Columbia’s finest female attorneys take unusual journeys to juris doctorate
Women in Law: Notable Attorneys and their unusual paths to the profession
Non-traditional. That’s the common theme that connects the CBT’s picks for Columbia’s top female attorneys. None of them followed the traditional path of lawyers who make early career decisions, go to law school straight after getting their undergraduate degrees and begin practicing right after passing the Bar exam.
One woman followed her husband to Columbia and was a social worker before going to law school. Another eventually overcame her father’s admonition that girls don’t become lawyers. One of the finest female lawyers originally wanted to be a doctor of psychology, and another was an art student who switched the direction of her career after a soul-searching year off from college. And the youngest member of one of Columbia’s biggest firms had once planned to become an elementary school teacher.
Name: Betty Wilson
Age: 76
Law Firm: Oliver, Walker, Wilson
Years in practice: 33
Law Degree: University of Missouri School of Law
Betty Wilson came to Columbia in 1961 to be with her husband, Clyde, after he took a job in the University of Missouri’s anthropology department. By that time, Wilson already had degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Michigan School of Social Work. She was 14-years-deep into a career in social work.
Wilson said there were few positions in social work available in Columbia, and she decided to enter law school, along with several friends, “and change the world.” At the time, less than 10 percent of law school students in the United States were women.
When she graduated from the University of Missouri School of Law in 1974 and began looking for a job in Columbia, “there were only two women in private practice at that time,” Wilson said. “They were very welcoming, but they didn’t have jobs for me.”
Wilson did find a job with attorney Warren Welliver, who later served in the Missouri Senate.
“That’s how I got to where I am,” Wilson said. “I attribute everything to Warren. He was an excellent lawyer, he gave me very good training and I wouldn’t have had a start without him.”
Later, Welliver sold the practice. The new owners kept Wilson, and she has been with the firm – now called Oliver Walker Wilson – ever since.
“I gradually saw more and more women come into the practice of law, but we were still not considered to be real lawyers,” Wilson said. She still remembers a judge who would refer to women attorneys as “lawyerettes.”
Wilson practices domestic relations and family law, including providing mediation services, and is one of just three women to have served as president of the Boone County Bar Association.
Wilson said that going into family law was less a choice for her than an expression of the way things worked at that time. “By default, back then, women were just considered to be representatives of that field,” she said. “In fact, when I came into Warren’s practice he turned all of the divorces over to me because he didn’t want to do them.”
“Nowadays, I think women coming into the practice have more choices in terms of the fields they are likely to follow,” she said.
Name: Anna Lingo
Age: 44
Law Firm: Law Offices of Anna Lingo
Years in practice: 19
Law Degree: University of Missouri School of LawAnna Lingo moved to Columbia from Oklahoma to pursue an art degree at Stephens, which she earned in 1985. For Lingo, becoming an attorney was not something planned or even considered; it just sort of happened.
“I took a year off, cooked at Glenn’s Café, worked at a bunch of goofball establishments, went to law school and graduated in 1989,” Lingo said. “I immediately went into private practice and I’ve been in private practice ever since.”
“After I’d been out for a couple of years, I started a partnership with Bob Tyler, and at some point Joel Anderson and Lorri Kline joined our partnership” Lingo said. “That was very fun. At that time we were, by far, the youngest, and probably strangest…”
Lingo trailed off, seemingly caught up in memory.
“Yeah, that was a fun group.”
Lingo has a practice that is exclusively family law, including mediation. She said family law keeps her interested because it is filled with “chaotic human emotion.”
“I don’t know if it is gender based,” she said. “You either have an inclination and an aptitude for being around those kinds of people in crisis or you don’t.”
“You don’t know when you walk into the office on any given morning what’s happened the night before, what phone calls are coming,” she said. “So the best laid plans are just constantly being thrown out the window. You’re just zipping off into one direction and then – wham! – it’s like a wild mouse ride – you’re 180 in another direction. If you have to have a whole lot of order and predictability in your life then you can’t do this. You’ll end up in the madhouse.”
Name: Marsha Fischer
Age: 37
Law Firm: Walther, Antel, Stamper & Fischer
Years in practice: 12
Law Degree: University of Missouri School of Law
When she started college, Marsha Fischer went back and forth between becoming an attorney and an elementary school teacher. In the long run, practicing law just felt right to her, “As I thought more about teaching, it was like wearing a jacket that didn’t fit,” she said.
That decision led Fischer to the University of Missouri School of Law, which she graduated from in 1996. Her first job was clerking for a federal judge in Kansas City. Then she returned to Columbia, where she immediately went to work for what is now the firm of Walther Antel Stamper & Fischer. Today, she is both the firm’s only female partner and the youngest.
Fischer’s practice is primarily a combination of employment discrimination and personal injury cases. “That’s one of the things I found attractive about this firm,” she said. “I could define my own practice.”
The best parts, she said, are the one-on-one interactions and “getting people through difficult times.”
“It sounds cliché, but when I was in college and didn’t really know what lawyers do; I wanted to do it because I thought I could help people and give a voice to people who don’t have one,” she said. “I’ve been doing it for a while now, but that’s probably still what sustains me.”
Name: Helen Wade
Age: 32
Law Firm: Harper, Evans, Wade & Netemeyer
Years in practice: 4
Law Degree: University of Missouri School of Law
Helen Wade said it took her a while to figure out why education is so important. While sorting it out, she worked full time and earned a degree in psychology at Columbia College during the day.
“I thought I would get a PhD in psychology,” she said. “Then, after much agonizing, I decided to go to law school.”
Wade graduated from MU’s law school in 2004 and eventually found her way to the firm that is now Harper, Evans, Wade & Netemeyer. It was there that she became close to the woman she calls her mentor, now-Judge Leslie Schneider.
“Leslie taught me the ropes,” Wade said.
Wade said that one of the most challenging parts of practicing family law now is what she referred to as “Protecting Separation of Church & State” – figuring out how to keep her work life separate from her private life.
“It’s very easy to become personally involved,” she said. “It’s hard to not wake up at 4:00 in the morning, thinking about a case.”
Wade said one of the most important things she can bring to any case is perspective. “People don’t naturally make good choices all of the time,” she said. “My job is to see the whole picture and help my clients find the best outcome.”
Name: Mary Carnahan
Age: 61
Law Firm: Brown, Willbrand, Simon, Powell & Lewis
Years in practice: 16
Law Degree: University of Missouri School of Law
Mary Carnahan – of Brown, Willbrand, Simon, Powell & Lewis – was raised in a very traditional household. After graduating high school in 1964, she told her father that she might want to be an attorney. His reply was, “Girls aren’t lawyers; you’ll have to pick something else.”
Carnahan listened, went to two years junior college, and took a job as a secretary.
“I was a horrible secretary,” Carnahan said. “It is such an art and such a skill to be a secretary. That’s why I had to go to law school, because I wasn’t good enough to be a secretary.”
First, Carnahan had to complete her undergraduate degree, which she did as part of the Stephens College adult program. By the time she was ready for law school in 1989, Carnahan had married for the second time, and, as a wedding present, her husband agreed to hold the home together while Carnahan earned her Juris Doctor. “And boy did he,” Carnahan said, “I could not have done it without him.”
Today, Carnahan handles all of the family law for her firm, and also does estate planning, real estate law, and assorted other sorts of cases, often resulting from her work with clients on family law cases.