After a year in the southern Utah wilderness, Mary Dulka has no plans to head back to her Big Law career. She would much rather help animals.

Dulka, a former securities litigation and white-collar defense partner at Goodwin Procter, left the Am Law 100 firm's New York office in October 2016 for Kanab, Utah, a town on the state's southern border with Arizona.

In Kanab, Dulka became part of the cat caregiver team at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, where she would spend more than a year tending to felines that had fallen on hard times. In December, Dulka returned to the East Coast to work at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) of Westchester County, the same place where her animal adventure began almost a decade ago.