Kathleen Sullivan served 28 years on the faculty of two prestigious law schools and became a groundbreaking dean of one. But her career in law shifted in 2004, when the founders of a budding litigation boutique asked her to establish the firm's appellate practice, telling her it was “a new mountaintop to climb.”

She took the offer. Now a name partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who chairs its appellate practice, she regularly argues before the U.S. Supreme Court and other appellate panels, obtaining victories on behalf of corporations, individuals, nonprofits and the government, while mentoring associates and editing a leading constitutional case book.

Sullivan, 60, didn't plan this career route. During college at Cornell University, she was considering going to graduate school for literature, but said, “as much as I loved thinking about literary theory, I loved even more that words on the page could affect events in real life and the power of the word could actually change outcomes.”