ..................................................... 18Dean Ellen Suni ............................................ 19

CitizenshipColleen Coble ............................................... 20Joan Lipkin ................................................... 22Morey Mechlin ............................................ 23

Woman of the YearJudge Ann K. Covington ............. 24

enterpriseRashda M. Buttar ........................................ 26Crista Hogan ................................................ 27Vickie Schatz ................................................ 28Deborah C. Weaver .................................... 29

trial practitionerStacie Bilyeu ................................................. 30Denise Henning .......................................... 31Maureen A. McGlynn ................................ 32Christine F. Miller ....................................... 33

Business practitionerMira Mdivani ................................................ 34Sandra Moore .............................................. 35Terry J. Satterlee ......................................... 36Ronda F. Williams ....................................... 37

public Service practitionerEffie F. Day .................................................... 38Sheila Greenbaum ..................................... 39Quinn Loring Grimes ................................. 40Deanna K. Scott ........................................... 41Mavis T. Thompson .................................... 42

public officialJudge Kathianne Knaup Crane .............. 43Judge Cynthia L. Martin ........................... 44Mary E. Nelson ............................................. 45Judge Nancy Rahmeyer ........................... 46

photographyStaff photographer Karen Elshout traveled the state to photograph Women’s Justice Awards honorees. Photos from this program and tonight’s ceremony will be available for purchase online at www.molawyersmedia.com/photos.

Table of Contents

Whether you’re with us now in-person at the Women’s Justice Awards or sharing the moment through the time- and place-shifting magic of print, welcome. In

With all these firsts, who better to help us blaze a trail this year than the First Lady of Legal Firsts in Missouri, 2010 Woman of the Year Ann K. Covington? As Missouri’s first woman appellate judge, first woman state Supreme Court judge and first wom-an chief justice, Judge Covington made a career of deciding precedents and embody-ing them. Staff reporter Scott Lauck’s pro-file begins on page 25. Staff photographer Karen Elshout’s gorgeous photography of all our honorees appears throughout.

If no one has yet thanked you for your support of this endeavor, please, let me be the first.

S. Richard Gard Jr.President & PublisherMissouri Lawyers [email protected]

The honorable Cindy MarTinMissouri Court of AppeAls

MisCha buford eppsshook hArdy & BACon, llp

dean ellen y. suniuniversity of Missouri-kAnsAs City

(uMkC) sChool of lAw

r. denise henningthe henning lAw firM, p.C.

nikki CannezzarofrAnke sChultz & Mullen, p.C.

Mira MdivaniMdivAni iMMigrAtion lAw firM, llC

effie f. daylegAl Aid of western Missouri

Terry J. saTTerleeshook hArdy & BACon, llp

viCToria sChaTzkAnsAs City power & light CoMpAny

Congratulations to the Kansas City Women’s Justice Award winners

from your colleagues

Pictured from left: The Honorable Cindy Martin, Mischa Buford Epps, Dean Ellen Y. Suni, R. Denise Henning, Nikki Cannezzaro, Mira Mdivani, Effie F. Day, Terry J. Satterlee, Victoria Schatz


Some highlights: She won Saint Louis University’s moot court competition and then acted as the regional director for the national Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition; she has a federal clerkship in place for after her graduation this year; and she is the first student liaison to the Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater St. Louis.

Hamilton readily volunteers that her ac-complishments reflect her competitive nature. Her dad is the type who sees second place as “losing,” she says, and as a girl growing up in Springfield, Ill., she wanted to play basketball like the rest of her family.

Hindered by her tendency to foul out of games and her 5-foot-1 stature, Hamilton was pushed to find another outlet. Law, it seemed, also rewarded rigorous train-ing and performance (and came without a height advantage).

While a desire to succeed fuels her, Hamilton’s put-you-at ease personality is just as important. Before beginning law school, she worked as a legal assistant for Springfield, Ill., firm Stratton, Giganti, Stone & Kopec, a legislative intern for the Tennessee General Assembly and a para-legal for American Airlines. Those experi-ences taught her something about the limi-tations of paper — even the most impressive kind — in the real world.

“People understand you’re going to spend a lot of time at work,” she says. “It’s hard to make an impression as a co-worker if you’ve never been a co-worker.”

Hamilton’s comfort interacting with very successful (read: intimidating) individuals stands out as one of her top qualities, says St. Louis Circuit Judge Donald L. McCullin, her mentor through the Black Law Students Association.

“She easily impresses people with her per-sonality and her skills,” he says. “Look at the results.”

Hamilton hopes to eventually catapult those results into “interjecting necessary thoughts at ‘the big table.’” The “big table” being the place where business decisions are made, she says, whether at a Fortune 500 Company, within the government or at an influential law firm.

She’s well on her way. Following her two-year clerkship with Catherine Perry, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, she’ll join Armstrong Teasdale as an associate.

Hamilton has time to decide where she’d like to focus as an attorney, but, with her moot court experience, it seems she’d be a natural litigator. For someone who’s garnered signifi-cant praise, the compliment that stands out to her most came during her first-year Legal Research and Writing class.

“One of the judges said, ‘You broke the legal issues down such that you could have explained it to a fourth-grade class,’” she re-members.

— Anna Vitale

Sheena R. HamiltonLeader of TomorrowAmbitious law students are likely to drool over Sheena R. Hamilton’s résumé.

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Portia KayserLeader of Tomorrow

Just because Kayser deftly ar-gued and won her first two cases before the Missouri Court of Appeals doesn’t mean she will win every case upon her gradua-tion from Saint Louis University. Right?

Well, who says you can’t maintain a perfect record? Especially if, like Kayser, a third-year law student at SLU, you started attending law school at age 6.

As a child, Kayser tagged along with her mother, Donna, to night classes at San Francisco State University. The young Kayser often would pipe up with answers to questions posed by the professor.

“Sometimes they were right!” Kayser jokes, sitting in a coffee shop across the street from SLU’s campus.

John Ammann, director of SLU’s legal clinics, enters the coffee shop and, juggling a sandwich, makes a beeline for Kayser. Ammann asks her if she had a chance to read the winning opinion that came down that morning from the Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District.

Kayser replies that she just skimmed the opinion, and only pulled it up at the insistence of U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber, who was eager to see the result. Kayser is spending a spring externship working in the federal judge’s chambers. At the coffee shop, she was still giddy about her second appellate win.

In both cases, Kayser represented low-income clinic clients who fought for state

unemployment benefits. The cases hinged on just a few thousand dollars, but their success means everything to the clients, Kayser says. In one case, a client used the money to make mortgage payments, pay off credit cards and provide Christmas gifts for her family.

“A little bit of money makes a big differ-ence for these people,” Kayser says.

A resident of O’Fallon, Ill., Kayser ap-plied to law school after running her own business, Kayser Consulting, for 13 years. Fluent in French and toting an MBA, Kayser hopes to find a job in Missouri where she can focus on international busi-ness law. The Midwest locale shouldn’t limit her job options, she says.

“We can’t escape it; it’s a global econ-omy,” Kayser says. “Look at Anheuser-Busch, this strictly Missouri company. Now we’re a Belgian brewing company.”

Kayser lived in Tokyo for four years while her husband, Michael, was stationed there with the U.S. Air Force. Caitlin, one of the couple’s four children, spoke Japanese be-fore she spoke English.

Kayser tries to keep her afternoons and evenings free to attend her children’s sporting events and chess matches. And she tries not to lug her law books along.

At the end of the day, she also gets to compare notes with her lawyer-moth-er, Donna, who lives with the family in Illinois since suffering a head injury at her home the summer before Kayser started law school.

“My mom rocks,” Kayser says. “She’s my hero.”

— Allison Retka

Portia Kayser’s law professors are trying desperately to bring her back to Earth.



Nikki Cannezzaro

Rising Star

touts her as a “very aggressive trial and appellate lawyer.” And in 2008, the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association awarded Cannezzaro the “Young Lawyer of the Year Award.”

But upon meeting Cannezzaro, with her golden hair and easy smile, the word ag-gressive doesn’t come to mind.

“She has the ability to be a zealous ad-vocate without being disagreeable,” says John Franke, managing partner of Franke, Schultz & Mullen. “That is a tremendous asset to any lawyer.”

Cannezzaro, who graduated from the University of Missouri in 2000, says she has learned how to use her competitive streak and her passion to her advantage.

“I guess I’ve learned that you attract more flies with honey, as they say,” she says with a grin.

After a brief stint in the prosecutor’s of-

fice, Cannezzaro joined the firm because she wanted courtroom experience — im-mediately. Franke says the firm was happy to give it to her.

“I knew as soon as I interviewed her that she was going to be a good lawyer because she was smart and articulate and had a likeable quality that is such an asset for a trial lawyer,” he says.

Soon, Cannezzaro worked up to appellate work, along with her trial work. She served as second chair in important appellate cases just months after joining the firm.

“She was excellent in the role of second chair, and she got a firsthand look at what’s required as far as preparation, cross-exam-ining witnesses and working up the file,” Franke says. “It’s a requirement before be-ing able to take over as first chair, which she has done beautifully.”

Cannezzaro has worked on several ap-pellate cases included in Missouri Lawyers Weekly’s “Most Important Opinions” is-sues. She says appellate work allows her to

flex her planning and organizational mus-cles. But trial work, the reason she selected her specialty, is her adrenaline rush.

“In the courtroom there are so many things that make you think on your feet,” she says.

“That’s one of the things I like most about being in the courtroom. It requires you to be creative. You are your client’s voice, so you’ve got people relying on you. It’s kind of one of those things you have to experience to appreciate.”

Her passion for serving her clients was one of the qualities that allowed her to become, at the time, Franke, Schultz & Mullen’s youngest partner.

“It was a very rewarding experience for me,” Cannezzaro says.

“I’ve always thought that this firm is the absolute perfect fit for me. The f lip side is that they recognized how hard I worked, and they’ve given me opportuni-ties as well.”

— Betsy Lee

Nikki Cannezzaro’s firm, Franke Schultz & Mullen,

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Melanie Daily DeRousse

Rising Star


The only problem was where to do it. It was a question she’d pondered since law school, when for class work she’d helped at a clinic for victims of domestic violence.

“I was always disappointed that I wasn’t able to go further with my clients,” she says. “We just had one semester and were rolling through orders of protection. It was a great foundation, but it wasn’t enough as far as working with them on the entire solution.”

Lasting solutions are now DeRousse’s career — literally. She is a staff attorney for the Lasting Solutions Program at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri’s Family Law Unit. The 2007 Washington University Law School graduate, whose territory cov-ers Jefferson County, helps her clients deal with everything from orders of protection to child support.

“We take a holistic approach, try to go beyond the law,” she says. “Legal issues of divorce and custody are not the only thing someone is fighting when they are trying to emerge from an abusive relationship. There are all of these other barriers that have happened as a result of the abuse.”

DeRousse, a native of Scarsdale, N.Y., once worked as an Outward Bound in-structor for troubled juveniles in Florida and South Carolina. Later, after earning her undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Chicago, she came to St. Louis for law school. She dabbled briefly in the private sector, even doing a stint at a major New York firm practicing securi-

ties litigation. After clerking for Judge Kathianne

Knaup Crane for a year, she found her niche at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, where she has worked since 2008.

In May, she got married, and she and her husband, Travis, bought a home in the Tower Grove East neighborhood of St. Louis.

Dan Glazier, executive director and general counsel for LSEM, says DeRousse is a perfect fit for his agency. He cites an invitation she received last October to be the keynote speaker at the Jefferson County conference on family violence as evidence of the respect she has earned.

“Melanie is exactly the kind of advocate that we want to be part of the work that we do here,” Glazier says. “She is energetic, inquisitive. The question she asks with every client is, ‘How can I make this situation better? How can I make the system better?’”

