Warrior

Deanna Koestel’s entire body shook as she took the podium at the state Supreme Court in Manhattan in 2015.

She was giving a victim impact statement at the sentencing of Julius Graham, the man who stabbed her in the back multiple times with a pair of broken scissors, puncturing her lung twice. It was part of a random attack on five people, including a toddler, on a beautiful, sunny morning in Riverside Park in 2013.

Koestel was surprised by the uncontrollable shaking. She knew it would be hard recounting the worst day of her life, and the three surgeries and two painful years of recovery that followed. But she was also a trial attorney; she’d been in court many times. She’d also prepared for the moment extensively—as she did for every argument—by outlining and drafting, ruminating and running through scenarios and looking for improvements. She relies on meticulous preparation. And she does the same for her clients.

“I prepare my clients for hearings, trials, depositions,” she says. “I go over questions. I do everything I can to make them comfortable. We’re in this process for months together. And sometimes we get to the actual trial or deposition, and they are extremely nervous and everything we talked about goes out the window. For the longest time, I didn’t quite understand. If you practice, and you do it over and over, it should be instilled in you.”

But all that preparation could not stop the shaking as she recounted the terror of that day, and the emotional toll, including self-doubt, of relearning to walk when she should have been training for a marathon. And she realized: This must be what it’s like for her clients.

Graham was sentenced to 23 years that day, and Koestel has since made it to the other side of recovery, a place where she’s determined to succeed, and where she wants to bring others with her—especially women and girls. She’s the North American chair for the Women of Interlaw Network, a community of 8,000 female professionals, and a longtime board member and former chair for Girls on the Run NYC.

“It’s now been 11 years, which is hard to believe,” Koestel says of the attack. “It feels both like it was yesterday and like it was 50 years ago. But I really think what that did is it made me appreciate the importance of living your life and making every day count.”

Running has always been a source of joy and fulfillment for Koestel. As a kid whose family moved around a lot (born in Pennsylvania, Texas for elementary school, Rhode Island for middle school, and back to Pennsylvania for high school), joining the cross-country and track teams was her way of meeting people and making friends. Since becoming a lawyer, she’s run more than 130 races around the country, including a 50K, eight marathons, and 47 half-marathons.

“Running forces you to have discipline,” she says. “You really have to prioritize and focus and have time management, which has helped me to this day. When I am not training for something, I am not as efficient. When I have a full plate, and I know what I need to get done, I’m able to get everything done.”

On that morning in 2015, Koestel was on a 10-mile training run. The Philadelphia Marathon was just six weeks away and she intended on finishing with a time that would qualify her for the Boston Marathon.

“I tended to do things alone,” she says. “So while I had this great community, I trained alone because I was very focused. The attack made me reevaluate everything. I had to learn to be kind to myself. I had to rely on the support of my community.”

She remembers asking her thoracic surgeon if she could still complete the marathon. The answer was no. But Koestel’s sister ran that marathon in her honor, while Koestel still ran the half-marathon, while her partner cheered her on with a giant sign reading: YOU ARE A WARRIOR. It was the hardest run she’d ever done.

Koestel didn’t always want to be a lawyer. A psychology and criminology double major at the University of Maryland, she planned to go into forensic psychology. It was her stepmom, former family law Judge Jill Gehman Koestel, who suggested she go to law school. Koestel attended Temple and never looked back.

After spending six months studying abroad in Tokyo, Koestel came to work at Norris McLaughlin in New Jersey as a summer associate in 2001, and stayed until she joined Pashman Stein in 2021.

“I was doing a fair amount of construction litigation,” she says. “I think I was often underestimated, which I tried to use to my advantage. Being the only woman in the room gave me space and an opportunity to think differently, think creatively, do some problem-solving. I do think women tend to look at things from a different lens. We tend to be more collaborative, tend to be more empathetic, more cautious, more deliberate. We tend to pay more attention to detail, which as a litigator doing construction law is very important. Because it is the little details that really matter.”

On the advice of a mentor, Koestel built her practice by going back to clients she’d litigated for and offering to review and strengthen contracts for free—in advance of a full review if they liked what she’d done.

“It was the best advice I’ve gotten career-wise,” she says. “I feel like I’ve come full circle. I’m 22 years in, and I am doing the same thing for a very large-firm client right now that I helped with a matter last year, and they came last month and said ‘We want you to look at all of our contracts’—hundreds of pages of contracts. You have to be very detail-oriented.”

Last January, Koestel was appointed to the executive committee at Pashman Stein. “They really foster an environment that seeks to hire and retain and promote diverse people,” she says of her firm’s leadership. “As of this year, we are implementing a formal elevation and promotion process, so everyone is aware of what the policies and procedures are for elevation, which I think levels the playing field. We have a DEI committee that we are reconstituting as we speak to get more voices, younger voices, different voices, to help us continue to advance.”

Koestel’s longest volunteer relationship has been with the nonprofit Girls on the Run. In the early 2000s, she met the group’s central New Jersey executive director and learned about its mission: empowering girls in grades 3 through 8 with confidence and teaching them to live joyful, healthy lives. She helped set up their 501(c)(3) status and then volunteered as a coach. In 2015, she became board chair of the org’s NYC division, a position she held for four years.

“In Girls on the Run, we teach that confidence is a skill you have to practice—that if you don’t work on positive self-talk, the self-doubt will creep in,” she says. “The lessons, they’re applicable to everyone from my 6-year-old niece to my 101-year-old grandmother. We have something called ‘Stop and Take a Breather’ for dealing with stressful situations. I think everyone can benefit from doing that in your career—not sending that email or text when you’re in the heat of the moment.”

Running is still a major part of Koestel’s life, but with a slight change.

“I started trail running,” she says. “It took a long time to be able to run by myself, and the trails were a place I felt more free. It allowed me to relax. Being out in nature, it’s beautiful and a much more enjoyable way to run for me. I still do some road racing, but I focus more on trail races.”

In May, she’d just finished a 25-kilometer trail race in Philadelphia and was training for the next one—a half-marathon.