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.
Sarah Schultz (pictured) says it's a tradition at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld for partners from each office to gather en masse in a conference room to congratulate associates who have just been elected to the partnership. But at the time on Oct. 30, 2009, when Schultz was slated to learn that she would become a new partner in the firm's Dallas office, she was on a conference call negotiating a deal. Schultz says she ignored one summons to report to the office's conference room that afternoon and didn't take a break from her work obligation until her boss, partner Charles Gibbs, insisted. She walked into the conference room to applause and congratulations from the group of Dallas office partners who were awaiting her arrival. Schultz says she soon returned to her office to telephone her husband, Christian, and tell him the good news. They celebrated that evening with a bottle of champagne, but she couldn't do the same the next evening because she was running her first half marathon bright and early on Nov. 1. Pumped up by her partnership news, Schultz says she ran the Dallas Running Club Half Marathon in two hours and 11 minutes, and she was very happy with that time. The next weekend, Schultz says, she and her husband celebrated her partnership with a group of friends and more champagne. Schultz joined the firm after graduating from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2001.
-- Brenda Sapino Jeffreys
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