Leading Lawyers Network
Magazine
Women’s Edition
JULY 2009
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THE TOP WOMEN
LAWYERS IN ILLINOIS
21st Century Leadership
Nancy Bertoglio: Rock of Strength
Plays Key Role at Merged K&L Gates llp
Marci Eisenstein: Puttting
the ‘Class’ in Class
Action Defense
Susan Schwartz: Leaving
No Stone Unturned in
Med-Mal Niche
Karen Layng: Thriving on
Trial Work—From Construction
to Complex Litigation
NANCY BERTOGLIO
Leading Merged Firm With
Savvy and a ‘Steady Hand’
by Adam W. Lasker
Law firm mergers can cause a shakeup of
managing partners that can result in a new
look, a new initiative, and, in some respects, a
whole new atmosphere for the firms involved.
But the game-winning strategy remains
essentially the same for long-time law firm
manager Nancy E. Bertoglio, even after her
firm merged with another on March 1.
Bertoglio was immediately placed on the
K&L Gates LLP management committee after
that firm combined with her former firm, Bell,
Boyd & Lloyd LLP. Bertoglio had worked with
Bell Boyd since 1984 and had been appointed
annually to serve on its management committee
and as managing partner since 1999.
“In many ways, the job has changed—it’s a
much bigger platform now,” says Bertoglio,
who now splits her time as the administrative
partner for K&L Gates’ offices in Chicago and
San Diego.
“There’s a time when most lawyers
understand that, at some point in their careers,
they could be enhanced by a broader
platform,” Bertoglio says. “The similarities
[between the two firms] have helped make the
merger a smooth transition — it’s been a real
positive change for both sides and has
certainly expanded our platform.”
The merger between these two firms, which
now employ a worldwide network of nearly
2,000 attorneys in 33 offices, has been a long
time in the making, according to Bertoglio. The
Bell Boyd strategic plan committee started
focusing on strategic growth plans some five
or six years ago, she says.
The goal, she says, was to increase
Bell Boyd’s geographic presence to enhance
its services for clients who do business
outside Chicago.
“Our management committee at Bell Boyd
realized that, to better serve our clients, we
needed a broader platform,” Bertoglio says.
The Chicago-based Bell Boyd has experienced
a significant expansion of its geographic
presence thanks to the dozens of offices K&L
Gates already had on three continents.
And the geographic benefits of the merger
run as a two-way street, Bertoglio says. For
instance, K&L Gates already had offices in
some parts of California, representing clients
who conducted business throughout the entire
Golden State.
The firm had clients doing business in San
Diego but didn’t have an office there, Bertoglio
says. “In order to maintain our relationships
with current clients, both firms needed to
broaden their geographic presence.”
With a consensus among Bell Boyd’s
executive committee in the last year, the only
remaining questions revolved around which
firm would be the best fit with Bell Boyd’s
client base, with its geographical needs, and
its employee-friendly atmosphere.
The answer to all those questions turned
out to be K&L Gates, which had numerous
offices from coast to coast and overseas but
only one overlapping office with Bell Boyd, in
Washington, D.C. That made mapping out the
geographic expansion a relatively simple task.
K&L Gates also had firm-wide initiatives and
programs that meshed well with Bell Boyd’s
practice areas and with its pre-existing goal of
creating a work environment that allows
attorneys and staff members to balance the
demands of their personal lives with their
professional responsibilities, Bertoglio says.
“As soon as we announced the merger
discussions to our [Bell Boyd] staff and
attorneys, the phones started ringing,” says
Bertoglio, who believes that everyone involved
with the merger quickly realized the benefits to
both firms.
“Everyone feels energized from many
perspectives, and it was almost immediate,”
Bertoglio says. “There were so many synergies
between these two firms that it was just a
natural fit.”
A Match Made in Law Firm Heaven
Former Bell Boyd attorneys and staff are not
the only ones touting the recent merger as a
resounding success. Peter J. Kalis, K&L Gates
chairman and global managing partner, echoes
Bertoglio’s beliefs that the two firms have
created one cohesive and well-run institution.
Similarities among the two firms’ internal
policies, client bases, and geographic
presence are some of the key ingredients to a
merger that, Kalis says, is already a clear
success. But what truly makes this a match
made in law firm heaven, he believes, is the
addition of some experienced, intelligent and
highly capable leaders to the K&L Gates
management committee.
