Editor's note: The day a lawyer makes partner in a firm is a red-letter date in a career. This week, Tex Parte shares what seven new partners in large firms in Texas have to say about how they learned about their partner promotion, who they called first and how they celebrated.
Ginger Webber (pictured) of Fort Worth was in the room at a partners' retreat on Feb. 5 when the partners in Jackson Walker voted the real estate attorney and four other associates into the partnership. Her first call was to her husband, August, who was in Miami that weekend attending Super Bowl XLIV. "I don't remember his exact words, but he said congratulations. He was very excited for me," Webber says. That call was actually the second Webber had placed to her husband with good news about her partnership. In January, Webber says, partner Susan Halsey, chairwoman of Jackson Walker's real estate practice group, told Webber the management committee was proposing Webber for partnership and she would be invited to the partners' retreat on Feb. 5 and 6. Because anything could happen, Webber says she only told two people about Halsey's news: her husband and her mother, who stayed at her house to watch the couple's two daughters while Webber was at the partners' retreat and her husband was in Miami. Knowing that she would be the first lawyer on a part-time schedule at Jackson Walker to be voted into the partnership, Webber says she didn't want to tell anyone else until after the vote. "Although once you are invited to the partners' retreat, it's pretty much a rubber stamp, it's a little scary until the vote came through," Webber says. She celebrated her partnership at the retreat at a partners' dinner, but she and her husband have not yet formally celebrated her promotion. Webber, a 1997 graduate of Texas Tech University School of Law, says she worked full-time at the firm for six years but went on a part-time schedule six years ago after their birth of her oldest daughter.
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Brenda Sapino Jeffreys
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