Author and former partner, Vinson & Elkins

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Legal thriller author Patricia Hunt Holmes spent 30 years as a public finance attorney with a large international law firm specializing in nonprofit healthcare finance and rural electric cooperative finance. She sits down with M.C. Sungaila to discuss what it was like to be one of the first women partners at her law firm, her journey from a Ph.D. to paralegal and then lawyer, and her current career as an author of legal thrillers that expose readers to real life issues, such as human trafficking.  There is power in storytelling, especially in addressing contemporary social issues.

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Relevant episode links:

Patricia Hunt Holmes, Searching For Pilar, Crude Ambition, United Ways, YMCA, Inprint, National Sex Trafficking Hotline, Stages, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Baker Botts, Shell, Kinder Morgan, The Lincoln Highway,A Gentlemen in Moscow, Cloud Cuckoo Land

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About Patricia Hunt Holmes:

I use storytelling to bring readers to the front-lines of human engagement. The stories are an entry point to delving deeper into some of today's prevalent social issues.

I'm very happy to have Patricia Hunt Holmes. She has quite a range of careers. She's on her third career now. She's a novelist. Previously, she was a law firm partner at a major law firm and even prior to that, a pre-law career. Welcome, Patricia.

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Usually, I start by asking what drew you to a legal career. Before that, you had another career. Maybe we should talk about that.

Before that, I was an academic. I went to the University of Missouri because I wanted to be a writer. They had the best journalism school in the country. It was in the '60s. I went there and I thought I was going to be a great creative writer and journalist. I took a creative writing course during my freshman year and got a C. I realized I didn't have anything to say at eighteen that the world was waiting to hear. I was going to be a journalist, which is the last two years, but my counselor told me to take a European History class because I wanted to be an international journalist. I did and I fell in love with history. I went on and got a PhD in Russian and South Asian History. I taught at the University of Missouri and the University of Tennessee.

Russian and South Asian History sound to be very disparate.

Not really. My dissertation was on Leo Tolstoy and his relationship with Mahatma Gandhi. Most people don't know they had a relationship but they did. Tolstoy thought he had to develop tools for a nonviolent social revolution in Russia. He was in his 70s and 80s when Gandhi was in law school in London. Gandhi read his work and was inspired by it. He started in South Africa as a lawyer. He is from India but his brother sent him to South Africa to do some work. He was a follower of Tolstoy and they corresponded for a couple of years at the end of Tolstoy's life. Tolstoy was writing a book about Gandhi because he thought that Gandhi was the one who understood his teachings on nonviolence and that he was following in his lead and would lead the revolution. That was their relationship. 

I went to Russia. I researched it and it was a lot of fun. That was good preparation for not only my legal career in writing a dissertation but also writing a book. People say, "How could you write a book?" I said, "I already did." A dissertation is a book. I taught for six years and decided I liked eating better than teaching. I went to law school at the University of Houston. At the time, I was working for Vinson & Elkins, a large law firm in Houston. They hired me because they didn't have any other PhDs in Russian History and figured I could do something. I started their legal assistant program. I recruited other Master's degree and PhD people who were on the market at that time to come to work as legal assistants.

I was doing that and had my two daughters during that time. When they were 1 and 4 years old, I got the bright idea to go to law school. I went to the University of Houston. When I was finished, I went back to Vinson & Elkins and stayed there for my whole career. I made partner in '91 and retired at the end of 2012. When you're old, they kick you out. They say, "Go do something useful now."

In some ways, that would be nice to stay at the same law firm where you had the legal system program and then became a lawyer. On the other hand, it might be a little bit of a challenge to do that transition at first because people see you in one role, and now you have another one. Was that hard at first?

A lot of people told me, especially other law firms, "Don't go back there because they will always see you as a legal assistant." I interviewed with 21 law firms but I still liked it there and I liked the people. I went to work in real estate, which was something I had not done when I was there. It was not a problem until it was far along in my career. I was working as local counsel to Latham on a Texas power plant financing. I involved one of our more senior lawyers from a different group. When we went to New York, he said to the lawyer in New York at Latham, "Pat will be helpful. She used to be a legal assistant." I have been a partner for fifteen years. That's the only time that I had that issue.

They were referring to your broad range of skills, all kinds of them.

He was trying to steal my client. That’s what he was doing.

I was trying to give the charitable explanation but that happens on occasion. It's a little challenging out there.

It could be a problem but it didn't turn out to be.

That's wonderful to hear. Even if it works itself out over time, it might be a little awkward in the beginning. It's good to know that the firm was supportive. I was thinking about that in terms of the firm and the people you work with or report to you. Do they have your ultimate growth in mind? Do they want you to become the best you can be, even if that means leaving the role that you have or the firm that you're at? It's gratifying to know that the firm was like, "We want Patricia to be whatever Patricia wants to be. We want to support that whether it's the legal assistant, attorney or a partner." I can understand why you stayed.

