Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

One early brief I turned in was less than stellar, and a senior associate sat me down. “Look,” he said, “we are American Airlines First Class. Our clients expect the cloth napkins and the glass cups and the real silverware. You can’t half-ass things here.” I worked like a dog. Many nights I stayed past midnight. Saturdays were not a day off as much as a chance to catch up on work you hadn’t managed to get to during the week. On Sundays we worked a laid-back noon to 6:00 p.m. I didn’t mind. I understood the enormous opportunity I had been given—the chance to prove myself, to make something of my life. Around this time, I shared a cab with a lawyer who’d been in the game about eight years. We struck up a conversation. “Do you hate it yet?” he asked. “No!” I said. “I love it!” “Just wait,” he said to me. “About eight years in is when you decide you’re either in it for the long haul or ready to make a change.” If that were true, I had seven years left on my clock. Even though I was the only female lawyer in our Chicago office, I didn’t deal with much in the way of sexism, though occasionally there was a waft of it. For example, when Brewer came up to the Chicago office from Dallas, all of the women in the office—yours truly plus the support staff—had to change from our pants into skirts. We weren’t supposed to be wearing pants at all, ever, but the rule wasn’t enforced unless Bickel or Brewer came through. It seemed ridiculous to me. The guys could wear pants, but we had to fr...