DeRousse’s supervisor, Jason Dodson, agrees. “Melanie has a unique, innate talent that makes a good lawyer,” he says. “She can feel things. She uses her intuition. It’s not stuff you can teach.”

DeRousse says the reasons she loves her job couldn’t be clearer.

“Working with victims of domestic violence appeals to me the most because these are people who have been silenced for many years,” she says. “For me, I think it’s all about helping people to find a voice and find a way to empower themselves to assert their own legal rights.”

— David Baugher

Melanie Daily DeRousse always knew what she wanted to do.

“Working with victims of domestic violence appeals to me the most because these are people who have been silenced for many years.”

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Mischa Buford Epps Rising Star

Terry Satterlee Business Practitioner

Shook, Hardy & Bacon is pleased to congratulate our partners and Missouri Lawyers Weekly Women’s Justice Awards recipients,

Mischa Buford Epps & Terry Satterlee.We salute their tireless dedication to clients, profession and community.

Terry Satterlee Mischa Buford Epps



Charity R. ElmerRising Star

CoxHealth. The 770-bed healthcare orga-nization is headquartered in Springfield, with 62 physician-staffed clinics covering Southwest Missouri.

“This organization is like a town,” Elmer says. “We are governed by every sort of statute or regulation you can imagine, anything from managing the underground storage tanks that hold fuel for helicopters, to HR issues, to physician contracting is-sues, to OSHA issues.”

At more than 7,500 employees, if Cox really were a town, it would have more people than nearby Ash Grove, Elmer’s hometown. Today she lives in Springfield with her husband and two sons.

The scope and the intricate nature of Cox don’t bother Elmer — a fact her supe-riors took note of immediately.

“Healthcare institutions like Cox are very complex organizations,” says

Robert Bezanson, CEO and president of CoxHealth.

“When Charity first joined us, I was ab-solutely impressed from the first day. She’s an extraordinarily clear thinker. She has the ability to grasp the essential issues and put them into a context that everybody can understand.”

Bezanson says Elmer, who has been on the job six years, fits in well in the com-plex nexus of medicine and law. He calls her an uncommonly good communicator who quickly earned the trust of the board of directors.

“Whether it’s an engineering problem or a construction problem, malpractice, credentialing, simple contract law, hu-man resources, workers comp, federal and state regulations, she’s got to have an un-derstanding of all of that,” he says. “I can’t imagine being able to manage some of these legal challenges without her.”

A University of Arkansas School of Law graduate, Elmer has been named among the “40 Under 40” civic and profes-

sional leaders by the Springfield Business Journal and an “Up and Coming” lawyer by Missouri Lawyers Weekly.

Elmer, who had originally planned a career in education and employment law, couldn’t be happier with her present posi-tion, which allows her a diversity of op-portunities.

Today she supervises eight employees, including three attorneys, and says she en-joys both the challenges and the stability of dealing with a single client she can get to know very well.

“Cox is a great organization with a great culture,” she says. “Everybody is fun to work with. The morals and ethics of this organization match up very well with mine personally.”

There’s also an intangible benefit to her work.

“I work for a nonprofit organization where everything I do every day is to help somebody further the mission of this hos-pital,” she says.

— David Baugher

Charity R. Elmer says every day is different — and that’s just the way she wants it. “I like the variety of issues,” says Elmer, general counsel for


Mischa Buford EppsRising Star


to Chris Miller on being recognized at the 12th Annual Women’s Justice Awards as one of the

Top Trial Practioners in Missouri.

Congratulations

Chris Miller

A R I Z O N A • C O L O R A D O • I L L I N O I S • K A N S A S * • M I S S O U R I • N E B R A S K A • T E N N E S S E E • W A S H I N G T O N , D . C . • E N G L A N D

www.huschblackwell.com 314.480.1923 · [email protected]

The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements. *By appointment only.

Congratulations Rashda Buttar

For receiving the 2010 Women’s Justice Enterprise

Award! We’re proud of your accomplishments.

In addition to Rashda, we congratulate all other

winners of this year’s awards.

Rashda Buttar, Vice President and Associate General Counsel

2010 Womens Justice Enterprise Award4.indd 1 4/7/10 4:33:42 PM

In 1998, Epps, an attorney with Kan-sas City’s Shook, Hardy & Bacon, flew to Denver to help the owner of a concrete manufacturing company sell an aspect of his business.

The $4 million deal was tight — so tight Epps says she thought, “I’ll pitch in the $2,000 if it will help make the agreement happen.”

She called a partner with the firm, seek-ing advice. He told her to give up and jump on the plane.

“I remember hanging up and saying, ‘I’m going to make this deal work,’” she says. “It was one of the first big moments where I re-ally helped my client achieve their objective.”

And, though she missed her flight home to do it, Epps made the deal.

“It was one of the opportunities where you learn to trust your gut,” Epps says. “It made it really memorable for me.”

James Beck, co-chairman of the health law group with Shook, Hardy & Bacon, says Epps has become one of the team’s “go-to” people for large transactions, making her a key player in the health care group.

“Knowing you can do it and that you’ve got it figured out is a big, big deal,” he says. “The client comes in with an 800-pound elephant and says, ‘Cook it.’ You’ve got to

know how to take it apart and cook it. Doing that for the first time and doing it well is a huge accomplishment.”

Epps, who earned her law degree at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, also was a founding member of the firm’s diversity committee, formally estab-lished in 2000.

“I was one of the people that said we real-ly need a formalized effort,” Epps says. “To just say we’re committed isn’t enough. It’s the old adage; we needed to put our money where our mouth was.”

And for Epps, the adage applies to her personal life as well. But instead of money, Epps believes in putting her time and skills to use for the community groups and orga-nizations she supports.

Epps, now a partner, serves as legal coun-sel to the police board, has helped several nonprofits organize and has served on the board of Legal Aid of Western Missouri for nearly 10 years. Her efforts earned her Shook, Hardy & Bacon’s internal award for pro bono service, the William G. Zimmerman Pro Bono Award, in 2009.

“I think it’s important for attorneys to give back,” Epps says. “With Legal Aid in particular, I just see consistently the need for people to have access to legal services. Anything I can do to help people have access to those services is very important work.”

— Betsy Lee

Mischa Buford Epps remembers her first multimillion-dollar transaction; it was a defining moment.

“I think it’s important for attorneys to give back.”



THAT UPPITY THEATRE COMPANY IS PROUD OF ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

JOAN LIPKIN FOR BEING HONORED WITH THE

WJA CITIZENSHIP AWARD

• Celebrating the 20th anniversary of our company with Joan’s vision, artistry, courage and leadership to enhance justice in our community

• First artist to recognized by the WJA, acknowledging the important role that art has in transforming and educating our society with great compassion and inclusion

• Co-founder of the DisAbility Project, for 14 years a nationally recognized ensemble creating and performing original material before over 75,000 children and people about the culture of disabilities

Don’t miss our latest production “The State of Marriage” in collaboration with the St. Louis Actor’s Studio, June 4-20

Congratulations to our Partner,

nikki Cannezzaro, for being named a rising star

in the 2010 Women’s JustiCe aWards

Bridget G. HoyRising Star

or sorority to join, Bridget G. Hoy was serving her country in the U.S. Air Force.

“After graduating high school, I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “And college wasn’t honestly on my radar. The Air Force gave me the resources and the time to figure out what I wanted to do.”

In 1994, Hoy was awarded the Air Combat Command Outstanding Airman of the Year. The award recognizes lead-ership, job performance, community in-volvement and personal achievement.

Hoy graduated from Saint Louis University School of Law in 2001 at age 30. She was a bit older than the typical law school grad, but her life experience helped her in the legal profession.

“Bridget is a self-made woman,” says at-torney David Helms, a partner at Lewis, Rice & Fingersh. “She had more a maturity

about her than your typical associate, and she also had the benefit of having clerked, as well. It set her up for success.”

Hoy joined Lewis Rice in 2003 after clerking for U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber. She practices in commercial liti-gation, particularly in intellectual prop-erty. In 2009, she was named a member of the firm.

Frank Janoski, a partner at Lewis, Rice, says it is Hoy’s insight that makes her such a good lawyer.

“She is incredibly smart and incredibly good with client relations,” he says. “She understands how to get the most for the clients in particular situations and has good discernments about what’s the best course of action and doesn’t overlitigate cases. She’s able to see what the issues are and what is important.”

Hoy attributes part of her success to a group of friends known as “the knitting group.” Although she never took well to the knitting, the friendships have uplifted her.

“We all have a professional background

and are about the same age and have young kids,” she says. “And we’re able to lean on each other and help each other. It’s a great support group, as most of us are trans-plants to St. Louis.”

She’s also thankful for her husband, Patrick, who can handle the combative-ness of her being a litigator and who helps tend to their children, Perry and Paige.

Fellow knitting group member Danielle Uy, associate general counsel for Saint Louis University, says Hoy has earned her success with hard work.

“She has such a great work ethic and com-mitment to the profession,” Uy says. “She understands the necessity to be at work and get on top of projects and can’t just leave at [5 p.m.] and just check her Blackberry.

“Bridget has this saying that ‘I carry my own tool kit,’ from her time in the Air Force. She tells this to people who ask if she needs help carrying things into court. That’s just how she is. She’s very capable and can get the job done.”

— Angela Riley

While many of her peers were downing Jell-O shots and figuring out which fraternity



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We congratulate our colleagueand Rising Star Honoree,

Bridget Hoy

Erica L. Nuyen

Rising Star

clear to jail transportation officers when they stopped for pizza.

“They kind of looked at me, then they looked again because my hair is in a po-nytail and I’m in T-shirt and jeans,” says Nuyen, who had taken a job at a pizzeria to make ends meet. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s me.’ That was funny.”

Nuyen, who also baby-sits on the side, was able to drop her pizza-making duties last summer when her raise finally came through. But it’s still not money that keeps her doing what she loves.

“I do this every day because I like the people that I work with,” Nuyen says. “That includes both my co-workers and my clients.”

Originally from the southern Michigan town of Coldwater, Nuyen is a 2005 graduate of Saint Louis University School of Law. She had planned to pursue a career in corporate litigation but found herself disinterested in the intricacies of contract law. Internships with prosecuting attorney and public de-fender offices changed her direction.

“Every day was different,” she says. “I also liked being in the courtroom, which I didn’t expect when I originally went to law school.”

Like others in Nuyen’s office, fellow assis-tant public defender Patrick Brayer says cli-

ents are lucky to have Nuyen on their side.“What’s incredible about her is her or-

ganizational skills and her ability to take any complex project and make order out of chaos,” he says. “That’s why she’s a good litigator. She has such an attention to de-tail in how she does depositions, talks to witnesses or investigates a case.”

Nuyen has earned the respect of those on the other side, as well. “She has a lot of credibility,” says Susan Peterson, a St. Louis County assistant prosecuting at-torney who has sat across the table from Nuyen in plea negotiations. “She really picks and chooses the cases in which she comes to the prosecutor and asks for me to change a recommendation or give some leeway. It’s not every case, and that gives her a lot of credibility.”

Nuyen, who lives in the Benton Park West neighborhood of St. Louis with her husband, Mark, will celebrate four years as a public defender in September. While she knows there can be a high burnout rate in her profession, she says she still enjoys what she does — and has no doubt about why she does it.

“As a public defender, you have a lot of challenging clients and challenging cases. But they are all people who need help, at the lowest point in their life,” Nuyen says. “It’s about finding solutions that aren’t al-ways what I hope or what they hope, but sometimes it’s the best possible solution.”

