Success Amidst Chaos

 Every week I hear from law students and lawyers who have found opportunities in non traditional ways.  They applied the legendary motto of the United States Marines - the adapted, improvised,, and they overcame. Through diligence, persistence, creativity, spontaneity and with they found opportunities when others simply abandoned the path exhausted and dejected.   Eight of my favorites follow, some names omitted in the interest of confidentiality.

Kristina Juntunen is a 2003 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. A few days before she graduated she received a letter from her about-to-be firm Altheimer & Gray notifying she and her classmates that they had been terminated in advance of their arrival. No $50,000 farewell bonus.  No internship. No Deferral.  Just good-bye.  The firm folded shortly thereafter having flamed out like the mythical legend Icarus reaching for the stars when it should have stayed closer to familiar more pedestrian ground.  For Tina and her classmates this was a debacle.  The market was terrible - the economy was beginning a slow crawl out of the two pronged tech wreck /9-11 recession but firms were basically full. 

This did not stop one my favorite Wolverines.  Sure she was scared. Offended.  But Tina, because of her Spartan and Wolverine roots is tenacious and practical. She developed a Chicago plan and a New York plan. Skipping the details (which we will save for the movie - where I assume she will played by Hillary Swank), the Chicago strategy was tantalizingly close but not successful.  On to the D.C. and New York strategies. A couple of months later I received one of the most memorable calls of my career.  On her own - no entre, no magical connection, no headhunter, she joined with New York’s White & Case.  Story over? Hell no.  Just warmin’ up.

She spent 2.5 very successful years with one of the best and toughest law firms in the world.  But she took the city by storm.  If there is someone more involved in the pulse of the Big Apple I’d like to meet her.  Organizations, galleries, friends galore, restaurants, events, causes,  neighborhoods - she does it all.  She moved from White & Case to Kasowitz  Benson, akin from moving from the Green Berets to the Delta Force and in short order established herself in that firm.

She’s been seconded to a foreign client, worked on major cases, returned to Ann Arbor last year to talk with second year students taking the same journey, and again has made the leaps and bounds that might have surprised some. It didn’t surprise me in the least. She’s what Sinatra had in mind when he sang “New York, New York.”  I’ve worked with 10,150 lawyers and students. 100 are in my Hall of Fame.  Most of the 100 rank lower than this Wolverine.