Susan Cahoon, a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers, has chaired the firm's litigation practice group and is the firm's general counsel. She has represented clients in the chemical, life sciences and pharmaceutical industries in patent litigation, complex commercial litigation and intellectual property litigation. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 1971.

You enrolled at Emory at age 15, and some years later you became your law firm's first female partner. Were you motivated to be a groundbreaker, or were you in the right place at the right time?

I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. When I went to law school, I was quite naive about the degree of discrimination against women in the profession—I didn't know that many firms in Atlanta and elsewhere had never hired a woman as an associate. Fortunately, things were starting to change (albeit slowly) by the fall of 1969, when I was interviewing for a summer job. I also was at the right firm—one of the first “large” (not by today's standards) Atlanta firms to have hired a woman into a partnership track associate position even before I was hired, first for the summer and then given an offer to return as an associate after graduation, which I accepted. Fortunately for me, the firm didn't think it needed to defer hiring another woman until it saw whether the first succeeded.