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Burns & Schultz LLP in the News

July 10, 2006

A CONVERSATION WITH NEW MCBA PREZ JILL SCHULTZ

BY TARA E. BUCK
Daily Record Reporter
tara.buck@nydailyrecord.com

Jill K. Schultz officially assumed the duties of president of the Monroe County Bar Association on July 3. Her term marks only the sixth time in the association’s 111- year history that a woman has held its top post.  Schultz, 44, said last week that she expects the year to be filled with challenges, but also opportunities, and she is happy to take on the enormous task of leading such a large and diverse organization.

“I anticipate that I will be very busy this year,” Schultz said with a smile during an interview in the T. Carl Nixon room of the MCBA’s headquarters on Exchange Street. The room choice was a fitting one, as Schultz has worked in the Rochester office of Nixon Peabody LLP for the past 20 years. She is a partner with the national firm where she works as a litigator, focusing on employment discrimination cases, along with medical malpractice, wrongful death and products liability cases on behalf of many of the city’s larger corporations.

She will continue to carry a full caseload at Nixon Peabody during her tenure as president of the bar association, but said the firm fully supports her volunteerism, and has for the last year when she worked in the capacity of MCBA’s president-elect.

MCBA initiatives

Schultz said that in the coming year she hopes to build “on the successes of the bar association, because so many achievements have occurred in the past few years,” while bringing some of her own initiatives to the table, including a greater emphasis on collaboration with the county’s specialty bars like the Rochester Black Bar Association and the Greater Rochester Association for Women Attorneys.

She cites the MCBA’s successes in its minority clerkship program, which brings minority court clerks to Rochester from various law schools, as one to be continued.

Schultz also hopes to expand the bar’s reach to GRAWA and RBBA through a membership initiative that enables members of the specialty bars to join the MCBA for free for the first year and at a discounted price for the second year.

“We realize that there’s a long way to go on the diversity front,” Schultz said. “We think there’s a lot more that needs to be done for women, for attorneys of color and for gay and lesbian attorneys. ... I think that outreach is very important and I hope that will be one of the goals I will be able to accomplish.”

Schultz also sees a need for expansion of the bar’s Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers Committee. She plans to appoint a new co-chair to that group in order to add a new element of assistance for attorneys suffering from depression and mid-level career issues.

“I think that possibly the stereotype has been that the committee has historically focused on drugs and alcohol abuse, and we want to expand the committee’s understanding into new areas, depression and other mental illness,” Schultz said. “Depression may be what’s leading to the other issues.”

Schultz also hopes to finish a new photo directory of the bar association’s membership, joking that many photos in the current directory show attorneys with hair and sideburns, “on gentlemen who have no hair and no sideburns today.”

The association’s co-location efforts will continue under Schultz’s leadership, a project she described as “a 20-year vision realized in this past year under the leadership of [James S.] Grossman (immediate past president). It’s something that we are very, very excited about.”

The project is bringing together six entities under the association’s roof, including a variety of civil legal service providers.

A significant fundraising campaign is also being continued, and will culminate in the renaming of the MCBA’s building to The Hon. Michael A. Telesca Center for Justice. “There’s a lot happening with all of that, and it won’t stop tomorrow,” Schultz acknowledged. “There’s a lot that will be going on over the next year and I’m very excited to be expanding and taking advantage of those opportunities.”

Background

Schultz, who lives in Pittsford, received her undergraduate education from SUNY Buffalo, and her law degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She grew up in Buffalo, where she said she worked hard throughout high school at various pizzerias and fast food restaurants.

That experience was “my true motivation to go to law school,” she recalled. “I knew that those were not the types of jobs that I wanted to have when I got out of high school or college. I wanted to have an education and, after college, work in a field where I would use my education and become a professional and, hopefully, both use the education and give back to society in some way.”

“It’s wonderful to sit here today and think forward to my opportunities to make a contribution as president of the bar association, and to look back on those pizza-making days,” she said. “I’m just delighted and humbled and honored that I was chosen to be president.”

For the past several years Schultz has served on the MCBA’s Board of Trustees and its Executive Committee. “When I received the call to be president, it was just a true pleasure to think that I would be able to lead this organization,” she said. “I hope that I will be promoting the profession, and making a contribution.”

Looking to the future

“It will always be difficult to get everything done that we’d hoped,” Schultz admitted. “I know that there will be challenges and unexpected items that will come up. Every time I talked to one of the past presidents, they speak to me about the challenges, and some of the difficulties, and a lot of the pleasures that they had.

“I come into my bar year knowing that I will” have many of the same, she said. “I can only wonder what they will be. … But I’m looking forward to working with Mary Corbitt and the wonderful staff she has assembled here … and I expect that I’ll receive wonderful support from my law partners back at Nixon Peabody.”

Corbitt, executive director of the MCBA, described Schultz as thoughtful, insightful and a good facilitator. “She’s going to be sitting at this table, month in and month out, with 19 of her colleagues,” Corbitt said. “That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of opinions, and you’ve got to be a pretty confident person and solid in who you are to take that on. Jill has clearly demonstrated that, and without that being recognized by her peers who nominated her and supported her through the election, she wouldn’t be here.

“I think those are the kinds of leadership traits that we can look for” in Schultz, Corbitt continued. “I think she’s going to be an outstanding president.”

Article Used With Permission from The Daily Record

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