— David Baugher

Erica L. Nuyen, a St. Louis County assistant public defender, didn’t choose her job for the paycheck. That became


Carol MillerLegal Scholar

For one thing, the northwest Missouri native doesn’t teach at a law school. As a business law professor at Missouri State University in Springfield, Miller teaches students who plan to pursue business or law after their undergraduate work.

Miller also has been honored with awards in teaching and researching. She has secured spots in law reviews. She’s slated to become president of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business in 2012.

And she plays a tough game of racquet-ball.

“I use it more for relaxation,” Miller says, “even though I play it pretty intensely.”

Teaching always was on Miller’s ra-dar. Her father was a dean at Northwest Missouri State University. There were teachers in her mother’s family. She re-ceived undergraduate degrees from NWMSU and the University of Missouri.

After she graduated from the University of Missouri School of Law, Miller served as a clerk for Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice June Morgan. “It gave me a lot of insight into appellate law,” Miller says. “It was a really good learning experience to be able to really discuss legal issues that were pending with the judges.”

Still, her sights were set on teaching. “I went to law school, and when I had a chance to market that into college teach-ing, that’s what I wanted to do all along,” she says.

Teaching business students about law is valuable for them, says Miller, who also

has an MBA.“It’s definitely a good foundation,” she

says. “It also gives them exposure. That might perk some interest in them that can be combined with their business back-ground effectively, especially if they want to go into transactional law or corporate law.”

Miller has racked up accolades and ad-miration. She won MSU’s cross-disciplin-ary University Foundation Research Award in 2008 and the University Foundation Teaching Award in 1998. She also received an award from the Missouri Bar Review for an article about limited liability partner-ships. And she has proven to be helpful to members of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, says Clemson University law professor Megan Mowrey.

“She’s always willing to give her advice or opinion to your research interest, the work that you’re currently pursuing,” Mowrey says. “Carol’s been very generous about giving those opinions and helping you, in a formal way in terms of meetings that are set up through ALSB, as well as informally.”

Gloria Galanes, an MSU communica-tions professor, says Miller readily tackles problems. “She brings that attention to detail to the students and to the classes,” she says.

“She has a MBA and a law degree. Those are not traditionally known as being re-search degrees. Yet, Carol is known as be-ing a premier researcher. It’s that ability to focus, it’s that ability to not let go of the question until you feel satisfied with the answer.”

— Jason Rosenbaum

Professor Carol Miller stands out in a crowd of law professors.


of Law in the early 1970s and remembers a professor who’d lock his classroom door to keep out late students. She recalls another professor who’d shove papers and books off the desks of students who showed up unprepared.

Suni had nearly graduated before she saw her first real affidavit for a search war-rant. That came in her third year, when she interned for a criminal defense lawyer, an experience where reciting caselaw from her classes didn’t help her.

“It was so divorced from reality,” Suni says. “I remember thinking, ‘This whole concept of law school — there’s got to be a better way.’”

Suni is now dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. She has made it her career’s goal to eliminate the disconnect between law school and the real world.

She pushes a curriculum that integrates what she calls “big-picture skills” into a more traditional approach.

“People ask, ‘Are you an academic in-stitution or a lawyer training school?’ The answer is ‘yes,’” Suni says. “The goal is to make law school more human and main-tain intellectual rigor, but not doing it through power and control.”

That is the legacy she says she hopes to leave behind.

Suni tries to emphasize the real legal world to all students as much as she can

so they know what to expect, like when she gave an aspiring public defender the chance of a lifetime.

In 2004, Suni successfully argued on be-half of Rubin Weeks in the first post-con-viction DNA test case before the Missouri Supreme Court. Weeks’ case became im-portant precedent on the subject.

In 2008, Supreme Court judges appoint-ed Suni to take on another DNA case. Suni recruited a third-year law student, Fawzy Simon, to help her.

“What kind of third-year law student gets to help write a Supreme Court law brief? There’s no student good enough,” Simon says.

They asked the court to allow a DNA test on evidence recovered from the scene of a rape at a Kansas City hotel, to help ex-onerate a man who’d already served more than 20 years for the crime. They won their case: The Supreme Court ordered the DNA test.

The new evidence, however, ultimately implicated Weeks, the hotel’s former cook.

Still, Simon says the experience of work-ing with Suni was invaluable because it readied him for his current position as an assistant public defender in Lebanon.

“She doesn’t ever treat people like stu-dents. Her goal is to prepare people for practice,” he says. “She prepared me by giving me opportunities to show myself I was capable of being a lawyer, by showing me that I could do it.”

Her legacy already may have begun.— Alyson E. Raletz

Ellen Suni

Legal Scholar

Ellen Suni used to have a love-hate relationship with legal education.

She attended Boston University School



Weco ngratulateou rS hareholder,PublicS erviceP ractitioneroft heYea r Honoree,

SHEILA GREENBAUM

AttorneysatLaw

7701Forsyth B oulevard,Twelfth FloorSt.Lou is,Missou ri6310 1-1818

314-721-7701 • FAX 314-721-0554www.capessokol.com

Colleen CobleCitizenship

advocated in her more than 20-year career as chief executive officer of the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.

Among her achievements are changes in the law to allow police to arrest abusers upon responding to calls; expanding who can seek orders of protection; and making marital rape a crime.

Coble’s influence extends beyond Missouri. She has helped train people in Europe to start shelters and other pro-grams to combat violence against women. She was a founding member of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and a key force in getting the national Violence Against Women Act through Congress.

Coble actually fell into her vocation by accident. In college, she studied journal-ism at the University of Missouri. Her first job was as a reporter at a small newspaper in Washington state. She was laid off and volunteered at a women’s shelter.

But she was young, the work was hard and, after a few years, she became over-whelmed. One night, she caught herself mentally making a grocery list while a woman was sharing her story of abuse.

Coble quit and headed for Florida. Florida Today hired her, but she quickly figured out journalism wasn’t her passion anymore. She visited with a friend of her old college roommate’s and learned the friend was in Florida to get away after be-ing raped during a break-in. That’s when Coble realized this: Violence against wom-en “is going to be a lens through which I will always view conversations.”

Coble soon moved back to Missouri and began working for a women’s shelter in Columbia. In December 1988, she became director of the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. As her job broadened to include lobbying for changes in law and program funding, Coble says, her background in researching, writing and getting people to talk proved invaluable.

Those who have worked with Coble praise her ability to get things done, the respect she has won from people of all po-

litical stripes and her ability to have fun. “There are times when I’m heartbroken

this [violence] is still going on,” she says. “But you have to have a point of balance. I find there to be great humor in life. If you don’t take advantage of that, you won’t benefit. I learned that from the women themselves. They still have joy in life.”

Observers praise her preparation and fa-miliarity with the law.

“Her knowledge almost always exceeds the knowledge of legislators, including those that are attorney legislators,” says Scott Penman, a friend and fellow Capitol lobbyist.

Coble, of Columbia, never went to law school but is well-versed in the laws pertain-ing to violence against women. She recalls with pride attending state Supreme Court arguments and being introduced to the court, a courtesy typically extended only to attorneys. Through her work, she sees how laws created at the Capitol are applied daily.

“I’ve gone through significant legal edu-cation,” Coble says. “It just wasn’t within the academy.”

— Kelly Wiese

The walls of Colleen Coble’s modest office in Jefferson City are covered with signed and framed legislation that she

The Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater St. Louis is proud

to congratulate WLA Executive Director

Debbie Weaver and WLA Board Member

Bridget Hoy on their Women’s Justice Awards

Celebrating 34 yearsPresident • Nicole Colbert-BotchwayPresident-elect • Jessica LissVice-President • Jamie BoyerSecretary • Kristine BridgesTreasurer • Melanie KniesPast President • Patricia SusiMembers At Large: Kathleen Dubois Amy Gunn Bridget Hoy Jessica Kennedy Christallyn McCloud Maribeth McMahan

www.wlastl.org


Joan LipkinCitizenship

towheaded Becky Thatcher is reborn as a strident and sassy heroine who declares her life’s dream from a wheelchair: “I want to grow up to be a rich, successful lawyer!”

Becky’s words hush a crowd of 900 squirming schoolchildren packed into the 560 Music Center in University City.

Lipkin stands to the side of the stage in a striped blazer, jeans and tennis shoes and watches intently. In every theater or dance performance she creates, she wants her audiences to change their attitudes — and then go out and change society.

“When you step into someone else’s shoes, as an actor or an audience member … it opens your heart,” she says. “It can transport your thinking, then, hopefully, your behavior.”

Lipkin, who lives in the Central West End in St. Louis, is the artistic director of That Uppity Theatre Co. Lipkin gradu-ated from Webster University and earned a master’s in art history from Saint Louis University. She founded the theater com-pany in 1989 and immediately began

creating performances about nearly every marginalized group in America.

She choreographed a dance piece about a nurse severely injured in the bombing of an Atlanta clinic that provided abor-tions. She wrote a play about an openly gay man struggling with HIV. She founded the DisAbility Project, a theatre group of actors with epilepsy, spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy and blindness.

The controversial nature of the perfor-mances didn’t escape notice. Protestors picketed her opening nights, verbally ha-rassed the actors and sent Lipkin death threats.

Sometimes the impact of the perfor-mances rolled out the doors of the theater. Last fall, donations from a free play about the 1969 Stonewall riots partially paid for a 55-seat bus that ferried gay-rights ac-tivists to the National Equality March in Washington, D.C.

It’s not easy to create theater in St. Louis. There’s a dearth of performance space, and it’s hard to get projects off the ground, Lipkin says. Early rehearsals aren’t pretty, either, until the ideas click and the actors dig into their parts.

“Rehearsals are fantastic when they’re going well,” Lipkin says. “It’s like flying a kite, only you’re the kite.”

A 1996 diagnosis of breast cancer up-ended Lipkin’s life and left her with per-manent nerve damage in her left arm. But it didn’t take long for the cancer to emerge as art. She wrote a play that wove together the stories of 12 breast cancer survivors, including herself, and titled it “The Real Deal.”

“It opened my heart more widely and more deeply to the challenges of other peo-ple,” Lipkin says of breast cancer. “It cre-ated a heightened awareness of time and how I want to use my time and what I want to accomplish during my time.”

Lipkin’s next project? A play inspired by 12 Missouri gay couples who hopped an Iowa-bound bus to matrimony when that state legalized same-sex marriages. The piece details the legal and social advantag-es attached to heterosexual marriage that are denied same-sex couples.

And at the end of her play, everyone — gay or straight — gets a taste of wedding cake.

— Allison Retka

In Joan Lipkin’s version of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,”


Morey Mechlin

Citizenship

she heard from attorneys in Springfield about the campaign to adopt the Non-partisan Court Plan for Greene County, she felt compelled to get involved.

“As a non-lawyer, it’s something that is just not at the top of your mind,” Mechlin says with a laugh. “But when I heard about it, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I was just amazed at what it takes to get a judge elected, and it didn’t seem right that money would dictate who sits on the bench.”

Chip Sheppard, a partner with Carnahan, Evans, Cantwell & Brown in Springfield, says the group Greene Countians for Fair and Impartial Judges approached Mechlin about serving as campaign manager for the group.

“We needed somebody who understood fundraising and somebody who had a pas-sion for the cause who wasn’t an attorney,” Sheppard says.

Mechlin’s name came up because of her work as executive director of the Springfield Public Schools Foundation, Sheppard says.

“She really brought that foundation up to another stratosphere, so when her name was mentioned as someone to lead us through the gauntlet, it was the fastest decision we’d ever made,” he says. “And it was the best decision we made.”

Mechlin jumped on board when the Nonpartisan Court Plan for Greene County was in its infancy.

