About Me
I am a lawyer, mentor, coach and consultant, and a few other things as well. For almost 25 years I practiced law at Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge LLP (now Edwards Wildman Palmer). For my professional bio and a brief statement of my mission as a consultant and a coach, click on the Bio tab above. The account below is a more personal history.
I joined Edwards & Angell as a partner in 1985, when there were only seven of us in the new office in Boston. I was then six years out of law school, with a substantial book of business I had developed as a young associate in my original, and beloved, law firm, Choate, Hall & Stewart. At that time, lateral moves were virtually unheard of, and--not coincidentally, lawyers were only just beginning to consider the merits of active business development. I was doing well at my firm, was devoted to my colleagues there and had no intention of leaving. But my practice needed space to grow and change. And though I didn't know it yet, I needed to take a shot at making that happen on my own.
Edwards & Angell was then our only competition for business in the media and communications finance market in New England, a deep well of capital for the growing cable television industry. The brand new office in Boston was young, innovative and eccentric. We shared many of the same contacts and clients and the desire to build that base beyond New England.
E&A in the eighties was entrepreneurial, free-form and full of possibility. The firm strongly supported us and our way of doing business. My partners and I were among a core group responsible for the growth of the firm’s nationally recognized media and communications finance practice. As you will note from several of my more self-disclosing blog posts, we had an enormous amount of fun doing so.
In addition to building a national practice, I was one of the chief architects of my firm's diversity program, chairing the Boston office’s first diversity committee and actively participating in EAPD’s firm-wide committee. I chaired our unsually active Women's Initiative, through which I co-founded our first peer mentoring program, organized and chaired annual retreats for our women lawyers and conceived and implemented a business development curriculum offering practical skills training to women associates.
This diversity work, which I took a little more seriously than expected, formed the basis for the consulting and coaching business I formed in 2009. Now, although engrossed in this work, I deeply miss my colIeagues, as well as the pleasure of structuring and negotiating transactions. Still, I have not been so engaged, hopeful or entertained in my work since we were building our new practice so many years ago. I go on about this quite a bit in the blog, so I won't do it here.
Long ago I lived in Toulouse, in Southwestern France, for one life-altering, character-renovating year. I haven't had the time to write the screenplay.
Both my husband, also a lawyer, and I grew up in New York City. We live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have three daughters, an irresistable, but anxious, rescue dog from San Juan and an exceptionally loud, resentful, but beautiful sun conure parrot.
