Jul 04, 2021

Women In Law at Conrad & Scherer

My name is Jessica Kopus. I’m a senior partner at Conrad and Scherer. I’ve been at the firm for 12 years as of June, and I started out as an associate junior associate with the firm and was promoted to senior associate partner and then senior partner.

My name is Janine McGuire and I moved to Broward County after graduating from the Columbia School of Law Catholic University. I’ve been a longtime member of the Broward County Bar Association and I’ve had the opportunity to see Broward county really grow and flourish.

I specialize in a number of areas of the law, including appellate practice and litigation. And I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of the firm’s nationally recognized cases and I’m very happy to be a part of the firm’s current team.

My name is Sylvie Ron Paul. I’m an Associate at Conrad and Scherer, I started my legal career working at an AmLaw 100 firm. Throughout my years at Columbia Law School, I transitioned to working as a legal fellow for the New York City Housing Development Corporations. Since then, I’ve been so pleased to have landed at Conrad and Scherer, which is a firm that specializes in taking top-flight complicated cases to victory at trial.

I feel very privileged to be a Conrad and Scherer, and in a position to be at the Council table and involved in these matters. As I understand it’s very rare to be in that position. And I feel, at least personally, very fortunate to have achieved that. There are very few attorneys who actually take cases to trial, they are rare, and it’s rare still to find women on the plaintiff side who take cases to trial.

I’ve been very pleased to work at a place where I have such an example in Jessica, as someone who is leading cases to trial, we’re very fortunate to be here because women don’t usually stick around in the profession as long as we have. So that is something I think you’ve been here a long time too through various iterations, you had your family, and then you came back to work full time. And you’ve transitioned to a new role.

I think the typical role would be to leave the profession, I would agree with Jessica, I mean, I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve been here a long time. But I was also given the opportunity and the flexibility to be able to stay here and also raise a family. And then when it was time I could go back and focus on litigation and get back into the courtroom. I’ve been very lucky for the opportunity that I’ve been given here.

What keeps me coming back to Conrad and Scherer is my ongoing commitment to the firm, whether or not the times are easy, or they are challenging, the hours are a normal business day, or we’re in trial, and we’re working 15-16 hours a day, I recognize it as a unique experience. And I’m here for that challenge. And to me, that’s what keeps me coming back. I think for me, what I’ve really relied on over the years is my sense of commitment to the firm, the practice of law, just to want to be the best attorney I can be to not let anyone down and just be part of a great team of attorneys that are really dedicated to what they do.

I think generally speaking, from what I’ve seen among this group, I think women are very detail-oriented with law. As with many other things, I think the devil is in the details. And I’ve seen more with the three of us. I think we tend to all be relatively detail-oriented, and look for things under stones and overturn rocks, to try to find out on these other aspects of the cases and pour through the materials. The world is saying that there actually is very little difference between male and female professionals, that we’re all trying to meet the same challenges and deliver quality work product together.

I think that during this period of time during the pandemic, the legal technologies and technologies that everyone has been relying on to work from home have led to a seismic shift in the way we work and the way we get things accomplished. If we’re talking about the pandemic, Conrad and Scherer had an immediate response to the pandemic in that it literally, to me at least, seems like it shifted over to remote work very seamlessly. I appreciated that.

I’m sure that the clients appreciated that it was for their benefit. Our cases at this law firm that I can represent did not suffer delays due to the pandemic. I don’t think any of our cases did. And I think that’s a testament to the people in this room to adjust to working from home so efficiently. And for me and my practice, it certainly led to more flexibility for me, but also being better able to serve the client by having that flexibility to work from home.

The firm has been very good at making sure your needs are met if you need something while you’re working from home. And I think at the end of the day, it makes the work better for our clients. And I think at the end of the day when you find us getting more and more back into a courtroom setting, the work that we’ve been able to do during this time is going to be reflected positively in the courtroom when we ultimately get back there for jury trials.