“They told me, ‘We need 15,000 signa-tures to get it on the ballot,’” says Mechlin, who studied political science at Ohio State University. “I said, ‘Eh, no problem.’”

She then started a massive public edu-cation effort, including presentations at libraries, community centers and in the

schools. The campaign also created a Web site and a marketing campaign. “We need-ed to let people know what was happening with the process,” Mechlin says. “It was truly an educational commitment.”

Mechlin infused the campaign with “or-ganized energy,” Sheppard says.

“She did a great job of channeling all of our energy in a productive way. She brought an infinite amount of energy to the effort herself and a ton of great ideas,” he says. “In addition to being a very good manager of the limited resources we had, she had a ton of good ideas.”

Mechlin watched the results come in at Sheppard’s house in November 2008. They were surprised by the results.

“To take a community from absolutely zero knowledge to being able to support it — it was an amazing feeling to accomplish that,” Mechlin says. “And we truly felt it was the right thing for Springfield.”

After the campaign, Mechlin joined an-other cause, serving as executive director of Care to Learn. Care to Learn, a program initiated by Brad Pitt’s brother, Doug Pitt, is designed to help impoverished students in Greene County. The program provides students with everything from backpacks full of food to head lice treatment to femi-nine hygiene products.

“It’s an incredible program,” Mechlin says. “I mean, these children don’t succeed because of things we can correct. We need to start correcting them. Now.”

Mechlin isn’t exactly sure where her strong desire to do right comes from. She just doesn’t have tolerance for injustice.

“I’ve never been afraid to fail,” she says. “Somewhere that was instilled in me. And I often say, ‘You’ve got to do something with your time, might as well be something worthwhile.’”

— Betsy Lee

Morey Mechlin never had much interest in the law.

But she was born and raised with a finely tuned moral compass. And when


Judge Ann K.

CovingtonWomAn of the YeAr


Judge Ann K.

CovingtonWomAn of the YeAr

The first time someone sug-gested to Ann K. Covington that she apply for an opening on the Missouri Court of Appeals, her reaction was swift.

“I thought, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in all of my life,” she says. “In all of my life.”

Her reasons were imminent-ly practical. She was less than 10 years out of the University of Missouri School of Law. She was a lawyer in Columbia, with-out the contacts and name recognition of lawyers in the major urban areas.

Still, the idea took root. In 1987, she sought an opening on the Kansas City-based Western District. She had little hope that she would make the three-person panel of finalists, but she did. And she had less hope that Gov. John Ashcroft would select her. But he did.

It was only later, after the headlines began to trumpet it, that it sunk in for Covington that she was the first woman to sit on an appellate court in Missouri.

A mere 14 months after that, she was selected for a vacancy on the Missouri Supreme Court, and she became the first woman to sit on that court as well.

In the wake of Covington’s appointment, 13 more women have been appointed to Missouri’s appellate courts. Three of them since have gone onto the Supreme Court, where they currently comprise almost half the court.

Vivian Eveloff, executive director of the Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life, says Covington’s appointment per-manently shattered what had been the ju-diciary’s “thick glass ceiling.”

“The idea that one [woman] is enough, or even two is enough, didn’t take root in Missouri,” Eveloff says.

Yet Covington is a reluctant trailblazer, a shaper of state history who feels as if his-tory simply swept her along. By 1987, she says, it was “well past time” for a woman to sit on the appellate court, and she knew her appointment was a mixture of merit and symbolism.

“For every Ann Covington, there are a thousand other lawyers in the state of Missouri who could have been serving and served with complete distinction, and many of them with much more experience than I,” she says. “I never lost sight of that. I expect that I was a beneficiary of right place, right time, wearing a skirt to work.”

Covington’s self-effacement is as inte-gral to her identity as her gender. Her legal career began by “default,” she says, after deciding not to pursue a Ph.D. in English literature. Her early days as a lawyer were wracked with self-doubt; sometimes, she says, she would paw through files in the middle of the night, terrified she’d done something wrong. It probably made her a better lawyer, but it wasn’t healthy.

“Though it is now many, many, many years later, I have found the practice of law seductive in that I can’t leave it — I don’t leave it behind in my head,” she says. “One would think that after all this time I could have developed a capacity to go home and start thinking about something else, but I have not.”

Yet her humility also has been inspi-rational to those who have followed her. Judge Cynthia L. Martin was appointed last year to the Western District — coinci-dentally, to the exact seat Covington once occupied. Martin says her predecessor was the “quintessential personification of how you can approach a hard-charging, stressful business with grace and poise and femininity and still be immensely successful at it.”

“You don’t have to be bold and bucking the system to get things accomplished in our business,” Martin says. “You can just quietly go about doing your job and doing it well, and eventually it seems that you rise to where you’re meant to be.”

In some ways, Covington’s doubts shaped her judicial philosophy. Death penalty cases, she says, were “more than a human being sitting on a bench in a black robe ought to have to deal with.”

“I still don’t know the answer to my in-ternal question, but my leanings are that this is not a good thing,” she says. “Because I do have to say that I always thought, and I do still, that redemption should always be available.”

Covington entered the court at a strange time, when “many members of the court were unable to get along with each other.” For instance, a few years earlier, one judge, Warren Welliver, had been passed over as chief justice.

It was a difficult environment to enter.“Nobody ever treated me to my face any

way other than graciously,” she says. “But as with the Court of Appeals, where there were 10 men and Ann, it had to have been an upheaval for everyone.”

Over time, the strife subsided. In fact, Covington was famously one of the seven Supreme Court judges Ashcroft appointed between 1985 and 1992. It’s the only time in Missouri history that all seven of the court’s judges were named by one governor.

Covington served as the court’s chief justice from 1993 to 1995. But she detested the spotlight and had no desire to rotate into the job again.

“I had not been a political creature, and I still think I’m not,” she says. “That aspect of being on the Supreme Court of Missouri, the administrative aspect, is ev-ery bit a burdensome responsibility as the decision-making.”

Covington left the Supreme Court in early 2001. She was 58 years old.

“I had no idea as a female what my shelf life might be,” she says.

She left the court without definite plans but was almost immediately offered a job at Bryan Cave, the state’s largest law firm. She first worked in the firm’s St. Louis of-fice and then at its Jefferson City location. She never moved from Columbia, howev-er, where she lives today with her husband, Charles McClain.

Covington announced her retirement from Bryan Cave in February. As with her earlier departure from the court, she says, she wanted to leave on her own terms, and not hang on too long. After 33 years in the law, she still hopes to learn how to leave it at the office.

“I’ve looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Ann, how much longer are you going to let yourself be seduced?’” she says.

— Scott Lauck


Rashda M. ButtarEnterprise

degree temperature warmed her face, chilled earlier from the winter winds above ground in West Virginia.

She flicked on her headlamp and looked around the mine, which stretched for more than 8 miles underground. Black soot coat-ed the floor and all the equipment, but the space was surprisingly tidy.

Buttar had worked for more than a year as associate general counsel for St. Louis-based Patriot Coal Corp. But this was the first time she had come face to face with the company’s product.

“It was theoretical until I saw it,” says Buttar. “We are so disconnected from the sources of our energy.”

When she graduated from the Saint Louis University School of Law in 1996, Buttar might not have known she would end up in the pits of the 200-year-old U.S. coal industry. But she definitely knew she

wouldn’t be a trial lawyer. “Research bores me to death,” she says. Instead, she found her calling as as-

sistant general counsel at TALX Corp., a St. Louis-based tax and human resources company. When she joined the company, TALX was a publicly traded start-up, just as Patriot Coal would be when Buttar moved to that company.

It thrilled Buttar to help build a com-pany from scratch. A big-picture thinker, she rarely stayed within the offices of the legal department.

Instead, she invited herself to meet-ings of other segments of Patriot Coal and started piping up with ideas, warnings and strategies.

“I never say ‘no,’” she says of her role as general counsel. “I say, ‘Let’s figure out a different way to do this.’

“You can’t just come in and be a sledge-hammer, or else you’ll lose credibility.”

One of her favorite jobs as in-house counsel is participating in mergers and acquisitions.

“To take two things that are separate and different and put them together,” Buttar says, “there’s an energy around that.”

There’s also a million things to do, from conducting due diligence to negotiating a sale and then figuring out how to blend the two companies.

Buttar’s negotiating powers likely have come in handy during her six years on the Board of Education for the School District of Clayton. Buttar has served as school board vice president and, at press time, was in the running for president. Her three children, Anisa, 10, Casimir, 8, and Shabir, 5, are enrolled at Glenridge Elementary School.

During her tenure, board members sup-ported the renovation of science classrooms that hadn’t been updated since the 1950s, sought funding for a new middle school and hired a new superintendent.

“Public education is a treasured asset,” Buttar says. “So it’s up to us to preserve that and not let it slide.”

— Allison Retka

Down, down, down she went. For 500 feet, Rashda M. Buttar descended slowly into the coal mine. The constant 55


why any attorney would pay to belong to a vol-untary association.

In the past eight-plus years, she has worked to add resources and programs that flip the stan-dard to “Why wouldn’t you join?”

Since she took charge, the organization’s mem-bership, finances and continuing legal educa-tion offerings have soared. The organization has grown from about 600 to nearly 900 members, and CLE programs have more than doubled.

Hogan has worked to make the bar more di-verse, but she stresses that in the legal world diversity means more than race or gender. For example, during her tenure the Springfield bar has boosted membership of in-house counsel and government attorneys and started pro-grams to keep young lawyers involved.

The bar association has hit many benchmarks under her leadership, among them buying its own building and establishing a foundation that works to help the community. Last year, she oversaw a program where dozens of attorneys volunteered to handle public defenders’ cases.

“She’s worked tirelessly to make our bar asso-ciation relevant and participating in a good way on statewide issues,” says former Springfield bar president Wallace Squibb.

The Tulsa University Law School graduate fits a successful career around an active family life. She and husband Tedd Hamaker have six children between them, plus an 18-month-old grandson. They spend free time coordinating schedules for everything from violin to hockey to the science fair. The family also enjoys the outdoors together, floating rivers and compet-ing in triathlons.

But the family now confronts a challenge like no other: Her husband is undergoing treatment for bone cancer. Hogan is used to being on the giving side but says the support her family has received from the bar has been overwhelming.

“We’re blessed to be part of a community like this,” she says, adding later, “Contrary to public perception, lawyers are some of the most com-passionate individuals in the world.”

Professionally, a crowning achievement for Hogan was passage of the Nonpartisan Court Plan in Greene County. She was one of a few le-gal minds in Springfield who worked hard out-side their real jobs to secure the plan’s adoption.

Hogan credits her deep roots in southwest Missouri and her previous work with commu-nity leaders outside the legal realm.

“When you have lived and worked with these people, when your kids are growing up together, then the relationship’s already there,” she says. “It makes it infinitely easier to go to a Chamber of Commerce meeting and make your case and have credibility.”

For all that, Hogan remains modest, regular-ly pointing to other attorneys who helped with the court plan drive and saying it’s easy to run a bar with many lawyers willing to give their time and talent.

“This has always been a good bar,” she says. “I just wanted to see if I could help get it to the next level and become a pretty relevant, dynamic bar.”

— Kelly Wiese

Crista HoganEnterprise

Before Crista Hogan started as executive director of the Springfield Metropolitan Bar Association, she wondered


Vickie Schatz

Enterprise

her hand at in-house practice. Schatz, who has been with Kansas City

Power & Light for close to eight years, loves the intimacy of working in-house.

“You really understand the client’s busi-ness so much more and you have an impact on something greater than just the out-come of a lawsuit,” says Schatz, a graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. “You can impact their busi-ness strategies and processes. It’s much more rewarding to work alongside your client and all have the same goals.”

