Published in 2024 Upstate New York Super Lawyers magazine
By Amy White on August 19, 2024
For a woman who says she is not theatrical, Sharon Stiller barely makes the two-minute mark in conversation before she delivers, from memory, the opening and closing verses of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer,” a poem which imprinted itself on her as a child:
“In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
“And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?”
Growing up in Irondequoit in the 1960s, Stiller identified with the 1885 poem. “I was a sickly kid,” she says. “I had asthma, so I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of sports and running around. But I couldn’t get enough of reading; I was adventurous, but through books.”
It didn’t take long, however, for that adventurous spirit to jump off the page and into real life. At 8, Stiller took a yellow note pad to the home of a “shirttail relative”—the late Irving Kessler, a prominent Upstate real estate attorney—and laid it down on his living room table. “I remember the room feeling like it went on forever,” she laughs. “I asked him questions about being a lawyer and wrote down all his answers.”
Decades later, in 1983, Stiller would become an associate in Kessler’s firm after becoming one of the first two women hired as assistant district attorney for the Monroe County DA’s office.
“I don’t know if it was because of the limitations set on me because of my asthma, but I eventually decided I would have zero limitations—and could do whatever I wanted,” says Stiller, now a partner at Abrams Fensterman in Rochester. “I’ll put it this way: I’m barely five feet tall, and I never once had the idea that I was short until the lecterns at the Monroe County Supreme Court came up to my nose.”
“Women Battle, But It’s Legal” read the Democrat and Chronicle headline in 1976 when Stiller, who was one of 20 women in the 1975 Albany Law School graduating class, went toe-to-toe with one of the state’s first female public defenders.
“It had never happened before,” she says. “The DA’s office actually held a press conference when they hired me and the other woman ADA. I didn’t see what I was doing as anything special. It was great fun, and I tried to be as good as I could possibly be at it, and to not get lost in what others might be thinking about the fact that I was a woman.”
Stiller worked her way through the office, taking appellate work and eventually prosecuting violent felonies. Because she needs to know how things work to tell a story, Stiller once prepared for a murder case by attending an autopsy. “I didn’t want to try a murder case and be asking the medical examiner about an autopsy without knowing what an autopsy was,” she says.
One case in particular sticks out, not so much because of the result, but because of its intersection of psychology and law, a relationship that always appealed to Stiller.
She was handling a rape case and advised the victim to dress up for court the next day. The woman arrived in full evening gown. “Psychologically, that made perfect sense—that’s what ‘dressing up’ literally meant to her,” Stiller says. “But I was armed with my white, middle-class view of what I meant by ‘dress up for trial,’ and she didn’t perceive it that way.”
With an “avant-garde” psychologist father, Stiller was “raised on the magazine Psychology Today. … Our dinner table conversations were always steeped in these psychological questions, like ‘What do you think, and whydo you think you think that?’” she says. Originally planning to major in psychology in preparation for the law, Stiller was persuaded to go the poli-sci route. Today, she still believes psychology has everything to do with the law.
After nearly a decade with the DA’s office, Stiller began to key into the cyclical nature of the system. “I’d see people come through as victims, and the same people come through as defendants,” she says. “For so many people whose lives are impacted by crime, their lives continue to be impacted by crime. I thought I could be of better service, and establish more intimate relationships, if I went into civil ligation.”
As Stiller moved into the ground floor of employment law at Goldstein, Goldman, Kessler & Underberg in the early ’80s, her psychological lens was critical. “I don’t think enough people understand the human side of the law or of litigation,” she says. “There’s an old phrase about accusations—that you can never take back what you say. You can, in a complaint, make allegations about somebody that can significantly affect their life, their world view, even make them want to commit suicide. I’m able to be analytical about the case and what the case needs, but also understand and empathize with how people feel. It’s just as important to truly understand every emotion a client feels.”
It was an exciting time; a year prior, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, the first case in which SCOTUS recognized that sexual harassment was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, had been decided. “Title VII and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act were enacted in the 1960s, but these cases didn’t start reaching the Supreme Court until the 1980s,” Stiller says. “All this history that we now draw on in interpreting employment laws, and even the very existence of those laws, is not only recent, but it was when I began work in the practice.”
Stiller jumped immediately into the fray. “It sounds simple enough, but I just started litigating,” she says. “I also became very active in the New York State Bar Association’s labor and employment law group.”
As a pioneer in the practice area, Stiller was asked in the 2010s to testify as an expert witness on the effect a criminal conviction would have on a person’s future work prospects. She wrote her first of multiple employment law books for New York lawyers in 1997. And in 2010 she joined Abrams Fensterman, where she leads the firm’s employment law practice.
When it comes to cases, Stiller prefers to not discuss specifics.
“The idea of that ‘human side’ ending up in publication is too much,” she says. “Some of the most fulfilling cases for me have been where somebody has been accused of doing something that just goes straight to their heart. Being able to get the matter resolved, even though it can take years and years—those are the cases that matter the most to me.”