Having had the PhD helped because people would go back to that sometimes. Also, I was older. When I started back, I was 36. People didn't assume I was a new lawyer. They thought I knew more than I did in the beginning. All those things helped too.

Consciously or unconsciously, did you apply any of the teaching skills that you had gained in your legal practice?

I was good at business development. I created a course for our mid-level associates and led it for 5 or 6 years. I enjoyed it because I was teaching. The way I did it was I would pick a topic and since I had such a long tenure at the firm, I knew a lot of the lawyers. I would pick lawyers that I knew were good at something. I told them I was Oprah. We would have a panel discussion for the associates, teaching them about networking and keeping up with clients, whatever it was.

At one point, I hired this lady from Tiffany's who was their social manners person and taught social manners like how to introduce people, where to sit at the table, how to ask for the check, and different things like that. They loved it. It was fun. Everybody was shaking everybody else's hand and looking them in the eye. I mentored a lot of young lawyers, both men and women. I enjoyed doing that because I had good mentors when I was there.

When you said, "I was good at business development," what does that mean? Why do you think you were? What does that look like to you? People sometimes have an image of what business development is and it's not pretty in terms of what it looks like to engage in that. I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.

You get business through relationships. It's building relationships, making friendships and being thoughtful. My whole social life during my working career was taking clients out. I became friends with them. There was a woman client at Chase who was a corporate trust officer and our children were the same age. Every year, I would take them to The Nutcracker with our daughters. 

My practice was representing large nonprofits and their financing like hospitals, YMCA, United Ways and rural electric co-ops. They would have benefits and galas, and I would buy tables. If it was an event that everybody in town wanted to go to, I would buy a table and fill it with clients. I always send Christmas cards to people far away. I would send them good company pecan pies from Texas, packed. It's being thoughtful, liking people and remembering that you are a service provider working for them. 

I would hear clients sometimes talk about lawyers that thought they were more important or more high status than the clients. I always tried to make the client feel that I respected them and I was there to do their work, and not that I was some fancy big firm lawyer. One way you can do that is to find something that you have in common with anybody. The hardest one I ever had was at a dinner in Washington, DC with a bunch of co-op board members from North Dakota. All they wanted to talk about was asparagus. They were asparagus growers. I don’t know anything about asparagus.

I enjoy asparagus but there's probably a limited discussion about it.

Everybody has something interesting, something you can learn from, and you keep asking them questions until you find it.

Did you know that asparagus could grow 12-inches in one night?

You learned a lot.

I have the philosophy that everybody has something interesting that you can learn from. You keep asking them questions until you find it. It may take a long time or it may happen right away. You may have both gone to the University of Missouri, or both have Hungarian grandparents. If you ask a lot of questions, you'll find something eventually. Listening to them is important. Not only talking to them but drawing them out.

The listening part can be hard to do that in a true way because you're often thinking, “What is the next thing I should say?” You’re getting preoccupied with that. That takes some practice to listen and respond. That helps you draw people out too because someone is interested in learning about me. That's nice. People appreciate that. 

I love your approach to it, which is relationships, building bridges and connections with people on a very human level. You do it quite well. I remembered you from a conference many years ago that we were both at in Texas. You were the same warm-hearted and inquisitive person now as you were then. It stays with people. Your interest shows in other people, and your warmth comes across. It's very nice.

If you have to hire a lawyer, you may as well hire one you enjoy being with. You pay that money anyway.

You might as well enjoy working with them along the way. That is an interesting practice. You mentioned real estate and that you were focused on nonprofits in that particular regard. How did you come to specialize in that? How many women were in that practice area? What was it like to be in a large firm at the time that you were there?

I started in real estate because I had not worked there. I had worked in public finance mainly when I was hiring all the legal assistants and worked for BZ Group. It was a business group. They both wanted me to come to work for them and I liked the people there a lot. I clerked in oil and gas and real estate. I went to real estate because they had some women senior associates.

I thought, "This group is women-friendly." Within less than two years, the one who was up for partner and that everybody thought would make partner did not, so she left. The next most senior saw the writing on the wall and she went to work for a client. The next one, they outplaced her to Kettle Kitchens. The other one left and said, "They will never make a woman partner." She went to a smaller firm as a partner. All of a sudden, I was the senior partner and lawyer. I thought, "These guys are not in for it." 

I started looking around. I had always liked public finance. The head of the section had been my mentor and the one I talked to when I thought about going to law school. I didn't think those guys would see me as a legal assistant forever. I approached them and they said, "Sure," so I switched. I was in public finance. I started in '83. In '85, we started doing workouts and foreclosures. All the Texas banks got bought. I did one too many workouts of deals where there were seven wraparound deeds of trust. I said, "I didn't get a PhD and a JD to do this. I wanted to do deals." I moved to public finance and did some creative things in water authority things and hospital bond issues.