In-house work also has allowed Schatz to grow her legal expertise.

“It’s the breadth and depth of my prac-tice and the different areas I’ve worked in that are my biggest accomplishments,” she says. “I’ve done everything from liti-gation to regulatory work. And I’ve been immersed in a very deep and meaningful way in a variety of cases.”

Jim Heeter, a partner with Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, says Schatz always goes above and beyond.

“As an attorney, Vickie enjoys a well-de-served reputation as an outstanding law-yer who does a terrific job for Kansas City Power & Light Company in all of the areas of her practice,” Heeter says.

In 2007, Schatz graduated from UMKC with her MBA. It was an unorthodox move, but one that Schatz says she appre-ciates every day.

“It has helped me further understand how the business operates and helps me to provide an even greater level of advice to my clients,” she says.

Heeter says Schatz’s MBA has proved in-valuable for the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association. Schatz chairs the asso-ciation’s finance committee and serves as secretary.

“She has done an outstanding job of han-dling the KCMBA budget process and the financial aspects of our upcoming move to new bar headquarters,” Heeter says.

Her MBA also gave her the opportunity to use her talents outside the legal profession. Schatz and a group of classmates recently started a company called Prêt-à LLC. They launched a yoga application that quickly became the No. 1 downloaded yoga appli-cation for iPhone, Schatz says, and the ap-plication was downloaded in 55 countries.

“It’s just a hobby,” Schatz says. “But we have a lot of fun, and it’s a way to flex our creative muscles.”

In addition to her busy practice and emerging business, Schatz spends a great deal of time giving back to the community. Heeter, who met Schatz while they worked together for LEAP (Lawyers Encouraging Academic Performance), says Schatz is a true example of generosity. Schatz vol-unteers her time working with several charitable groups, including the LEAP Foundation and Operation Breakthrough. Operation Breakthrough is a Kansas City organization that provides impoverished children with everything from tutoring services to a free dental clinic.

“Operation Breakthrough is an amazing organization,” Schatz says. “You can see the direct impact you have on the lives of children. There is so much you can do to help them.”

Schatz and her husband are expecting their first child this month.

— Betsy Lee

“It’s much more rewarding to work

alongside your client and all have

the same goals.”

After just a few years of serving corporate clients from the outside, Vickie Schatz was more than ready to try


court reporter, purchased in 1985.The dual operation, which offers ser-

vices from preparing courtroom presenta-tions to document scanning to video work to court reporting, began acquiring other firms in 1998. It now employs 40 people and has eight offices across Missouri. Its St. Louis headquarters is housed in an historic firehouse on 11th Street built in the mid-19th century as the first African-American Methodist church west of the Mississippi. Weaver’s company also has one office in Illinois.

Mary Gaal, operations manager, says Weaver is an energetic blend of high stan-dards and caring personal attention.

“She’s very driven, but more so than that she’s interested in the legal community, the furthering of court reporting and our ability to provide services to the client,”

Deborah C. WeaverEnterprise

says Gaal, who has worked with Weaver for a decade. “This is her vision, and she’s worked very hard to make it come true.”

Weaver has found a receptive audi-ence for her vision. She was named the St. Louis Business Journal’s Most Influential Business Woman in 2001, the Small Business Administration’s Small Business Person of the Year in 2002 and has been profiled by local and national media. Two years ago, the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis honored her with its Community Service Award.

“I have a responsibility to make sure that my clients have received the services that they have requested in a quality and timely manner and to make sure my employees have a good, positive place to work,” says Weaver, who often participates in pro bono work for area bar associations and others in the legal community. “Those are all important things to me.”

If she treats her employees like family, that may be because some of them are. Weaver is a St. Louis native who now lives in Columbia, Ill., with husband Bob Dear. Of her six children, four work for the com-pany. Her oldest son manages the Kansas City office.

Weaver says 90 percent of the company’s business comes from the legal arena.

“It’s a very demanding field, but it’s one that has given back to me, and my compa-ny wouldn’t be where it is today without the support of the legal community,” she says. “It’s made all the difference in the world.”

— David Baugher

think of business partner Kelly Willis.“What inspires me and gets me up every

morning is what Kelly and I wanted to ac-complish together,” Weaver says of Willis, who died of breast cancer five years ago. “With her being gone, I still know she is there with me every day guiding me, help-ing me provide top-notch services to the legal community. That’s our goal, and I know that I have a job to fulfill.”

Weaver is president of Midwest Litiga-tion Services and Midwest Trial Services. The sister entities evolved from Taylor & Associates, the enterprise Weaver, then a

When Deborah C. Weaver considers why she goes to work each day, she only has to


in women’s legal wear, but Springfield criminal de-fense attorney Stacie Bilyeu has never been one to blend into the courtroom woodwork.

“Even though I grew up in Springfield, Missouri,” says the member of Nordstrom’s fashion advisory panel, “my clothes were always an expression of me.”

And while some might say anything but a muted blazer and slacks is a form of jury trial suicide, Bilyeu knows her style gives her credibility.

“If you are true to yourself, people of any kind will accept you,” she says.

Bilyeu’s convictions don’t end with her outfits. On the list of things she’s passionate about: teaching her two children the importance of standing up for what you believe in, be-ing an attorney who fights for the underdog and swearing when there simply is no better word.

When it comes to legal issues, Bilyeu, who practices at Askinosie & Bilyeu, says the number of nonviolent offenders who end up in prison is our country’s biggest abomination.

“First of all,” says the University of Missouri School of Law graduate, “I think it’s a real big deal to put a person in a cage. When you put somebody in jail, you better make real sure you’ve got a real good reason for doing that.”

She says it’s frustrating that some bank robbers and rap-ists never see a day behind bars while some drug dealers spend years in prison without parole. Changing the attitude of the community is the only way to solve what’s politically unpopular, she says.

In the meantime, Bilyeu does the best she can to ensure her clients are treated fairly under the law.

Take a man she happened upon late one Friday afternoon at the courthouse. Bilyeu had stopped in to get a warrant taken care of and found herself behind a “giant of a guy in jail clothes” who was stuttering, quoting Bible verses and acting as his own counsel.

She recalls thinking, “‘Oh, God, Why, why, why? I just want to get in and out.’ ” Then she realized she could do something. “I’m not some spiritual freak,” she says, “but this little voice said, ‘You go up, and you help that person.’ ”

So Bilyeu got the scoop on the man, a nonviolent offender with a warrant out for probation violation, and took him on as her client right then and there. The action set off a chain of serendipitous events, which culminated in the prosecut-ing attorney dismissing the case that very day.

“I was looking up at him, and he was looking down at me, and his eyes were full of tears,” Bilyeu remembers. “He said, ‘Does this mean I’m going home?’ When he said that word, ‘home,’ you know what that meant to him. It was like the heavens opened up and he was going inside.

“What that made me realize is how we have so much more power than we think we do,” she says. “But you don’t know it if you don’t expend it.”

— Anna Vitale

Stacie Bilyeu Trial Practitioner

Shiny jackets and 5-inch platform heels aren’t the norm


Denise HenningTrial Practitioner

help but smile at his response.“Only girls can be lawyers,” Bryan an-

swered.Henning is one of the most successful

female plaintiff attorneys in Missouri. She owns the Henning Law Firm, in Kansas City, specializing in personal injury, wrongful death and transportation-relat-ed injury cases.

“It’s a demanding lifestyle — trial work especially. On the plaintiff ’s side, it’s defi-nitely risky,” Henning says. It’s not unusu-al for her firm to shell out $100,000 in a semi-trailer case. And her reimbursement hinges on a successful outcome.

“I have a pretty high risk-tolerance lev-el,” she says.

Henning has landed some of the state’s highest jury verdicts and settlements in recent years, including an $8 mil-lion verdict in 2005 against Green Valley Transportation. She convinced a jury that the California trucking company went against its own hiring requirements and allowed an inexperienced driver to operate one of its semi-trailers. The driver struck and killed a 23-year-old man driving a farm tractor in Jackson County.

Henning, a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law, spent her early ca-reer mainly defending corporations. Then she started her own firm specifically so she could represent families after catastrophic accidents. “They really are at a crisis situa-tion in their lives,” she says.

Henning credits part of her success to her mentors, including Missouri Supreme Court Judge Patricia Breckenridge. Henning clerked for Breckenridge at the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District.

Now Henning has evolved into a men-tor herself, Breckenridge says. The judge often calls on Henning to visit with young female law clerks looking to transition to private practice.

“What’s different about her is now she has a powerful personality. She knows she’s a force to be reckoned with,” Breckenridge says. “She has grown to her comfort level of being assertive.”

In 2007, Henning successfully negoti-ated a $6 million arbitration award in a highway defect case against the Missouri Department of Transportation. The case centered on the death of a doctor struck by a car after he stopped to help stranded mo-torists on a Warrensburg-area highway.

One of her more high-profile settlements also came that year when she represented the mother of a construction worker who died during an explosion at a pork-pro-cessing plant in St. Joseph. Henning gar-nered a $2.25 million settlement from Triumph Foods.

Henning says she could empathize more with her clients after encountering her own life crisis: She celebrated five years of beating breast cancer in December 2009.

“I have a greater understanding to see what it is like in the health care system, and that’s what my clients do every day,” she said. “When you have a serious illness, the hope is very encouraging. I hope I can give that hope to my clients.”

— Alyson E. Raletz

When Denise Henning asked her 10-year-old son if he wanted to grow up to be a lawyer, she couldn’t


Maureen A. McGlynnTrial Practitioner

key to representing them for the long haul, McGlynn says.

“I have developed close friendships with my clients,” she says. “I don’t treat them any differently than other people. They have a family, and they’re a person who is working for a corporation looking out for its best interests.”

McGlynn grew up in St. Louis and at-tended Saint Louis University Law School. She’s known in corporate circles as an out-side counsel to hire in Missouri.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time — over 30 years — and she is the best local counsel that I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with,” says Christine O. Boyd of Lavin, O’Neil, Ricci, Cedrone & Disipio in Philadelphia. Boyd serves as the national coordinating counsel for automotive and telecommunications companies. “She’s highly responsive and professional. She’s sought out in the jurisdictions where she practices.”

McGlynn balances her highly competi-tive trial law practice with the challenges of mothering her three children and volun-teer work. She is the president of the board of directors of St. Patrick Center, which provides services to the homeless.

“Because I want to be a present mom, something has to be given up, and that’s my personal time,” McGlynn says. “So I have to be sure that my work here [at the firm] and at St. Patrick Center is fulfilling.”

—Angela Riley

Maureen A. McGlynn’s integrity is one of the most important things to her as a trial lawyer.

“Getting great results for your clients and receiving defense verdicts isn’t enough,” says the partner at Kortenhof McGlynn in St. Louis.

“With millions of dollars at stake, it is so easy for there to be backstabbing. I have to maintain a face of kindness, which can be seen as a weakness. It’s a real challenge to balance acting with integrity with being an aggressive advocate for my client. ... I have to be true to myself, but show I mean business.”

McGlynn, a defense attorney, primar-

ily represents corporate clients in prod-uct liability, premises liability, toxic tort and asbestos lawsuits. Her clients include: General Motors Co., Chrysler Group, Detroit Diesel Corp., Kraft Foods Global, Kellogg Co., chemical company Ashland Inc., chemical distributor Univar USA and AK Steel Corp.

“Typically, someone hates you when you beat them that badly in the courtroom, but her opponents still love her,” says attorney Shawn K. Jacque, corporate counsel for Detroit Diesel. “It just doesn’t happen in the profession. It’s great for her clients.”

Good relationships with her clients are


Christine F. MillerTrial Practitioner

sense of what a jury wants to hear — and be prepared.