She will, however, divulge that one of the hottest topics in employment law today is the disruption of the gig economy. “Let’s say you hire a staffing company to come in and work for you one day a week. And somebody from the staffing company discriminates against one of your employees. Are you liable for it? Is the staffing company liable for it?” says Stiller. “Or let’s say you have a company that you hire to do your deliveries or messenger service: Are they employees? Are they independent contractors? Are you liable for what they do? Are they liable for what you do?”
Practicing in New York often gives Stiller a front-row seat to the next history-making evolution in the practice. “New York City is such a trailblazer, and so much of our state laws are enacted based on New York City laws,” she says.
For example, in 2023, New York City enacted ordinances protecting people from height and weight discriminations. “My New York office might have a height or weight case, but it’s so nebulous,” she says. “The changes in the law are to enact social principles: One should not discriminate based on height and weight. And it’s easy to say, and it’s a profound revelation, but it’s much harder to deal with in practice.”
One case that’s taking up Stiller’s time as of late—and one that’s a matter of public record—is Dunphy v. Giuliani, which she’s working on with Justin Kelton, a partner at the firm’s Brooklyn office. Their client is Noelle Dunphy, a former director of business development for Rudy Giuliani who sued Giuliani in 2023, alleging he abused his position of power to pressure her into sex.
“The case is still ongoing, but it involves cutting-edge legal principles in the area of employment law, and some other areas like sexual harassment, sexual assault,” Kelton says. “Obviously, it’s a very high-visibility case. The people who worked on that team got into it knowing that we were going to be subjected to aggressive lawyering on the other side, intense scrutiny, and somebody who is connected like very few people are. We could only accept this kind of a case if we had absolute faith and trust in each other. … When a case deals with cutting-edge employment law questions, there’s nobody better to do that kind of work with than Sharon.”
Kelton adds that Stiller’s ability to see things before others has been an asset in Dunphy. “She sees the end game before many really talented lawyers. We’ll get a project in, and some lawyers will start thinking about the first step and she’ll already be thinking six or seven or 10 decisions later. That’s what all lawyers dream of being able to do. We have reached fantastic results both in court and on settlement that could not have been reached without Sharon’s foresight.”
Maureen Bass, a member of Abrams Fensterman’s employment group, says she and Stiller play well off of each other. “Sharon is a litigator first, and feels very comfortable aggressively pursuing clients’ rights in court, whereas I tend to think the only good lawsuit is a necessary lawsuit. We have that balance when we work together,” Bass says. “She also has a phenomenal memory and ability to recall facts, and she is one of the most prepared lawyers I have ever met. I have heard more than one person accurately refer to her as a ‘legal pit bull.’”
A partner in the Rochester office, Bass notes how Stiller goes about the business of being a lawyer. “There are lawyers who are great lawyers, and lawyers who are great at managing the business of the practice of law. Sharon is a combination of both,” she says. “Her true superpower, though, is she shares in the emotions of her clients: She embraces what they’re feeling, and she goes out with marching orders to get them what they need. Sharon does not take no for an answer.”
As a woman who has navigated male-dominated spaces, Stiller is called to advocate for women, and she’s active with Greater Rochester Association for Women Attorneys. “A lot of the women in the organization are close,” she says. “When we litigate against each other, it’s just easier. I sometimes feel that some men are very competitive toward me. It could very well be that I’m competitive toward them, but honestly, I just think for them that it’s far worse to be beat by a woman.”
She’s also been on the board of the National Women’s Hall of Fame for years, watching it grow from a small outfit to a museum. “And it keeps growing,” she says. “Spreading the story of great women to young women is critically important.”
In an instance of “How did I get myself into this?” in 1995, Stiller wound up producing Susan B., a play concerning the Canandaigua trial of women’s suffrage movement leader Susan B. Anthony for voting in the 1872 presidential election. Stiller worked with her friend, writer Gary Lehmann, who wrote the play based off the trial transcripts. “It was so much fun,” Stiller says. “I’ve kept little mementos from the play—set decor, a Susan B. Anthony doll—in my house as a mini homage to women who fight.”
That dabble in the arts wasn’t accidental; if she wasn’t a lawyer, Stiller would have tried her hand at being an artist. From her in-home art studio, she works in multiple media: oil, watercolor, pastel on top of watercolor. “I’m back to a 6B charcoal pencil as I go back to the basics with Brian O’Neill, an instructor I’ve wanted to study with for 20 years,” she says. “If you look back at Picasso, he was an incredible realistic artist. But once he’d mastered that, he took the pieces apart and that became his abstract art. He told his story with his abstract art, probably more so than with his realism.”
Stiller recalls her own evolution—how she now tells clients’ stories differently than when she started.
“I was so serious,” she says. “I would wear three-piece suits, and for hours in the evenings I would read advance sheets of cases. Now, I’m not half as serious. I also understand better that there’s a lot more to the practice of law. I understand that you’ll win some cases, you’ll lose some, you’ll enjoy some, you’ll hate some. I have cases that I call my ‘cloud cases’ because they are so wonderful, and those that I call my ‘quicksand cases’ because, no matter what I do, they’re horrible. But neither is the entirety of life.”
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