“One of the things we do when working on
law firm mergers—one of the items that is very
high on our list of priorities — is strong and
legitimate leadership in the other law firm,”
Kalis says. “Bell Boyd certainly evidenced that,
not only with Nancy, who is one of the best law
firm managers I’ve known, but also with Jack
McCarthy, the longtime [Bell Boyd] chairman.”
Kalis started getting to know Bertoglio
about five years ago and has kept an eye on
her successes with Bell Boyd ever since,
almost like a baseball scout keeping tabs on a
different team’s top prospect.
“I came to admire her as a managing
partner of one of America’s premier mid-sized
firms,” Kalis says. “Chicago is an enormously
competitive legal marketplace, and Bell Boyd
was always known for punching above its
weight—and strong management had a lot to
do with that.”
There were, of course, several other factors
that Kalis and the other leaders of K&L Gates
saw in Bell Boyd that would make the union
beneficial to everyone involved. The practice
areas, quality of attorneys, client base, and
geography of the Bell Boyd offices were all
important criteria, and Kalis says that the Bell
Boyd team was strong and desirable in each
of those categories.
But there are other firms out there with the
offices and the attorneys to make them a good
fit with K&L Gates, Kalis says. It was the Bell
Boyd management team that made that firm
seem head-and-shoulders above the rest in
terms of its qualifications for a merger.
Since the March merger, Kalis says, K&L
Gates has created both firm-wide and officebased positions on its management committee,
which is the firm’s principal governing body.
Six attorneys from Bell Boyd now serve on the
K&L Gates management committee; Kalis is
pleased to have all of them on board, but he
remains particularly impressed by the way
Bertoglio is handling her new duties as the
administrative partner of the Chicago and San
Diego offices.
“Nancy is responsible for two of our offices,
which is a very challenging role that she
discharges extremely well,” Kalis says.
“Chicago’s office is a big business in its own
right, and Nancy has led the charge not only in
managing the office internally but also in both
operational and law-practice standpoints that
factor into the entire firm at large.”
Kalis believes that Bertoglio possesses
several “keys to success” that have allowed
her to succeed in law firm management for
more than a decade: “She is a good
communicator; she is a steady hand on the
wheel; and she’s unflappable. She’s smart,
and she has the savvy born of experience.”
Those qualities have been apparent in
Bertoglio for as long as Kalis has known her,
he says, and they continue to make her an
invaluable asset for whichever firm is lucky
enough to have her on its team.
“Nancy is a good, tough-minded business
woman as well,” Kalis says. “In our
management precincts, we value candor, the
crispness with which ideas are expressed and,
ultimately, the quality of those ideas. Nancy’s
stock is already sky-high, even though she’s a
new member of the group.”
No Putting Families on Hold
During her years as an associate with Bell
Boyd, Bertoglio came to believe that the
stressful demands of working at large, busy
law firms could sometimes become
overwhelming for attorneys who were also
facing challenges in their personal lives.
When she was appointed to the firm’s
management committee, Bertoglio pushed for
a policy allowing for flexible scheduling for
attorneys who needed time away from the
office to help them cope both with the rigors of
a challenging law practice and difficult
situations in their personal lives.
Bell Boyd ended up adopting a flexible
scheduling program several years ago and has
since made it possible for attorneys to give the
necessary time and attention to personal
matters without fear of losing their positions at
the firm or jeopardizing the quality of their legal
services for clients.
“It’s very common with the modern billablehours requirements for young attorneys to put
their families on hold,” Bertoglio says.
She believes it is not healthy or productive for
the attorneys—for their families and even their
law firms— to neglect their personal lives in
exchange for fulfilling requirements at the office.
“Now, I can encourage them to not put their
personal lives on hold,” she says, and the end
result can sometimes mean that a valuable
and successful attorney can remain on staff
rather than being forced to resign to take care
of challenges outside of the office.
The flexible scheduling policy allows
attorneys to take time off from work when they
have a baby, Bertoglio says, and she points
out that the policy applies to both men and
women. Not only can they take some time off,
she says, but they can further increase the
time spent with their families and young
children by splitting their work hours between
being at the office and working from home.
The policy also applies to people who have
health problems, even if the problems are
experienced not by the attorney but by his or
her family members. This policy, Bertoglio
says, requires support and participation by all
firm members—from top management down
to support staff — and it has already proven
successful at Bell Boyd.
To maintain this quality of professional and
personal life for her colleagues at Bell Boyd, it
was important to Bertoglio that a merger with
another firm would not result in an end to the
flexible scheduling program.