The Husch Blackwell Sanders partner and litigation division chairwoman says while being savvy about citizen temperaments and never holding a death grip on “a text-book defense” are important, preparation lays the bedrock for successful verdicts.

“You have to know everything and be prepared for everything,” Miller says. “You can’t expect that something won’t come up.”

She laughs remembering her very first trial.

“I was so overprepared for it, it was un-believable.”

Looking at Miller’s track record, though, it’s difficult to find anything funny about her tenacious approach.

For starters, she wins. A lot. There was the time she represented the

Fortune 1000 ammunition manufacturer Olin Corp. against claims from 17 em-ployees that they were chosen for layoff in

a reduction in force because of their age. Miller argued the decisions were based on skills, and she won. The case was named one of the year’s top-10 defense verdicts by the National Law Journal.

On another case — this one involving claims for religious harassment and retali-ation — the trial judge personally called Husch Blackwell Sanders co-chairman Joe Conran after Miller won to tell him she was one of the finest trial attorneys he’d ever seen in action in his court.

Given these cases and others like them, some might be surprised Miller first con-sidered marketing and then business school before zeroing in on law. An im-pressive LSAT score and the potential of always dealing with a new case or matter ultimately tipped the scale.

“I was looking for a career where I wasn’t easily bored,” she says.

During a summer clerkship at then-Husch & Eppenberger following her second year of law school at St. Louis University, she found it.

“I liked the ways the lawyers maneu-vered and positioned themselves at trial,” she says.

Miller has spent significantly less time practicing law since becoming chair of the 300-person-plus litigation division in January 2008, but the position allows her to focus on other issues close to her heart.

As a young attorney, Miller gained momentum at the firm while raising her twins as a single mom. While she didn’t feel it was financially feasible then for her to practice part time, today she champions the option for others.

“Chris is a role model for both women and men in the firm who are juggling the law and family,” says JoAnn Sandifer, a partner at the firm and one of Miller’s best friends.

Miller also encourages women to sup-port each other in the workplace.

“Some women are very focused on giv-ing work to women attorneys, but some aren’t,” she says. “Some think, ‘Men have more power, and they can do more for me.’ There are barriers that need to be broken through.”

If leading by example is the most effec-tive way of enacting change, then Miller has taken a hammer to the glass ceiling.

— Anna Vitale

In 26 years of practice, Christine F. Miller has subscribed to two keys of courtroom success: Have a

“You have to know everything and be prepared

for everything. You can’t expect that something

won’t come up.”


She fell into the niche practice because of the way certain English words roll off her tongue.

“They hear the accent, and they pre-sume you know something about inter-national law,” Mdivani says.

When she was 26, she moved to the United States from Russia to strengthen her career in business. She’s from a family of lawyers, and she eventually opted for law school at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Afterward, she focused on corporate law with Kansas City attorney John Klamann.

But she quickly found herself fielding countless inquiries on immigration law.

It was a topic she knew little about, so she began studying the complex world of immigration regulation.

In 2004, she started her own practice, The Mdivani Law Firm, in Overland Park, Kan. Today, she’s considered a go-to ex-pert on the subject, serving as chairwom-an of The Missouri Bar’s Immigration Law Committee. She also is an adjunct law professor at her alma mater.

She designed her firm, which embraced technology and alternative revenue sources, to help corporations with their legal immigration needs. The firm also assists abused women and children with green cards and visas.

“If you want to become edgy, which we are, you need to exhibit qualities that may be perceived as unladylike,” Mdivani says. “You have to be aggressive. You have to be willing to stick your neck out, will-ing to compete. … I’m OK with that.”

And aggressive she is. As many law firms struggle for business, she has an-other problem: “We can only take so many people.”

For employers with immigration con-cerns, Mdivani started I-9Seminars.com, a Web site that provides information on immigration law compliance and forms. She and her staff record frequent podcasts, updating listeners on happenings within Immigration Customs Enforcement.

Through the site, employers — clients or not — can sign up for training and seminars that she travels the country to conduct. And they can buy books she’s authored, including her newly released “Employer Immigration Compliance, Plans, Policies and Procedures.”

“She’s been very creative, very industri-ous in her work,” says Roger McCrummen, chairman of the Missouri/Kansas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “She’s a master at marketing. That’s not really typical of most lawyers.”

Mdivani grew even more creative when she combined her love of cooking with her day job. In her “Cooking with an Accent: An Immigration Lawyer’s Cookbook,” she paired each recipe with the real-life story of someone she represented.

Below a recipe for Beef and Guinness Stew is the story of an Irish man and a Chinese woman falling in love. The cou-ple’s courtship kicked into full gear when an expiring student visa threatened their romance.

“I was so nervous I laughed throughout the entire ceremony,” Linh Trieu wrote of their marriage. “Mira took care of the le-gal aspects and says, ‘Don’t worry about anything. I will worry for you.’ ”

— Alyson E. Raletz

Mira Mdivani Business Practitioner

Mira Mdivani is the entrepreneur behind a prominent immigration law firm.


“I wanted to work to level the playing field in every area I could.”

Moore is president of Urban Strategies Inc., a national nonprofit founded in 1978 with headquarters in St. Louis. The organization partners with developer McCormack Baron Salazar to rebuild dis-tressed, urban-core communities into saf-er neighborhoods with better institutions and human services.

While McCormack Baron Salazar works on the physical redevelopment, Urban Strategies works to stabilize residents and attract new ones across all income levels.

For example, the partners replaced a di-lapidated public housing project, known previously as Blumeyer Village in the North Grand area of St. Louis, with low-rise, mixed-income housing called Renaissance Place at Grand. Families started moving into the development in 2005, Moore says, and crime has plummeted in the area.

In her 10 years at Urban Strategies, Moore has grown the organization from a staff of four to more than 60 employees and a $7 million budget.

Before she came to Urban Strategies, Moore worked as a high-ranking offi-cial trying to help families from the top down. She has worked in state policy for children and families; helped direct a St. Louis redevelopment initiative; was a cabinet member of former Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan; and was an administra-tive judge for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

She thought: “I would really like to put what I know on the ground, get better re-sults, build up areas that are in distress, but I don’t want to do it from the perspective solely of a social service provider. I need to impact people in an aggressive way.”

It’s the hardest job she’s ever had. Hillary Zimmerman, senior vice president

and general counsel at McCormack Baron Salazar, is on Urban Strategies’ board of di-rectors. She admires Moore’s combination of business skills and passion for her work.

“In an industry that places a high pri-ority on places, she’s been a significant force in moving the industry towards people and thinking about their needs,” Zimmerman says.

Moore lives in St. Louis, where she grew up, and is married to her high school sweetheart. The couple has two grown children. Moore serves on nine boards, and she enjoys exercising, reading and listening to her husband play bass with a variety of bands in St. Louis.

Before she retires, she wants to shift government policy to more long-term so-lutions for disadvantaged families.

She recalls the words of her father, who worked for wealthy families as a driver or doing household jobs: “‘Babe, you’re going to have to work all your life because we don’t come from any money. So you make certain that you’re doing something that you love, because nothing’s more miser-able than to have to get up every day and go do something you hate.’ ”

Three decades into her career, would she have done anything differently?

“Not a thing,” Moore says. “Nothing, absolutely nothing.”

— Laura Girresch

Sandra MooreBusiness Practitioner

Sandra Moore earned a law degree at Washington University, but she never wanted

to work in a courtroom or a law firm.“I wanted to represent poor people,” Moore says.

“I wanted to work to level the playing field in every area I could.”


Terry J. SatterleeBusiness Practitioner

at Shook, Hardy & Bacon in Kansas City and for herself.

In the early 1970s, Satterlee applied to law schools with high LSAT scores and ex-cellent grades. One school sent a letter ac-cepting Mr. Terry Satterlee with promises of a full scholarship. A few days later, the same school rejected Ms. Terry Satterlee.

Unfazed, Satterlee persisted. She attend-ed law school at the University of Missouri, one of just eight women in a class of 223.

“Terry was very hardworking,” says solo practitioner Marilyn Shapiro, a law school classmate. “It was odd to be outnumbered by 200, but we made it work.”

Satterlee graduated in 1974. But before she could take the bar exam, The Missouri Bar contacted her, stating she could not take the bar under her maiden name, be-cause it would be deceptive. So she hur-riedly changed her name.

She passed. Satterlee selected environmental law as

her specialty, a difficult and ever-changing topic. She worked for the Environmental Protection Agency — and fought against it.

“I love environmental law because it’s not rigid, everything is new,” she says. “You get one case and it will be different from every other case you’ve done.”

In the 1999 EPA vs. Harmon Industries, Satterlee successfully represented Harmon Industries, challenging the EPA’s NOx SIP call, which required 22 states, including Missouri, to submit implementation plans for nitrogen oxide emission reduction. It was a case that her daughter would later read about in her law school textbooks.

When Satterlee had children, she opted to take a two-year break from practicing.

“I was told I’d never be a lawyer again,” she says.

She went back part time with Lathrop & Gage, something most colleagues told her wasn’t possible. Satterlee eventually returned to full-time practice, joining Shook, Hardy & Bacon as a partner in 2006. And since her return to the profes-sion, Satterlee has continued to push the envelope, working on sanitary sewer over-

flow cases and climate change rules cases. If climate change regulations become a reality, Satterlee plans on representing a large Midwestern group regarding the economic impact of the changes.

Despite her challenging legal schedule, Satterlee’s priority has always been her family, including her two children.

“She has been a path-breaker for women in the legal profession and has provided younger women in the profession not only a sterling example to follow, but also as a mentor, adviser and invaluable resource,” says Alok Ahuja, a judge with the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District.

Satterlee says younger women often ask her how she did it all.

“You just have to learn how to figure it all out, like the juggler that has plates spinning. You learn which one needs spinning and how to not let anything fall,” Satterlee says.

“Women were fighting for their rights when I came through the system, and it’s something that I always wanted to contin-ue. Just in my own way.”

— Betsy Lee

Terry J. Satterlee is a quiet sort of rebel. In her own way, she likes to break down barriers — for her clients


Ronda F. WilliamsBusiness Practitioner

at Hampton University in Virginia, spent five years working in the mortgage and insurance industries before enrolling at Saint Louis University School of Law.

“My philosophy when working was that if I didn’t want my boss’s job it was time to move on,” Williams says. She moved on a couple of times until she decided it was time to quit working and become a full-time law student.

Today she is senior corporate counsel at Savvis Communications Corp.

In law school, Williams questioned whether she was learning something that would make her a good lawyer. Her an-swer was no.

“So I changed my curriculum and … spent the last year and a half getting prac-tical experience,” she says, instead of tak-

Now she mentors three black women law students and takes special interest in the presidents of the Black Law Students Associations of SLU and Washington University law schools. Williams her-self headed the BLSA chapter at SLU and now is president of the Mound City Bar Association and an active member of the National Bar Association.

“Historically, most black law students don’t have lawyers in the family,” Williams says. “Their support system is lacking. We have a responsibility to be that support system so they’re not at a disadvantage.”

At Savvis, she is the only black lawyer in the entire legal department and the only female in the legal department’s St. Louis office. But she feels included and says her boss, Gene DeFelice, deserves much of the credit for that.

Williams, then a lawyer at Fox Galvin, wasn’t looking for a job when she met DeFelice at a Mound City Bar Association panel discussion on diversity in the work-place. DeFelice had an opening in his de-partment and invited Williams to apply.

“I thought we were too homogenous,” he says. “I wanted to stop talking about [di-versity] and start doing it.”

Hiring Williams was “a rational busi-ness decision,” he says. “Ronda has quiet strength,” which was “readily apparent” in the interview process.

