My parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, were first farmers and later shopkeepers in Monticello, New York, where I was born. I attended a one-room schoolhouse. Whatever image you may have about one-room schoolhouses, I skipped two grades when I transferred to public school. I attended Barnard College at age 15. You cannot imagine the enormity of the adjustment from Monticello to Manhattan. I remember the inkblot test they gave entering Barnard freshmen. I saw a rooster. The person next to me wrote “Dante’s Inferno.”

The single luckiest thing that happened to me at Barnard, maybe in my entire life, is that I came down with the mumps and had to miss my first exams. But for the mumps, I likely would have flunked everything and been back in Monticello for good.

Lesson Number 1: A little adversity sometimes can be a blessing.

In high school, I made the decision to be a journalist. I majored in Latin American studies at Barnard and saw myself as a journalist making and shaping world opinion in the capitals of Latin America.

After innumerable rejections, I found a job reporting weddings, church socials and women’s club meetings. Not the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes. Before long, I began to rethink my life and in desperation enrolled at the Law School at night with a day job editing copy for a feature syndicate. My sole ambition was to get off the social page, and law school seemed a sure-fire way in the 1960s for a woman to be taken seriously in the male-dominated profession of journalism.

Lesson Number 2: Every now and then it’s good to reconsider the life-course you’re on.

With a demanding daytime job, for me night law school was hardly a breeze. My assigned seat in Civil Procedure happened to be next to the class genius, a particularly brilliant engineer. When the grades came back on Delmar Karlen’s mid-year exam, my engineer friend and I were both shocked: My grade was at the top of the class, his at the bottom. He had written flawlessly about the law of contracts, which was the context of the exam hypothetical. My response was about the credibility of witnesses.

Lesson Number 3: Before you go spouting off on a subject, first be sure you know what the topic of the discussion is.

It was near-impossible to find a law-firm job. “Our quota of women is filled” was a common response—meaning, they had a woman, a quota, or both. Naturally, I aimed for one of the completely impenetrable Wall Street firms. My wonderful classmate Roberta Karmel ’62 asked me, “Judy, why are you doing this? They don’t want us!”

After scores of rejections, I was hired by the venerable firm of Sullivan & Cromwell—the only female in its litigation department. Departmental meetings began, “Gentlemen and Judy.” Why on earth Sullivan hired me is one of the great mysteries, and great joys, of my life.

Lesson Number 4—mine and Yogi Berra’s: When you reach a fork in the road, take it. It’s no time to pause for reflection, or be timid, or ask too many questions, or study the odds. Just go for it!

I have now marked 23-plus years as a judge of New York State’s highest court, 14 of those as chief judge. Let me assure you, nothing comes close to the privilege of being chief judge.

One of the most important reforms to our court system during my tenure has been jury reform. My official reason for focusing on the jury system is that it is a singular opportunity to show the public that our justice system works well. We call more than 650,000 potential jurors every year. That’s a lot of opportunity to win public trust and confidence. My unofficial reason is that years ago my NYU Law School graduate daughter Luisa ’91 called me during a break from jury service to say: “Mom, this is a great place to meet guys.” Immediately I resolved to expand the array.

We began the process with a commission of lawyers, judges and members of the public, who within six months handed me a terrific blueprint for reform. Indeed, the commission process has been a hallmark of my years as chief judge—an extraordinary route to effective reform throughout our court system.

Lesson Number 5 echoes Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

As a quick example of profound change affecting the courts, consider the drug epidemic and its impact on our criminal-court and family-court dockets. Probably threequarters or more of our criminal cases are drug-driven, many of them low-level offenders committing nonviolent crimes again and again simply to support a drug habit. Or consider the huge child-neglect and abuse dockets and record numbers of children being removed from their homes to enter foster-care limbo. There was a public outcry: “Do something.”

