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eport A Special Section • june 29, 2017
Lifetime Achievement professional excellence
Lifetime Achievement
Susan Cahoon: Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton
S
usan Cahoon, a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers, has chaired the firm’s litigation practice group and is the firm’s general counsel. She has represented clients in the chemical, life sciences and pharmaceutical industries in patent litigation, complex commercial litigation and intellectual property litigation. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 1971.
You enrolled at Emory at age 15, and some years later you became your law firm’s first female partner. Were you motivated to be a groundbreaker, or were you in the right place at the right time? I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. When I went to law school, I was quite naive about the degree of discrimination against women in the profession—I didn’t know that many firms in Atlanta and elsewhere had never hired a woman as an associate. Fortunately, things were starting to change (albeit slowly) by the fall of 1969, when I was interviewing for a summer job. I also was at the right firm—one of the first “large” (not by today’s standards) Atlanta firms to have hired a woman into a partnership track associate position even before I was hired, first for the summer and then given an offer to return as an associate after graduation, which I accepted. Fortunately for me, the firm didn’t think it needed to defer hiring another woman until it saw whether the first succeeded.
professional excellence
You started at what was then Kilpatrick & Cody in 1971. Over 46 years the firm obviously has evolved in technology, head count and geography, among other things. Is there anything that hasn’t changed? I think this firm’s culture respected diversity in its lawyers before that term was in vogue. It had hired people of different religions, when for years many Atlanta firms did not. Its lawyers came from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds—from patricians of the bluest blood to those who were the first generation of the family to attend college. There was no political party line. The firm had represented icons of the civil rights movement and African-American-owned businesses when other Atlanta firms declined such work. It was open to hiring both women and African-Americans by the late 1960s, when many other Atlanta firms were not. Then and now, that culture of respect of people of diverse backgrounds and inclusion of all as part of the firm family, so long as you were collegial and provided quality legal services to the clients, has been a hallmark of this firm. What drew you to representing clients in litigation? There were no lawyers in my family, so much of my idea of what being a lawyer meant probably was formed by watching television courtroom dramas. What TV lawyers did in
court looked like it would be exciting to do in real life. I also always enjoyed making presentations to others—something that my experience as a debater at Emory only heightened. So, like many debaters, I gravitated toward litigation. After I began practicing, I also appreciated that virtually every case required me to learn something new, which has kept my intellectual curiosity stimulated so that things don’t get boring—even after 46 years of doing this. What is one of your proudest accomplishments, and what was a key challenge to achieving it? Being inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers at its annual meeting in 1994, which my parents were able to attend and witness. It’s a great professional recognition for a trial lawyer’s body of work, so the challenge is to have a solid track record of trial experience and success, achieved in a manner that generated respect (even from your adversaries) for professionalism and civility, as well as for trial skills. At the time of my induction, very few women had received the honor—even as the profession opened more to women in the late ’60s and in the ’70s, women sometimes were steered away from litigation as their field, based on stereotypes that persisted about whether women could stand the pressure of such a confrontational practice or be regarded by
Lifetime Achievement
jurors as having as much credibility as males. What part of legal practice should younger lawyers pay particular attention to if they seek to have success like yours? I don’t think success in the law turns on factors that differ that much from what it takes to succeed in most things: Work hard, always give it your best and demonstrate your commitment. For a young lawyer, it means giving your client’s needs priority—and that may mean not getting to do something fun you had scheduled before a partner asked you at the last minute to work late on a project. It means not assuming that, because someone else will be editing your draft before the brief is filed, you don’t have to proof it carefully (Spellcheck isn’t the cure-all.) or really think through the best way to present the arguments, instead of just getting the basics down. It means taking the time to get to know your client and to understand the client’s business: You’ll better understand what’s important and what’s not in the case, and you’ll forge personal relationships. When your firm wonders whether you have the ability to generate business, you will have demonstrated that you can successfully function in what is, at its core, a relationship business, for someone ultimately has to decide to trust you with something very important—that client’s success or failure in a case.
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