The fact that K&L Gates had a similar preexisting program, and that both firms were
committed to maintaining those programs, was
an important factor in the merger’s success.
“We’ve had something at K&L Gates for the
better part of a decade called our Balanced
Hours Program,” says Kalis, the K&L Gates
chairman. “It is a way of structuring into the
firm’s everyday life certain roles for lawyers
who have competing claims on their lives and,
at least for a period of time, who require an
accommodation in their workload.”
The program could become threatened by
the current global recession, in that an
economic crisis of such magnitude could
cause attorneys to feel even more pressure to
succeed at the office at times when billable
hours can be harder to obtain, Kalis says.
Nonetheless, K&L Gates is committed to
keeping the program as long as possible,
particularly after having merged with another
firm with attorneys who were accustomed to
the availability of the scheduling options.
“To the extent the recession endures
unreasonably longer — and recessions do
normally endure—it will be interesting to see
whether lawyers feel they have to be more
committed to work and resolve the balance of
life and work that way,” says Kalis. “But, from
our firm’s standpoint, we think it’s very
important that we be prepared to work with
lawyers who want to resolve the dilemmas in
their lives other than in a full-time capacity.”
For Stacy H. Winick, a mother of three who
has been a Bell Boyd attorney since the early
1990s and now works in the K&L Gates office
in Washington, D.C., the availability of flexible
scheduling has been important for her
personal and professional lives.
“You can’t choose between your children
and your job — that’s just not a choice that a
parent should have to make,” says Winick,
who handles corporate and investmentmanagement matters as an attorney and who
handles meals, transportation and homeworkmanagement matters as a mother of three
sons, ages 5, 6, and 8.
Winick has lived and worked in Washington
since 2002, but she was in Bell Boyd’s Chicago
office, working under Bertoglio’s management,
when she started having children. Bertoglio,
who has two adult children of her own, always
supported Winick’s desire to be both a
The family at a London train station. From left: Bertoglio’s husband, Rick, Bertologlio, their sons, Brad and Bryan, Bryan’s
wife, Jessica, and Brad’s wife, Jennifer.
even if one of my kids had to get to the
doctor,” Winick says. “That has allowed me to
be able to keep my job and do it the way it’s
supposed to be done but also to keep my job
as a mother.”
For Bertoglio, flexible scheduling programs
allow law firms to acknowledge that even their
best attorneys face challenges in and out of
the courtroom and for the firms to show
proper respect for the lives of the people upon
whom they depend for providing the best
services possible to clients.
Opening Doors for a Younger Generation
The legal community was a much different
place for women when Bertoglio received her
juris doctor degree in 1973 from Loyola
University of Chicago School of Law. Now,
some 36 years later, she is one of the few
Generations: Bertoglio holds her first granddaughter, Natalie, while Bertoglio’s mother, Ethel Kolerus, looks on.
successful attorney and a nurturing mother.
To this day, Winick balances the demands
on her life by working from home a couple
days a week.
“Nancy has always respected me and has
always known that I would get my work done,
female attorneys who have served for more
than a decade in a management position at a
major law firm.
During her first three years after law school,
Bertoglio lived in England with her husband,
Rick, who is now a dentist in Aurora but who
was in the U.S. Air Force back in the mid1970s. While in England, Bertoglio worked as
a pro bono attorney for the Air Force Judge
Advocate General Corps.
She and her husband then moved back to
Illinois, where Bertoglio joined a friend from
law school in a small labor boutique law firm.
She practiced labor and employment law and
had “a great experience” handling several
class-action suits in Toledo, Ohio, in the late
1970s and early 1980s.
In 1984, She joined Bell Boyd, where she
continued handling labor and employment
matters. Bell Boyd had a tradition of recruiting
managing partners from within, Bertoglio says,
and in 1998, Chairman John T. “Jack” McCarthy
made the uncommon request of asking a
woman to join the firm’s management team.
“I think Jack might have thought that a labor
lawyer might bring something different to the
position,” Bertoglio says.
Whatever the reasons for her elevation to
the firm’s management team, she was reappointed annually as managing partner.
“I really like what I’m doing,” says Bertoglio,
who believes that her role as a manager allows
her to contribute to the quality of life for all
attorneys in the firm and particularly for women
attorneys who face additional challenges of
balancing life and work.
“What I can do as a woman in management
is to open doors for other people,” Bertoglio
says. “Whether people choose to walk through
those doors is their own personal decision.”