I’m proud to say we have done a lot. Today in New York State we have 152 Drug Courts, offering rehabilitation instead of jail; we have Family Drug Courts to speed rehabilitation and avoid the need to terminate parental rights, and Juvenile Drug Courts for vulnerable teenagers. We have Integrated Domestic Violence Courts throughout the state focused on victim safety and offender accountability; we have Mental Health Courts to reroute people in need of treatment from prison; we have Community Courts, Reentry Courts and many more specialty courts, and, best of all, we have a Center for Court Innovation—a research and development arm to help us think through these new approaches to delivering justice.

Are those without controversy? Of course not. Nothing worthwhile in life is. We are sensitive to the criticisms when they are valid. But we also have tremendous antidotes: the thanks of people who have been served by these courts and have been able to turn their lives from the downward spiral they were on; the enthusiasm of our judges who say, “This is what I became a judge to do,” and nationwide and worldwide interest in replicating our courts.

Lesson Number 6, the words of the late South African lawyer, soldier and statesman General Jan Christian Smuts: “When enlisted in a good cause, never surrender, for you can never tell what morning reinforcements… will come marching over the hilltop.”

—

All 2007 Features

All of 2007 Alumni Almanac

2007 Home

After 9/11, rules on immigration became stricter, particularly affecting refugees seeking asylum. Around 80 refugees are granted asylum daily, according to statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services cited by Patricia Buchanan, chief of the immigration unit in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Those rejected can go before immigration courts or appeals boards, making asylum “an area where we see checks and balances working in our system,” she said. F. Franklin Amanat, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, whose jurisdiction includes JFK International Airport, agreed, saying that although legitimate asylum-seekers are at times turned away, those instances are few in number.

Others strongly debated that point. Judy Rabinovitz ’85, senior staff counsel for the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, countered that since 1996, when the overhaul of immigration laws began allowing expedited removal procedures to be held at borders rather than in courts, low-level officers have had an authority disproportionate to their training to weigh asylum. This and other procedures that would be prohibited in law enforcement create an inherent unfairness in how refugees are treated, she said. For instance, she cites the fact that some asylum-seekers have been held in detention for years before seeing a courtroom. And then, they may even appear before immigration judges in shackles.

Abigail Price (LL.M. ’89), who is a global technical adviser for the prevention of exploitation and abuse at the International Rescue Committee, described how a mother and daughter from Sierra Leone—raped, enslaved and tortured in their home—endured a grueling wait at the border because they, under duress, housed local rebels. Their actions were initially categorized as providing material support to terrorists. Describing a central paradox of post-9/11 immigration law, she said, “This is a situation where the application of reasonable laws keeps out those who need it most.”

—

All of 2007 Alumni Almanac

2007 Home

Her more than 30-year career as a lawyer in the financial industry revolved around that philosophy. She’s always been open to any new challenge that comes her way. And, as the recipient of the NYU Law Women’s second annual Alumna of the Year Award, that is the advice she most wants to impart to the students at her alma mater. “I want to encourage people that change is good,” she says. “They need to stay open to opportunities, develop broad skill sets and look into different kinds of things.”

There’s no question that Robbins has followed her own career advice. In 2001, after 25 years at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCoy and JPMorgan, where she had served as general counsel, she decided to retire when JPMorgan merged with Chase. But Robbins never intended to play golf and bridge. Instead, she helped found an international consulting firm, Blaqwell; joined Citigroup International as general counsel, and served as a strategic adviser for Axiom Legal Solutions, a legal-services firm with a unique twist that allows lawyers to work for corporate clients on a flexible schedule. “I’ve learned that you never say never,” she says. “Here I am, back at the epicenter of Wall Street.”

