About Nan Levinson
Articles written by Nan Levinson
Holy de Toledo!
Victoria de Toledo loves a good David v. Goliath case“I think a lot of lawyers forget the human part of their own existence and it’s important in the whole process to be human,” says Victoria de Toledo. “Human and humane. Both.” De Toledo, an employment law partner at Casper & de Toledo in Stamford, studs her speech with words that don’t figure prominently in law books: nice, comfortable, humane. She’s talking about the value of balancing work life with family life and her commitment—one of her soapboxes, she calls it––to …
All the World’s a Courtroom
Joan Lukey's flair for the dramaticLong before she became a Boston-based trial lawyer known for winning record-breaking verdicts, Joan Lukey was an undergraduate considering a career in drama at Smith College in the late 1960s. That was when a professor laid it out for her. He told her she wasn't quite good enough to make it on acting ability, nor was she quite good-looking enough to make it on appearance. "It was actually very good advice," Lukey says. "I wasn't offended." Choosing her next path was easy. She liked politics; …
Nancy Shilepsky's Legacy
Losing isn't an option"The most important thing about how I’ve succeeded in my career is that I would rather jump out that window than lose,” says Nancy Shilepsky, a founding partner of Boston’s Shilepsky O’Connell. She is sitting in a conference room on the 16th floor of an office tower overlooking a glass atrium. It would not be a soft landing. “I’d rather die than lose,” she continues. “It’s the only secret to success that I know of.” Apparently, it’s a good secret. Since she began her …
A Fireside Chat with James Roosevelt Jr.
When the general counsel of Tufts Health Plan took President Bush to task on the oped page of the Boston Globe in January of 2005 for implying that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have supported privatization of Social Security, he spoke with uncommon authority. The writer was James Roosevelt Jr., FDR’s grandson. Jim Roosevelt, 60, has a moon face, an easy laugh, a cluttered office and the clear, firm voice of his grandfather. He’s Rooseveltian, too, in his commitment to pairing service …
Striving for Perfection
It was a case she couldn’t win. “There was such bad law in our area that we felt like we were hired to go down with the ship,” says Annapoorni “Anna” Sankaran, an attorney at Greenberg Traurig, of her defense of former employees of Arthur D. Little. “These people needed to be represented, but the law was against us and there was nothing we could do about it.” Arthur D. Little, the world’s first management consulting firm, filed for bankruptcy in 2002 and ended up …
New England Patriot
Few take the responsibilities of US citizenship as seriously as Peter VickeryThe roads are slick, traffic is a mess and Peter Vickery has driven 98 miles from Amherst to the State House in Boston for the weekly meeting of the Massachusetts Governor’s Council. He takes it in stride. The council, a holdover from colonial times, is responsible for approving judicial appointments in the state, and Vickery, a newly elected member, takes this process seriously. “Many of the issues that Western European countries deal with through parliamentary democracy, we in the …
Alimony from a Dead Man
In a feat akin to getting turnip blood, Shannon Fitzpatrick blazed a trailWhen you win a case by getting alimony from a dead man, you’ve got a right to boast a little. But Shannon M. Fitzpatrick is modest about her accomplishment. “I think that the significance has been overblown somewhat,” she says in an assessment of the case that led Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly to name her among the top 10 Massachusetts lawyers in 2003. The case, Cohan v. Feuer, turned on whether alimony payments should continue after an ex-husband’s death. Cohan probably would …
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