The encouragement she gives other
attorneys is not unlike how she encouraged
her two sons to do well in school to “keep their
doors open” for future success professionally
and personally.
“What I want our attorneys to understand—
both men and women—is that you can have a
balanced life, and there are doors open for you if
you choose to go through them,” Bertoglio says.
When an attorney is stuck outside the
metaphorical door, Bertoglio brings in all of her
own personal experiences as an attorney, wife,
mother, and law firm manager to help those
attorneys move forward with their lives.
“That allows people to come in with personal,
family, or health issues, and we’ll sit and talk
for long hours about it,” Bertoglio says.
She believes that being a good listener is a
fundamental aspect of being a good law firm
effectively, and Nancy is nothing if not an
extraordinary person.”
Kalis is not the only one who has noticed
and acknowledged Bertoglio’s door-opening
contributions to women in the practice of law.
In 2004, the American Bar Association
honored Bertoglio during a ceremony
sponsored by the ABA Commission on
Women in the Profession, in New York City.
Bertoglio also received the 2005 “Woman to
Woman: Making a Difference Award,”
presented by then-Illinois State Treasurer Judy
Baar Topinka.
Bertoglio’s inherent modesty makes her
shrug off such accolades, saying things that
make her sound like the stereotypical hero
who claims that anyone else would have done
the same thing.
“Lawyers all owe something to the
communities we live in,” Bertoglio says. “What
we can and should do is try to provide
opportunities for other people, both our clients
and our fellow attorneys, and that’s what I try
to do.”
Balancing Her Own Scales of Justice
To practice what she preaches, Bertoglio
strives to keep her own professional and
personal lives in balance.
“We all took different roads out of college,
following different career paths, but 10 years
later, we started getting together again, and it
was like no time had passed,” Bertoglio says.
“Now, two or three times a year, we will drop
almost anything in our lives to get together.”
Those kinds of friendships, and that time
away from the office, helps refresh Bertoglio
for another period of hard work at the law firm,
she says.
“They remember all the things, the good,
the bad and the ugly,” she says, “but there’s
nothing but unconditional love and support
among us all.”
Bertoglio is also dedicated to her family and
spends as much time as possible with her
husband and their two sons, Bryan, a neurosurgeon who is married to a dentist named
Jessica, and Brad, an intellectual property
attorney who is married to a lawyer named
Jennifer.
She also enjoys fostering friendships with
her colleagues and other attorneys she meets.
One of those friends is Kalis, who became her
colleague after the merger of the two firms.
Kalis, who spends most of his time working
out of the K&L Gates office in Pittsburgh, says
that Bertoglio, a Chicago native, is as good a
friend as she is an attorney and law firm
Bertoglio joins her son, Brad, and his wife, Jennifer Bertoglio,
as they celebrate their graduation from Chicago-Kent.
manager, and the end result can be a roster of
attorneys with a higher morale and increased
productivity.
“Every firm’s greatest resource is the
lawyers who do the work,” she says. “They go
home at night, and we want to make sure they
come back the next day.”
Bertoglio has been a role model for women
in the profession for many years now, Kalis
says. He and Bertoglio, he says, are “of the
same generation” and the role of women in the
practice of law has changed substantially
since they graduated from law school.
“One reason it has changed is because of
women like Nancy who have gravitated
towards firm leadership positions and have
thereby served as role models for newer
generations of women coming into these
firms,” Kalis says.
“It’s not an easy job to balance all the roles
that society imposes upon professional
women — and not only the well-publicized
demands of meeting obligations within the
family and obligations to clients — but for
Nancy’s generation and my generation,
women also have had imposed on them and
have embraced the responsibility to mentor
newer generations of lawyers,” Kalis says. “It’s
that combination of life challenges that
requires an extraordinary person to balance
Bertoglio and her husband, Rick, study a guidebook on the train between Paris and Avignon in 2005.
One “absolute priority” outside practicing
law and managing firms is to go on vacations
every year with eight of her closest girlfriends
from college.
This group is so close, she says, that a
couple of her friends wore her wedding dress
for their own weddings.
manager. However, he admits that some future
events could threaten their long-standing
relationship:
“I know that the [Pittsburgh] Steelers are
playing the [Chicago] Bears this September,”
Kalis says, “and that will be a real test to
our friendship.” ■
This article originally appeared in Leading Lawyers Network Magazine—Women’s Edition July 2009 and has been reprinted with permission. © 2009 Law Bulletin Publishing Co.