She arrived in the hallowed halls of the New York Stock Exchange last November (shares of NYSE rose 5.5 percent the day her hiring was announced). It’s a critical time for the exchange as it enters into a new era of global consolidation, takes on the challenges of being a private company and adjusts to ever-changing technology. One of her first accomplishments in the job: ensuring that the $10 billion merger of the NYSE and Euronext, the largest European stock exchange, went smoothly last spring. With her wealth of international management experience in the financial industry, Robbins, who heads a staff of 160, is perfectly suited to handle the task. “Rachel is one of the best managers I’ve ever worked with,” says Debra Stone, a freelance consultant who worked for Robbins at JPMorgan. Citing Robbins’s legal talent, her understanding of doing business in different cultures and her dedication to the professional growth of her employees, Stone says Robbins “set standards for focusing on the quality, efficiency and dedication of people to their work and not just putting in face time.”

A case in point: Back before it was acceptable in the financial industry, Robbins allowed Stone, after the birth of her first child, to go on a flexible work schedule without going off the career track. “She always was an excellent role model for those of us in the profession who are trying to balance career and family,” says Stone.

It’s not surprising that Robbins approved of such a move. One of her concerns is the growing number of women in their 30s who are leaving law because they can’t manage both a career and a satisfying family life. “This is deeply troubling to me,” says Robbins, who blames the billable-hoursbased legal mindset. “If you can solve a client’s problem in 15 minutes, you’re just not profitable for the firm. That’s a disadvantage for women.” She urges women to consider the path she followed and serve as in-house counsel. “One of the benefits to being inhouse is that you’re encouraged to come up with an effective solution quickly,” she says. “You have to make legal judgments that have a real impact on the business world. It’s a more pragmatic approach.”

Robbins’s choices have allowed her to raise two sons—now in their 20s—and maintain a full life. She sits on the board of the NYU School of Law, goes to the theater and travels overseas with her husband. Her secret? “You have to choose what to focus on and learn to be good at delegating,” she says. That, and embracing opportunities that come along, just as she did 30-someodd years ago, when she took the plunge and applied to NYU.

—

All of 2007 Alumni Almanac

2007 Home

By the following summer the two had quit their comfortable, high-paying jobs to raise money for a business that barely existed— legal outsourcing. Their New Yorkand India-based company, Pangea3 (from the Greek word meaning “all earth”), uses Indian lawyers to provide legal and patentsupport services including contract drafting and analysis; patent research, analytics and litigation; and document review.

Today, after three years in business, the company boasts 170 employees (100 of whom are lawyers) in Mumbai, and 10 (seven lawyers) in Manhattan. Its client list includes several Fortune 500 companies— although, citing confidentiality, Kamlani allows only that they’ve worked for Yahoo!. Revenues in 2006 exceeded $4 million, and co-CEO Kamlani expects exponential growth in the next two years. “Professionals can provide legal services to people anywhere in the world,” he says. “Geography doesn’t have to impact business.”

Clients are attracted initially by the huge savings that outsourcing offers, Kamlani says. For example, Roamware, a San Jose-based telecommunications company, hired Pangea3 to create an electronic database that would highlight the key terms in about 200 contracts. Alan Sege, the firm’s general counsel, estimated that retaining stateside lawyers would have cost him at least $60,000. Pangea3’s price: $5,000.

Critics of legal outsourcing argue that such low rates are wooing jobs away from U.S. lawyers. They also charge that outsourcing can compromise the quality of the service. The Association of the Bar of the City of New York has recently addressed these concerns, issuing guidelines to keep the process ethical. U.S. attorneys need to supervise the work, ensure client confidentiality and avoid conflicts of interest. Kamlani says Pangea3 already does these things: “Our clients don’t view our attorneys as any less respectful of confidentiality obligations than full-time U.S. lawyers.”

Kamlani also insists that, in the long run, savings on legal fees can help fuel business growth in the United States—an argument that he says ultimately convinces firsttimers to remain clients. For example, an Internet services company with a $300,000 budget for patent review and filing could only afford to file 10 patents a year using New York attorneys. After hiring Pangea3, it can now afford to file 30 patents annually. And then there’s the industrial-products company that last year sought documentreview support in a product-liability case with 4.5 million pages of files. Hiring a U.S. firm for that task would have bankrupted the company, Kamlani says. Pangea3 did the job for less than $500,000. “If we can keep a company alive by allowing them to do a document review in India that they otherwise could not afford, then we have preserved U.S. jobs,” says Kamlani.

