For Elizabeth Cabraser, presenting in the courtroom is like making jazz music.

"You improvise, you listen," she says. "You are making music as you go along."

And Cabraser has spent her career hitting the right notes, winning some of the most challenging and complex cases in the country.

"I watched and listened to the judges more than the lawyers because I realized very early on that I wasn't a typical courtroom lawyer," Cabraser says.

Shy and soft-spoken by nature, Cabraser spends most of her time observing in the courtroom, a strategy that has allowed her to patiently develop effective arguments and beat her opponents—most often men.

"So many times the guys weren't listening, they were just talking, they have prepared outlines, they have prepared arguments, they were going to give those arguments regardless," Cabraser says. "I was willing to improvise. I was willing to be responsive. I was always trying to have a respectful conversation in court."

Over 40-plus years, Cabraser has earned a reputation as a leading plaintiffs attorney for handling complex, high-stakes litigation against Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and Big Oil, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the BP Deepwater Horizon industrial disaster. She serves as sole lead counsel and chair of the plaintiffs' steering committee in the Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler diesel emissions cases.

"She is a lawyer beyond comparison in terms of creativity, intellectual discipline and commitment to the issues that she believes in," New York University School of Law professor Samuel Issacharoff says.

Issacharoff has worked with Cabraser on a number of high-profile cases in the more than 20 years he's known her. He describes Cabraser as "a transformative figure" in mass tort litigation in the United States. But some of his fondest memories of Cabraser have come outside of the courtroom, including sprinting through the airport to catch the last flight out with her.

"For as long as I have known her, I have always tried to get her to allow me to carry some bags for her," Issacharoff says. "In 20 years, she has never allowed me."

Cabraser has only worked at one law firm her entire legal career. She got her first legal job as a law clerk for Robert Lieff, a solo practitioner in Sonoma, California, as the former partner of Melvin Belli was winding up a few cases in preparation to retire to his vineyards.

"My job was getting rid of those cases, so he could work on his winery full time," Cabraser says. "We just never got rid of all the cases because we were there in a little law office in Sonoma, a little town in the wine country."

As people kept coming into the firm with more cases, Cabraser says, she ended up staying with Lieff, eventually becoming a name partner of the firm. Today, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein is a 100-attorney operation with offices in San Francisco, New York and Nashville. Lieff, who is now 82, hasn't yet managed to retire.

"In the world of the law firm, we are a very small firm. In the world of plaintiffs-only firms, we are a large firm," Cabraser says. "And there is a reason for that. You can only get so large working on a purely contingency-fee basis and being self-financed."

Cabraser says she intends to keep the firm the same size in the future to preserve its harmony. And she'll keep improvising alongside her colleagues.

"When it's time to take your solo, you take your solo," she says. "It's going to be for four bars only and then you get out of the way and you let somebody else lead."