Williams says her career resulted from building relationships with other people.

The lesson she wants to teach the law students she mentors is simple: “You never know what that relationship can lead to … [and] how that can develop into the oppor-tunity to do something great.”

— Donna Walter

ing the traditional “bar classes” that cover what’s on the bar exam.

St. Louis lawyer Dorothy White-Coleman first met Williams during the summer of 2000, when she hired the law student as an intern.

“It was pretty obvious to me at that time that she was going to be successful in what-ever she did because she was determined,” White-Coleman says.

Williams still counts her former employ-er as a mentor. “What I learned that first summer was more valuable than anything I learned in the first year of law school.”

During law school, Williams worked as an intern at the Missouri Court of Appeals in St. Louis for Judge Kathianne Knaup Crane. The next year she clerked for Judge Booker Shaw, who is now a practicing lawyer.

Ronda F. Williams became a lawyer because she didn’t want her boss’s job.

Williams, who majored in marketing


Effie F. DayPublic Service Practitioner

Aid of Western Missouri, a career that has helped uncounted people win ac-cess to Medicaid?

Just the best way to make an impact, she says.

“It’s a very selfish thing,” she insisted. “What else are you going to do where you feel good about yourself at night? You nego-tiated a $500,000 contract — so? But when someone tells you you’re as cool as the other side of a pillow, and they got their prescrip-tion that day, it’s like, all right! Even when they don’t tell you … that’s still OK, because you know you got them what they needed.”

Day began as in intern with the Kansas City organization in 1970 and joined as a staff attorney two years later, after com-pleting law school at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It was all she want-ed to do, she says — in fact, it was the only job she applied for.

Without really knowing what she was getting into, she agreed to defend the rights of welfare recipients. Day assumed that after a few years of hearing tough sto-ries of poverty and denial, she’d burn out, become calloused and have to move on.

“But what happened is, you don’t get calloused to it,” she says. “You become, if anything, more involved and I think more sensitive to our clients’ issues. It sucks you in to the point that you can’t walk away from it.”

Early on, Day’s representation of Medi-caid recipients led to a series of class action lawsuits that have helped shape the law, prompting courts to recognize such basic procedural rights as being able to challenge a denial of services or receive a replacement check if the original is lost or stolen.

Five years ago, she also helped spearhead a program with Truman Medical Center in Kansas City. The hospital refers patients who may have been denied Medicaid im-properly to Legal Aid. The program has helped more than 1,000 patients and al-lowed the hospital to recover about $5 million in payments that otherwise would have been lost.

Gregg Lombardi, Legal Aid’s executive director, says Day’s tenacity has “made the law work the way it should work.” He also says her long experience and high success often persuades the other side to negotiate, rather than to fight in court.

“The Family Support Division, who’s on the other side of us in these cases, has learned that Effie and her team, once they sink their teeth into a case, aren’t going to let go,” he says.

Perhaps Day’s toughest fight is against the subtle prejudice and overt dislike of her clients.

“There are a lot of people who don’t like ‘welfare recipients,’ ” she says. “It’s never been popular. Fortunately, Legal Aid doesn’t decide how to allocate benefits or whether to do something because it’s popular.”

— Scott Lauck

Effie F. Day is selfish. Her nearly 40 years with Legal


Sheila GreenbaumPublic Service Practitioner

“I know it sounds cliché, but I went into law because I wanted to save the world,” she says. “I was attracted to the idea that what you could do representing one person could help many people.”

After graduating from law school at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Greenbaum spent most of her career in the public sector including working as: staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Western Missouri; chief regional attorney-Region VII for the U.S. Department of Education; assistant regional attorney and chief regional civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare; and senior staff attorney for the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 2004, she made the switch to the pri-vate sector and joined the St. Louis law firm Capes, Sokol, Goodman & Sarachan, where she serves as shareholder.

“I did it backwards,” Greenbaum says of moving from the public to the private sector. She practices in the firm’s litigation department. She primarily handles state and federal appellate cases, complex civil litigation and employment cases.

Still, Greenbaum is as dedicated as ever to public service. She and fellow Capes, Sokol partner Gary Sarachan drafted the firm’s pro bono policy. The firm credits its attorneys the hours they work on pro bono cases, and the firm has committed funds for the time.

“It’s one thing to give lip service [to pro bono activities], but it’s a challenge to actu-ally do it,” Greenbaum says. “The program is a way for us to walk the walk.”

Greenbaum often steps up to new chal-lenges. In 1999, Saint Louis University Law School Professor Roger Goldman, who was acting interim dean of the law school, asked Greenbaum to serve as the acting director of the legal research and writing program. The previous director had re-signed too late in the year to find a perma-nent replacement.

“With her experience at the 8th Circuit, I could not think of a more appropriate qualification,” Goldman says. “She did a terrific job.”

The year 2009 was big for Greenbaum. She settled a civil rights case with the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners, which apologized and agreed to com-pensate four protesters whom police tar-geted before the 2003 World Agricultural Forum. Greenbaum and Sarachan worked on the case as cooperating attorneys for the ACLU. She was awarded the ACLU’s Civil Liberties Award by the Eastern District of Missouri chapter, the organization’s high-est award. She also completed her term as the president of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis — as the second female president in the organization’s 108-year history.

“Sheila does so many activities for civic organizations, whether it be the ACLU or the president of the Jewish Federation in the worst time in history in terms of fi-nancing,” says Alan Zvibleman, of Capes Sokol, Goodman & Sarachan.

“She’s dedicated in all she does. She doesn’t just show up to board meetings, she’s involved in every level. She deeply cares about helping the world and making it a better place. I know it sounds trite, but it is her heart.”

— Angela Riely

By her own accounts, Sheila Greenbaum is a child of the ’60s.


Quinn Loring GrimesPublic Service Practitioner

Grimes’ office is a radiant reflection of self: Photos of her husband and 7-year-old daughter cover the desk, a print of the Chicago skyline (Grimes grew up in the city’s suburbs) stretches across one wall, and colorful posters from past King Biscuit blues festivals hang on another.

What the office can’t convey is the enor-mity of Grime’s dedication to her field. Since graduating from Hamline University School of Law more than 20 years ago and immedi-ately beginning practice as a public defender, she hasn’t found a case she wouldn’t take.

She says she typically handles 100 at a time and that, in an average year, she closes out 300 to 400. She says this in her charac-teristically understated manner, as if 300 to 400 cases a year is completely within the realm of attorney caseload normalcy.

Don’t be fooled. Like, you know how there’s the blues and then there’s the blues how Bessie Smith sang them? Yeah, Grimes is like the latter.

“She is always the first person to want to take every client,” says fellow public de-fender Patrick Brayer. “She would take ev-erybody if she could.”

And while Grimes is, as Brayer says, “the last person to toot her own horn,” she has no problem talking about what drives her.

“I make sure my clients’ rights are pro-tected throughout the entire process,” she says. “A client is not a number or statistic — a client is a human being.”

It’s safe to say public defenders often see human beings at their worst. The differ-ence is how Grimes responds.

“I’ve never seen her yell or say a cross word at a client,” Brayer says. “In criminal law, the emotions can run pretty high. … Even when they are yelling at her, she stays cool and calm and collected.”

Although Brayer says Grimes has had plenty of opportunities to move into a managerial role, she has always chosen to stay on the ground, protecting her clients’ rights, keeping her cool, and doing her part to ensure the community’s right to justice.

“If there’s a breakdown in the public defender system, it’s a breakdown for ev-eryone,” she says. “There’s a problem of delayed justice.”

Just like how the best musicians pass their bass lines and techniques on, Grimes makes it a point to impart her knowledge and experience by mentoring law students — including Women’s Justice Awards Rising Star honoree Erica Nuyen — at the office’s in-house Criminal Justice Clinic.

“When I work with the interns,” Grimes says, “I see so much promise, but I also see the challenges they will face. They are the future of the legal profession, and I am very optimistic about that future.”

— Anna Vitale

Forget the motivational prints and the unassuming potted plant. St. Louis County public defender Quinn Loring


Deanna K. Scott

Public Service Practitioner

what life is all about.She is the director of litigation for Legal

Services of Southern Missouri.“The most rewarding thing is that you

are giving back to clients and to the com-munity by helping when they can’t afford legal counsel,” Scott says. “It’s great watch-ing them improve their lives and the lives of their children by helping them to get into a better situation.”

She supervises about a dozen attorneys who work across 43 counties to provide services to the indigent. She also carries her own caseload, primarily focusing on family law, mixed with some probate cases and general civil work.

Scott recalls a young mother of three whom she helped escape an abusive spouse. The woman now attends Ozark Technical Community College and is working to-ward a degree.

“She sent a letter of thanks saying how much it meant to her to be able to start a new life with her children,” Scott says. “That meant a lot.”

Family is important for Scott, the daughter of a rural mail carrier and a teacher’s aide, who says her grandmother emphasized the importance of getting a good education and thinking of others. She also gives credit to a professor who inspired her as an undergrad at Missouri State University.

“He was a mentor who always thought I could succeed if I put my mind to it,” she says, “and he thought so before I thought so.”

And succeed she did. The former legal secretary began to study law as a divorced mother in her late 30s. “My son started high school in Tulsa the same year that I started law school at the University of Tulsa,” she says, laughing.

After law school, Scott worked in pri-vate practice with Twibell, Johnson & Johnson in Springfield. She soon noticed, however, that pro bono work on family law and probate cases consumed more and more of her time. In 2005, when her present position came open, the Cabool native made her move. Today, she encour-ages others to do the kind of pro bono work she loved so much.

Douglas Kays, executive director of the agency, says Scott is an excellent attor-ney, and her casework is only part of her contribution.

“I think that her strongest point is that she works well with other lawyers,” he says. “She’s good at getting other lawyers to take pro bono cases.”

Scott’s contributions have been noticed. She won The Missouri Bar’s Pro Bono Publico Award in 2000, the same year the Springfield Bar honored her with its Equal Access to Justice Award. In 2006, she was named one of the 20 most influen-tial women in the area by the Springfield Business Journal.

In 2008, Scott was elected to the state bar’s Board of Governors for the Southern District.

“When your peers choose you for a po-sition, I think that’s a great compliment,” she says. “I was very honored that they did so.”

— David Baugher

Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes. For Deanna K. Scott, providing one is

“The most rewarding thing is that you are giving back to clients and to the community by helping when they can’t afford legal counsel.”


Mavis T. ThompsonPublic Service Practitioner

including some with disabilities and some who married people from other cultures. Her home life left an indelible impression.

“We had an appreciation for each other,” she says. “It was more than tolerance.”

It was in that North St. Louis home that Thompson’s grandmother taught her how to give back.

“She would always say I had too much or I was spoiled,” Thompson says. “She said, ‘It’s your responsibility to share.’”

As a girl, that meant donating her gen-tly used clothes and toys and saving up to buy family members Christmas presents each year.

The attitude ultimately became one of Thompson’s life mantras: “I am my sister’s keeper.”

Today, as president of the National Bar Association, Thompson has taken the mantra nationally.

During her tenure, she has honed in on enacting health care initiatives for people of

color. Thompson holds both a Bachelor of Science in nursing and a Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri. As NBA presi-dent, she has used her knowledge to orga-nize health screenings at events and review Congress’ health care proposals. She also has worked to increase diversity in the legal field, where numbers have stagnated.

The position requires her to travel around the country as a spokeswoman for the NBA and to discern best practices on legal issues that affect people of color.

When she comes home, it can be frus-trating, she says.

“Missouri is a little bit behind,” Thomp-son says. “It seems we don’t get much further than talking and joint social activities.”

More effective alternatives, she says, are creating institutional pipelines for people of color between secondary schools and law schools and persuading companies to enact diversity requirements for their legal teams.