The eldest of three sons, Kamlani inherited his entrepreneurial spirit from his dad, Sham, who immigrated to Miami from Bombay in 1967 “with nothing,” says Kamlani. Sham started a business importing exotic birds, and went on to successful ventures in real estate and the garment industry. He and his wife, Kavita, recently opened an Indian restaurant in South Beach.

Kamlani received his B.A. in economics and public policy from Duke University in 1991. After earning his J.D. at Penn, he joined Coopers & Lybrand, where, says former boss Herman Schneider ’64, “Anytime we had a tough problem, he got the assignment.” Kamlani pursued his LL.M. at NYU, which he praised for its “practical and business- oriented focus.” A year after finishing his LL.M. in international tax law at NYU, Kamlani joined OfficeTiger.

Always confident making decisions—he proposed to his wife after six months of dating and they now have three young children— Kamlani moved to India in 2005 to open the Mumbai office. He now spends his time mentoring and supervising his Indian attorneys. “We’re committed to being here for as long as it takes for Pangea3 to run itself,” Kamlani says. “Ultimately, we want this company to be viewed as the Cravath of legal outsourcing.”

—

All of 2007 Alumni Almanac

2007 Home

Student rebellion was in full swing when Virginia Hill Worden ’75 entered Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (R-MWC), in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the late 1960s. Worden fit right in; she marched in anti-Vietnam-War protests and led a successful revolt against the school’s dress code banning slacks. So she was not unprepared for the mayhem that erupted last September, when as interim president she announced that the 115-year-old single-sex school would open its doors to men in September 2007.

Some students burst into tears. Others chanted, “Keep R-MWC a WC.” Over the next week, hundreds of protesters marched with signs and yellow T-shirts that read, “Better Dead Than Co-Ed.” The students registered as a campus organization, which entitled them to a Web site, a faculty adviser and use of the college facilities. They held a ’60s-style sleep-out on the front campus lawn that eventually moved to Worden’s front yard. At 6:00 the second morning, the protesters started singing the R-MWC alma mater. “It’s my karma to have students camped out on the lawn to protest this change,” says Worden, who threw on jeans and a sweatshirt “and joined them, arm-in-arm, singing the college song.” She says, “They let me in. I protested myself.”

Nine students filed a lawsuit, which was dismissed in January. But most of the students cooled down after Worden let them pore over the school’s financial statements. Over four decades, enrollment had declined steadily from 900 students to 700. As a result, the school had been dipping into its endowment to woo students with financial incentives. Had R-MWC stayed all women it would have folded within 12 years, Worden estimates. “The decision wasn’t made on a philosophical basis. It was a question of survival,” she says.

Raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Worden recalls accepting the lesser roles designated for girls, such as class secretary instead of president, and cheerleader instead of athlete. Both parents—Albert, who worked for a paper company, and Virginia, who quit teaching to raise Worden and her sister—were college graduates and expected their daughters to further their education. Worden was drawn to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College because of its liberalism. The college was also small enough to encourage participation and leadership in campus activities. “At a time when males were given more value than females, to have a faculty of males and females devoted entirely to women…was extraordinarily empowering,” she says. She quickly involved herself in student government, ultimately becoming vice president in her senior year. Inspired by her economics courses—a subject taken by few women in those days at most coed schools—she ended up running the school cafeteria, and upon graduating in 1969 went on to earn her master’s degree in economics at Vanderbilt.

Then her life took a detour. Her fiancé was killed in Vietnam. “I’d gone through a life trauma and needed something that wasn’t that complicated to do, to work through the grief process,” she recalls. For the next two years, Worden traveled the globe as an airline hostess for Pan American World Airways, once again joining a sisterhood of sorts. “They were terrific, adventurous women,” she says of her fellow stewardesses. During this time, she met her brother’s friend Geoffrey Worden, whom she married in 1974.

