Lawyer blends warmth with advice
Profound life questions add depth to her practice
Some questions slice to the heart of what it means to be a person. These are questions Julia Wald has to ask her clients in order to do her job: When you're in the hospital and not well, how do you want your treatment to go? When you lose your mind and somebody has to take over, who do you want that to be? You want to leave everything to your children, but what if your children are dead?
"You sit with a husband and wife and talk about their death, their parents' death, their children's death, the death of all their loved ones," says Wald, an estate-planning attorney in Marin. "You talk about intimate, horrible things that nobody wants to talk about. You get to have incredible conversations."
Job opportunities for girls and women have expanded rapidly since Wald went to school. She and her peers faced limitations on their options. She hopes the current generation has no clue what it was like. "If things have gotten so good that they don't have to know about that," Wald says, "fabulous! That's real change."
As recently as a few years ago, "they were still having conversations at Harvard about whether a woman can be as good a scientist as a man. At Harvard! Couldn't a medium-smart woman do better than a run-of-the-mill man at science? I don't know how you factor in gender; it seems stupid."
Wald attended Chapin School, a private K-12 school for girls in Manhattan. As an undergraduate, she studied philosophy and art history at Wellesley College, an all women's school in Massachusetts. She saw no bias; most professors and administrators were women.
For about a year after college, Wald worked for UNIVAC, a division of Sperry Rand, which produced one of the first commercially available computers. "The top-paying job was in sales," she recalls. "There were no women." It was 1964. Women were restricted to programming or systems analyst positions. "Until I went to Univac I had no sense that there was discrimination against women. But at least they hired women and paid us well."
Wald then entered UC Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, believing that in academics there would be less discrimination than in business. There she met another philosopher who would become her husband. She completed course work but not the dissertation on aesthetics, which seemed daunting. "I hated writing this big important paper," she says, laughing. "I didn't even want to write the first paper so why spend the rest of my life writing them?"
They moved near Washington State University where her husband had landed a teaching position. In the 1970s, nepotism rules prohibited them from both working for the same university. They needed to find a city with two colleges that would hire them to teach philosophy. Chances were minuscule. "It was nearly impossible to get one job," Wald says.
When Wald was in sixth grade, "I was arguing some position in the lunch room," she recalls. A teacher noticed her knack for argument and suggested she become a lawyer. Wald never forgot.
By then they had children aged four and 18 months. Yet Wald had pluck, and her husband had flexible hours that allowed him to do housework and care for kids. After attending top-flight schools all her life, Wald wanted to attend a well-known law school. But her family was in eastern Washington. So she entered the nearby law school at the University of Idaho, graduated near the top of her class and became an attorney in 1977 at age 36. "In my career, doing well in law school counted for a lot more than the name of the school," she says.
Her law class was nearly 40 percent women, but the ratio had shifted rapidly. When her class organized events for other women law students, upperclassmen scrawled on their posters that they were meeting to trade recipes or conduct a roller derby. Wald arranged for the women to wear helmets and roller skates to classes all day; the hazing stopped.
"I could have gotten so much goodwill if I had handed them a $20 bill and offered to pay for their parking."
They moved to San Francisco after Wald passed the bar exam in California. After months of looking, she found work at a fledgling firm. "I knew the law but had no idea how to be a lawyer," she says, "no idea how to write a complaint. They only paid me when the client paid. They were excellent teachers. I lucked out." The firm did litigation and transactional law: divorces, tax law, personal injury, incorporations, probates. "Insane," she says. "Fun!"
Estate planning appealed to her because it has both people contact and intellectual challenge. "It's a puzzle, and I like that," she says.
Despite gaining more experience in several larger firms, such as Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, she was laid off from each. "For someone who is very bright, high-achieving and doing a good job, that really hurt! Enough of this! I'll just have my own firm." In 1989, at age 48, she opened an estate-planning office with another woman lawyer in San Francisco. After a few years the partner left. So did her husband. "I'm a strong, domineering, do-it-my-way kind of gal," Wald says, chuckling.
For awhile Wald had her own office in San Francisco. Then she decided to live in Marin for the sunshine, and relocated her office to San Rafael. Clients from San Francisco love coming across the Golden Gate to meet with Wald and Louie, the small dog who does most of her legal research. They also get to see the three-dimensional artwork Wald creates and hangs on her walls.
For the years Wald had an office in downtown San Francisco, clients griped about the $20 they had to spend on parking, even though they paid her thousands. Parking fees became an irritant. "I could have gotten so much goodwill if I had handed them a $20 bill and offered to pay for their parking," Wald says. "It never occurred to me. It really is a big deal."
Some clients don't want to pay for services she has provided. "Pisses me off," she says, because she worked hard to please them. Despite the occasional collection snafu, estate-planning law still appeals to Wald. "It's my job to make people comfortable enough so they stick with it, complete the documents, come back and sign them," she says. Usually they do, because Wald poses critical life questions with delicacy, humor and warmth.
Though some of Wald's clients are quite wealthy, many have modest wealth—assets they want to preserve and pass to the next generation. In conservatorships, Wald works under court supervision to protect seniors who can no longer think clearly or in their own best interests. Such elderly people often attract those who try to divest them of their wealth.
She has aligned her career with her heart. "If you are not working for anybody else," Wald says, "you can really live your values."
—James Dunn
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