4 Meredith Leary, Litigation Member and head of the Women’s Initiative Steering Committee, and Carolina Säve, Intellectual Property Associate and member of the Women Associates’ Subcommittee, recently had the opportunity to speak with Pat Metzer, the first female attorney to join Mintz as well as the first woman to make partner at the firm. You have the distinction of being the very first female attorney at Mintz. How did you first come to join the firm? I joined Mintz in 1966. Before I interviewed at Mintz, I had never been to Boston. Fran Meaney came to my law school (the University of Pennsylvania) and asked if I’d like to interview at the firm. At first I declined and said I wasn’t available to do so. A few days after I turned Fran’s offer down, I thought, “that was stupid,” and changed my mind about the interview. I came up to Boston to interview with everyone — Haskell Cohn, Milton Wasby, Bill Glovsky, and Dick Mintz, among others, were partners back then, and Irwin Heller, Jeff Wiesen, and Tom Murtagh became associates somewhat later — and the rest is history. At my interview, I thought the firm was a family affair, a great place, a home. My impression of the firm has never changed. Do you have any memories of your early days at the firm that you can share with us? I remember when Bob Popeo first joined the firm. Bob was just the same then as he is now. He was the firm’s first litigator, and that was a big, exciting change. I remember that we were always working late, and we’d all have a drink and dinner together. Dick Mintz knew all the good restaurants in town — Athens Olympia, the Bunny Club, Rosie’s Pizza. I remember one time Haskell Cohn brought me in to work on a brief that we then argued at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. It was wonderful. In addition to being the first female attorney to join Mintz, you were the first female attorney to make partner at Mintz. What was that like? In my law school class at Penn, only nine of us out of two hundred were women. We did not think of ourselves as any different. I went to law school with the goal of going into the Foreign Service. But when I got to law school, I loved tax class and decided to become a tax lawyer. While I was different because I was a woman at the firm, I was also different in that I was not Jewish and I did not go to Harvard. This was a time of transition, where law firms started hiring more diversely. When I joined the firm, people worried that the wives of the attorneys might have trouble with me being there. I dealt with that by being a person. I knew what I wanted Featured Profile: Pat Metzer, Of Counsel, Vacovec, Mayotte & Singer