New BBA President Sets Bar Very High - Kathy Weinman HAS Taken Office

White collar criminal defense work has historically been a man's world, but it's changing thanks to women like Kathy B. Weinman, who began blazing the trail over 25 years ago. Today she's an inspiration not just to women, but to all lawyers trying to build successful careers while spending time with their families and giving back to their community. On September 1, 2008, Kathy, a founding partner of Dwyer & Collora, took office as President of the Boston Bar Association, succeeding Tony Doniger.

"Kathy succeeds in a world where you need more than smarts, creativity and hard work," says her law partner, Thomas E. Dwyer, Jr., himself a former BBA President. "You have to have a tremendous amount of credibility, and Kathy has that too. When you're facing a prosecutor in a meeting and trying to stop an indictment, and you say ‘these are the three most important facts,' it's essential for a prosecutor to believe you."

The epitome of the Renaissance woman, Kathy also loves studying Jewish text, serves on the board of trustees at Temple Israel, and only last year had a bat mitzvah with a group of other adults. She studied modern dance in her youth, loves Israeli folk dancing, and takes hip hop classes at a local gym. She is also a thoughtful and caring professional mentor, particularly for younger women attorneys.

"Kathy has set the bar very high and we all aspire to do the high quality work that she does to get the great results for our clients, and at the end of the day to have the respect of our peers that she has earned," says one of her younger law partners, Maria Durant. "Kathy is so incredibly supportive of our efforts to do that for ourselves, and her actions speak louder than her words."

Soft-spoken and modest in her demeanor, Kathy brings intense focus to whatever she does, subjecting everything to intense critical analysis, often taking massive amounts of information and quickly capturing its essence. When she speaks, she has something insightful to offer, and whether it's a meeting at the BBA dealing with a complex public policy issue, or a meeting involving multiple defendants and their lawyers, people listen carefully.

If the clients she and her partners represented were once mostly men, that's no longer true. What hasn't changed is her ability to relate well to clients who have never experienced the terror of a criminal investigation. Major hand holding is involved, but even more important is Kathy's ability to think outside the box, and craft a defense strategy custom-tailored to the needs of the individual client.

One of the first women in Boston to second chair, and also to first chair white collar cases, Kathy is recognized nationally for her work in defending healthcare fraud cases. She has also represented clients in cases involving allegations of public corruption, tax and mail fraud, and securities violations.

She and partner Tom Dwyer led the Dwyer & Collora team working in collaboration with Hogan & Hartson, representing a major pharmaceutical company in a seven year investigation that wrapped up recently. It is believed to be one of the only major criminal pharmaceutical cases resolved without a criminal charge, which is the goal in a lot of her cases.

Earlier this year, Kathy told a BBA forum for younger women attorneys of an experience she had nearly a decade ago at the White Collar Crime Conference of the American Bar Association. Upon her arrival she realized that a number of the men had arrived a day or two earlier to play golf and network.

Kathy, who's not a golfer, subsequently organized a spa day so that women white collar crime lawyers could do their own networking. Thanks to her leadership and the support of her firm, the event attracted over 60 women nationwide this year. It began with just 10 women.

Diana D. Parker, a white collar criminal defense lawyer in New York and the editor of a treatise called Defending Federal Criminal Cases, credits Kathy and her organizational skills for an event that is making a real impact in narrowing the gender gap. "I have referred cases to women I've met at these annual events, and women I've met have referred cases to me," says Parker. She notes that two of the chapters in her book were written by women she's met at the spa day.

The daughter of a high school English teacher and a businessman, Kathy grew up in suburban Detroit, and began her legal career in Washington, D.C. at what was then Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. She developed her interest in white collar crime defense work after being assigned to a small team of lawyers investigating a $200 million fraud on behalf of a U.S. bankruptcy trustee.

"Our system of justice depends on having strong criminal defense attorneys," she says. "Just as we have balance of powers in our federal and state governments, we need to have a strong counterweight to enormous government power in criminal prosecutions. That's an important role that criminal defense attorneys play, and one that I value highly."

While at the firm that's now WilmerHale, she also met her husband, Cam Kerry, today a partner at Mintz Levin. When she moved to Boston, Kathy worked briefly at the firm that's now Nixon Peabody, before joining Tom Dwyer and then co-founding Dwyer & Collora with Tom and Mike Collora in 1988.

Kathy and Cam have two daughters, Jessica, a recent graduate of Brown, and Laura, an incoming freshman at Bowdoin. "Motherhood was my greatest personal growth experience," she says. For many years she often worked a four day week.

"It benefits everyone when firms recognize that lawyers are individuals and offer room for individual arrangements that balance busy professional and personal lives," she says. She says having the support of her husband, and also her law partners made a big difference.

Kathy first became active in the BBA's Criminal Law Section in the late ‘90's, initially serving on the section's steering committee, and then becoming Co-Chair of the section. She also served on the Council prior to becoming an officer, and has been a panelist on countless seminars focused on white collar crime. During her days at the University of Michigan Law School, she never envisioned becoming involved in a bar association, something she thought of as a trade organization.

"I found the BBA to be just the opposite," she says. "The BBA is committed to the community at large, it's focused on public policy issues of tremendous importance, and it's dedicated to educating lawyers and non-lawyers about the law."