Mark Ford – WilmerHale
"I always got in trouble for yelling at and fighting with my older brother. He knew just how to push the right buttons, and to do it without my parents noticing. It always ended with me in my room and him smelling like a rose. I became a lawyer to fight this type of injustice."

Polly Plimpton – McDermott Will & Emery
"When my collection of ‘pollywogs' turned into frogs, they hopped off the balcony of our 6th floor apartment in Beirut and populated the floors below, including the apartment of the prime minister on the second floor."

Richard Kimball – Nutter McClennen & Fish
"Mostly for being a smart alec. Such as the time in grammar school when our teacher taught us a four-or five-step formula for solving a math problem. I told my teacher that I had a simpler solution and could solve the problems in my head. She insisted that I must follow the formula. So, whenever she gave us a problem of that type to solve, while all the other kids were busy with their paper and pencils solving the problem, I would be staring off in space. Of course she took note of that and would call on me. And, yes, I always had the right answer. Drove the poor sister crazy. She did find ways to get even!"

Lisa Tittemore – Bromberg & Sunstein
"I know that this sounds very nerdy, but when I was a kid I used to get in trouble for too much reading, especially reading at the breakfast and dinner table. When my parents took my book away, I would read the back of the cereal box. My mother still laughs about it."

Rob Quinan – Office of the Attorney General
"When I was about 10 years old, I threw a ball that broke my bedroom ceiling-light's frosted-glass cover. When I confessed to my father, he asked me how many pieces the cover had fractured into and I replied, ‘several.' He basically accused me of lying when he later counted 11 pieces, until I pointed him to a dictionary definition of ‘several' meaning a number greater than two but less than a dozen. At that point, my parents decided I'd very likely become a lawyer upon growing up."

Nan Elder – Bowman, Moos, Elder and Noe
"Throwing a mean natural curve ball, because my brother, who wanted desperately to be a pitcher, didn't and I loved to taunt him with it."