Driven by a passion for debating, Worden entered Boston College School of Law, then transferred to NYU: “I loved it. Having a degree from NYU is a wonderfully affirming credential for anything you want to do in life”—which is considerable.

She became a litigator at Davis, Polk & Wardwell, juggling a full-time career with family commitments. Only after her third maternity leave did she quit to raise her children—two of whom, Katherine Worden ’06 and Annette Worden ’07, have also obtained law degrees from NYU. Worden threw herself into volunteering, becoming the president of the board at her daughters’ private school in Summit, New Jersey, and also at R-MWC.

In the 1980s, with their children growing up, she and Geoff had dual midlife crises. Instead of buying a Corvette, however, they studied at the Union Theological Seminary, then became ordained interfaith ministers. In 1988 they founded Bridges Outreach, which distributes bagged meals, clothing and toiletries to the homeless in New York City and throughout New Jersey.

As Bridges demonstrates, Worden embodies a mix of empathy and proactivity that has served her, and others, well. During R-MWC’s tough transition, Worden traveled the country talking to groups that were often hostile. “One of the things that is most impressive to me is her ability to have people challenge her, sometimes in not very kind ways,” says husband Geoff, an independent investment banker. “She listens to what they have to say, feels and empathizes with the hurt or anger. She’s like a tree—absorbing CO2 and exuding oxygen.”

By the time Worden’s one-year term as interim president ended on July 1, she was sure that the decision to go co-ed was the right one. The school—now called Randolph College—more than doubled its applications: 1,859 for the Class of 2011, compared to 902 the previous year. One quarter of the applicants were men.

—

All of 2007 Alumni Almanac

2007 Home

By Bettman’s analysis, a wide disparity in the competitive skills of teams was hurting the league overall. Clubs with $80 million payrolls were predictably trouncing those with $20 million. “If you don’t think you can outscore somebody, you’ve got to do something else in the game to try and slow them down,” said Bettman.

When it came time for a new collective bargaining agreement in 2004, the players’ union balked at the proposed salary cap. But believing the NHL needed a new economic system, and that a cap would provide longterm stability, Bettman stood his ground. The subsequent lockout led to the cancellation of the 2004-05 season.

“Very few businesses ever shut down and live to tell about it, but we set a record [in 2005-06] for both attendance and revenues,” said Bettman. “No sports league has ever lost a whole season, and that’s not something I’m proud of. What I am proud of is how well we came back.”

Bettman, who was the guest of Dean Richard Revesz at an October roundtable, talked expansively about his legal career and how he made the transition to business executive. “It was nothing but serendipity,” Bettman said of his path from being an attorney at Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn to taking executive posts with not one, but two sports leagues. Prior to serving as the first commissioner of the NHL, Bettman spent 12 years as senior vice president and general counsel of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

“Almost everything we do in a sports league has a legal implication,” Bettman said, explaining that as the head of the “most international of the North American sports,” he has dealt with upholding the NHL’s by-laws as well as handling its advertising agreements, jurisdictional issues, intellectual-property infringements, broadcast and Internet rights, Olympic participation, injury compensation and even a criminal investigation into alleged gambling. “[The NHL is], like lots of entertainment companies, in lots of businesses that touch lots of areas of the law.”

Bettman’s tenure with the NHL, which began in 1993, has been the catalyst for myriad changes to the sport. Bettman expanded the league to an impressive 30 franchises, up from 24 when he took the job. Stanley Cup-champion teams have represented such non-traditional hockey markets as Raleigh, North Carolina; Tampa, and Dallas. Bettman also implemented rules changes designed to make gameplay more exciting for the fans. The licensing and sponsorship revenue for the NHL is on par with such other sports merchandising juggernauts as Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the NBA. Bettman now looks back on his fateful 2004 decisions as the beginning of a new direction for the league. As the famed Canadian hockey announcer Foster Hewitt put it, “He shoots; he scores!”

—

All of 2007 Alumni Almanac

2007 Home