“The consequence of not doing so is that we don’t get a diversity of thought,” she says.

For Thompson, who says she is inspired

by challenges, the NBA presidency is one more in a lifetime of public service. Before going to law school, Thompson worked full time as a nurse. After, she continued practicing nursing part time. Then, she pursued governmental work.

Longtime friend and St. Louis attor-ney Lee Goodman remembers Thompson wowed him when he was a young public defender. The two met when Thompson was campaigning for St. Louis city circuit clerk in 1992. Goodman helped run the ultimately successful campaign and acted as Thompson’s legal adviser throughout her more than five-year tenure. Thompson was the first woman to hold the office.

“She was a good person who wanted to make the world better,” Goodman says, “and I think she was sincere about mak-ing the world better. When hard work and talent come together, good things happen. Now we’re seeing the fruits of her labor.”

The seeds of that fruit were planted in the North St. Louis house where Thompson grew up. It’s where she lives today, when she’s in the state, and still calls home.

— Anna Vitale

Growing up, Mavis T. Thompson lived with generations of family members,


Judge Kathianne CranePublic Official

studying at the University of Strasbourg in France and graduated in 1967 with a political science degree in her hand and ideas in her head.

She answered the call to service and joined the Peace Corps, teaching English to middle-school children in South Korea.

“We only taught a small group of stu-dents, but the Korean government believes that gave them some help when they need-ed it,” Crane says. “Now they’re proud of their prosperity.”

She entered Saint Louis University School of Law when she returned from the Peace Corps and graduated in 1971. At the time “there was a lot of publicity about all the good things lawyers can do, and I thought, ‘I want to have a part in that,’” Crane says.

As a litigator during the 1970s at the firm now known as Lewis, Rice & Fingersh, she “was just so impressed with

the caliber of the people” on the appel-late court, she says, listing, for example, judges Harold Satz, Theodore McMillian and George F. Gunn Jr.

“I just decided that’s what I wanted to do and that I would get as much experi-ence as I could and pursue it,” Crane says. Toward that end, she took a job in the U.S. Attorney’s St. Louis office, where she worked in the criminal division for 10 years. In 1990, then-Gov. John Ashcroft appointed Crane to the Missouri Court of Appeals in St. Louis.

“I find it a privilege to be in a position to really study the law and determine what it is and apply it to the facts of the case,” Crane says, pointing out that appellate judges base their interpretation of the law on state Supreme Court precedent.

Judge Cliff Ahrens, who joined the court soon after Crane, calls his colleague a “judge’s judge — very bright, excellent in her analysis in the law.”

Judge Lawrence Mooney says he advises his law clerks to approach opinion drafting the way Crane would. “Her legal reasoning

is so logical and tight that one proposition naturally flows to another proposition in her opinions,” he says.

Crane also has taken the lead on work-ing to improve the court’s rules and the way the court handles its opinions, Ahrens says.

Recalling her law firm mentors Bill McCalpin and Bob Allen, Crane mentors her law clerks and interns. She hires new law clerks every year.

“I think it’s important for lawyers to have the opportunity to be a law clerk,” she says.

Many lawyers who clerk at appellate courts consider it a formative experience in their development, she says.

“I have at least 40 law clerks in the world now,” says Crane, who lives in Clayton. “It’s really fun to see them doing well.”

Her former students in South Korea are doing well, too, Crane learned during a visit there last fall, when she caught up with six of them. All are college-educated. Five are teachers, and one is a nurse.

— Donna Walter

During the decade of social change of the 1960s, Kathianne Knaup Crane entered Washington University, spent a year


Judge Cynthia L. MartinPublic Official

Martin knows well.Finalists must be prepared to drop their exist-

ing legal careers practically at a moment’s notice if they are chosen.

Martin lived that reality for 10 years. She was a finalist for a spot on the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District four times before, in October 2009, the fifth time was the charm.

No other successful candidate in the history of the Nonpartisan Court Plan has been a finalist more times.

Martin can only conclude that the timing was fate. It gave her time to raise her family and to com-plete the highest-profile case of her solo career.

A few months into her judicial career, Martin is working at “turning off the lawyer switch and turning on the judge switch.” She has a special em-pathy for lawyers now appearing before her.

“Sometimes they may be there knowing they have a tough row to hoe on appeal,” she says. “Sometimes they may be scared because it’s the very first time they’ve argued. Sometimes you can tell that’s where they want to be, and they love standing there talking with us.”

Martin, who thrives on the intellectual challenge of an appeal, was always firmly in the third cat-egory. Her love of the law dates to her ninth grade American civics class in Lee’s Summit, the Kansas City suburb where she grew up, opened her solo practice and lives today.

Martin worked at a series of small firms in Kansas City before opening her solo practice in 2000. Her two sons, now grown, were young boys at the time.

“It was a really good time for me as far as my life work, my mom work — which was far more important to me, frankly, than my legal practice — to be in a position where I could be closer to home,” she says.

Her only employee was legal assistant Jo Chrisman, who shared the anxiety of Martin’s potential appointment, never knowing when the firm might close.

As it turned out — and in another sign that the long wait was worth it — Martin’s appointment coincided with a judicial administrative assistant opening at the Court of Appeals. Chrisman still works alongside her longtime boss and friend, and cried at her investiture.

“It would have been very heartbreaking to have parted ways after all that time,” Chrisman says.

Among Martin’s cases while in solo practice was a long-running dispute between Cass County and power company Aquila over a power plant built before the company obtained the proper permits. Martin’s representation of the county wrapped up in late 2008, just months before applications were accepted for the vacancy Martin eventually filled.

“You do feel good about timing issues on things like that,” she says. “Again, almost as if it was meant to be.”

— Scott Lauck

It’s not easy to try and try again for a Missouri judgeship, as Cynthia L.


Mary E. NelsonPublic Official

committee and board appointments.Doubt just how daunting a task that can

be?Try coming up with a skeletal analyst

who’s interested in joining the Unmarked Human Burial Consultation Committee. That’s what Nelson is looking for right now.

An easier choice is what to order for lunch at her favorite St. Louis eatery, Schlafly’s Tap Room.

“Do you still have the Scotch Ale?” she asks a server.

The sweet, heavy-on-the-malt beer and a platter of the establishment’s famed fish and chips are must-haves when Nelson makes it back home from her Jefferson City apartment.

Ale in hand, she says that besides a su-per-size Rolodex, her job requires an astute understanding of personality dynamics — whether a committee could use a con-

sensus builder or someone who will really take charge — and an appreciation for out-state locales.

“This is a big state — there are places I hadn’t even heard of,” she says.

A map in her office helps her pinpoint the locations of applicants from, say, Portage-ville, and a stack of books on Missouri Civil War-era history helps her understand just how people ended up living there.

In addition to her more explicit job duties, Nelson sees herself as an ambassa-dor for government that truly reflects its citizens.

“I’m sure I’m not what most people ex-pect to see,” she says. “I enjoy the fact that a member of the governor’s staff is dread-locked, female and African-American.”

While shaking up expectations is fun, law — like the fish and chips — has always been a given.

“When I was little, I watched a show called ‘The Defenders,’” she says of the 1960s TV drama. “They had a skill that was enviable: interpreting the laws and pursuing the process of justice — it was responsible and heroic.

“I knew that was what I wanted to do by the time I was in kindergarten,” says Nelson, who attended law school at the University of Missouri. “It was a relief that I was good at it, because I would have been hard-pressed to think of something else.”

Nelson is perhaps best known for working on the Metrolink expansion suit brought against the Cross County Collaborative. She worked with a team of attorneys to secure a win for the four members of the CCC on all counts and counterclaims, but the case remained bittersweet.

“In some ways, there was no amount of money that could make up for the seri-ous allegations that had been made,” she says. “I’m hoping my client’s reputation is at least on equal footing to what it would have been. But we’ll never know what he actually lost.”

For someone whose work has run the gamut between public and private sectors, you can’t help but ask, “What’s next?”

“I think things are revealed to you be-cause you’re open,” Nelson says, “and I try to be.”

— Anna Vitale

As the governor’s director of boards and commissions, Mary E. Nelson’s job is sorting through thousands of applications for hundreds of


Judge Nancy RahmeyerPublic Official

districts in the state.That year, Nancy Rahmeyer took her seat

on the Missouri Court of Appeals Southern District as the first judicial appointment of then-Gov. Bob Holden. It was an adjustment for her and for the formerly all-male court in Springfield.

“It was a different era,” Rahmeyer says. “I’ve been told that the court en banc sent a letter to the commission as to who would be accept-able when this position came open — and no women were on the list.”

Only one other judge from those days re-mains on the court. “The group that’s here now have had women law partners, have ap-peared before women judges,” she says. “I’m sure they had women law professors.”

Rahmeyer became “hooked” on law when she took a course on civil liberties in college. Ten years later, married with two children, she enrolled in law school at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. In between, she was a social worker and a history teacher.

Even today she uses her teaching skills as a volunteer for The Missouri Bar’s “We the People” program and to talk to student groups in high school and college. She wants all Americans to know the history of the United States — not the “sanitized version” but the “nuts and bolts of good people acting together … who had to compromise and negotiate to come up with a system,” she says.

Rahmeyer graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor’s degree in history before earning her master’s degree in educa-tion from what was then Southwest Missouri State University. She practiced family law in Springfield for 15 years and was a part-time municipal judge before joining the appellate bench. She considers the appellate court to be “lawyer heaven.”

“You can’t write novels better than some of our stories,” she says. “Now to be able to have the time and the interest in it, I really like it.”

The judges talk at length about the long-term consequences of the decisions they must make and try to avoid unforeseen conse-quences, she says.

“She’s a very careful researcher and a care-ful reader,” says Judge Jeffrey Bates, who fol-lowed Rahmeyer’s 2002-2004 term as chief judge. “She is someone we can count on to catch any mistakes that creep in there.”

Missouri’s Nonpartisan Court Plan “has been wonderful” when it comes to diversify-ing the courts, Rahmeyer says, noting it is dif-ficult for women in partisan elections to raise money and meet people while maintaining a career and a home.

Like most judges, Rahmeyer took a large pay cut when she joined the bench, but she was driven to public service.

“If you don’t see it as a service and become part of the system, then you just have left people who want it for themselves,” she says.

— Donna Walter

It was a first for Missouri: In 2001, at least one woman judge sat on the bench in each of the three appellate


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Nominating CommitteeSusan e. BlockPartnerPaule Camazine & Blumenthal

nicole Colbert-BotchwayAssistant Attorney General & Unit ChiefState of Missouri

Doreen D. DodsonPartnerThe Stolar Partnership

mike easonOf CounselVincent Fontg Hansen

tami fox Of CounselFox Stretz & Quinn

Virginia fry Managing Partner - Springfield OfficeHusch Blackwell Sanders

Charley germanPartnerRouse Hendricks German May

Carrie L. hermelingPartnerHusch Blackwell Sanders

mary pat mcInnisAssociate Dean for Career DevelopmentSaint Louis University School of Law

alison priceClaims CounselThe Bar Plan

Sarah SeigelVice President & General CounselDierbergs Markets Inc.

richard B. teitelmanJudgeSupreme Court of Missouri

Cheryl D. S. WalkerOf CounselBryan Cave

S. richard gard Jr.President & PublisherMissouri Lawyers Media

amy BurdgeAssociate PublisherMissouri Lawyers Media

32/50offi

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Documents

Woman of the Year Judge Ann K. Covingtonmolawyersmedia.com/wp-files//wja2010.pdf · Woman of the Year Judge Ann K. Covington page 24 W W The 12th ... Effie F. Day ... Women’s Justice