The Tax Bill of '86 was then passed and all that work went away. It was four years of scrambling for all young lawyers. You had to have the hours but there wasn't much work. I did anything. One of our clients bought a lot of canals from another water authority. I drove down to the boonies every day for six months and mapped the canal route because I had real estate training. I kept busy doing different things when I was up for partner in '91. All of a sudden, all the hospitals went to market. I was the only person left who knew how to do a hospital deal. I was busy. I built 3,300 hours that year and made partner. That's as far as I remember.

There are a couple of things in there. First would be choosing a department because you think, "There seem to be a lot of women here." It looks like it's a pretty good ground to go to, then have them leave one after the other. That's an experience that women have. That's a good admonition to pay attention to that. There are more women in a firm or a department, but you also need to dig a little deeper than that in terms of how they are treated and whether they leave at a certain point. 

 There were four women partners at the firm in my second year. That's not very many but that was what there were. One of them was in public finance. I knew that they would leave. At that point, I wanted to do something other than deeds of trust.

There were a lot of other motivating factors there. You wanted some challenge.

I told both my daughters this, "Find something you love to do, and you will be good at it. You will be successful and it will never be work." I liked public finances and doing deals, but it has a social purpose. When you're done, you either got a school, water tower, hospital, electric utility or something that has a public purpose that is satisfying. There were a lot of the deals that I did in the beginning. Because there wasn't enough hospital work to keep me busy, I did all sorts of things like extending water to the Colonias down in South Texas from the sea of Harlingen. There were these settlements where people would come across the border a long time ago. They lived in these Colonias or squatter's areas. They didn't have water or sewer. I worked on extending water to them. I worked on the first privately funded hydropower project with the corps of engineers in East Texas. 

There were lots of interesting things to do in that area. People don't know about it because they don't teach it in law school. I picked up representing rural electric cooperatives in 1990. My mentor had done some of that work. That was when Reagan wanted to privatize the REA. I did the real estate work to release all the government liens on the co-ops properties, then created a practice in that area.

It's very satisfying. You go out to these small towns, the local people are on the board, and they're providing for their own and their neighbor's electricity. I was mainly doing either electric co-op and hospital work, one or the other. Eventually, I had to make a choice, and the hospital work is what I chose. By the end of my career, that's mostly what I was doing.

Why did you have to choose between them?

I had too much work.

Were there conflicts or anything?

No conflicts. I had a lot of people working under me at that point. There's this quality control and there's only so much you can do. I liked hospital work. We have the Texas Medical Center here. I used to drive my daughters around the medical center because my husband worked there. They say, "Mommy helped finance that building." It's funny because my older daughter who is a lawyer now has used that line. What I did was extremely specialized. There was only one other person in town who did it and that was a man. I took one of my associates to a meeting. He’s passive-aggressive. Either he was the bond counsel and I was the underwriter counsel or vice versa.

You would see a lot of each other because you helped in the transactions.

I insisted that my practice went to a woman when I retired. I didn't have any choice. I had reached retirement age. You can move on and go to another firm. I had plenty of firms wanting me and bring my book of business but there were other things I wanted to do at that point. As soon as I did that, I found that my male partners were taking my clients out to play golf.

Find something you love to do, and you'll be good at it, and you'll be successful, and it'll never feel like work.

We had a young woman who had worked with me for years as a counsel. I wanted her to take over my practice. Another firm made me an offer I said, "I'm done but if you hire her, I'll make sure she gets my clients with her." I told the guys at my firm that. All of a sudden, they decided to make her a partner. I'm happy that I left my practice to another woman.

We talked about having mentors, but there are people who are champions or sponsors who make things happen for people's careers. It sounds like you did that for your successor. At any level, it's nice to hear.

I had a very good mentor. He went out of his way for me to come up. I would not have made it without him.

The way to repay that is to help someone else in turn. That is wonderful.

You need to be assertive, not aggressive but assertive, as a woman in a law firm.

There's a fine line in that. In that case, you saw where things were going and you handed it off in the past so that there was no need to have any direct conflict. They would be like, "Here's the situation. You're free to do what you like but here's where it's going."

Gandhi used to say that he would make it easier for people to do what he wanted than to not do what he wanted. Satyagraha was his form of conflict with the British to get them to leave India. It's more than just standing in the street, refusing to move and going to jail. He had a lot of negotiating tools that I incorporated from studying him.

This is interesting because when you were talking about it, I don't think there are many law firm partners who would say, "What would Gandhi do and know?" First, there wouldn't be that inclination because there's usually a lot more direct confrontation in lawyers. Second of all, it is to realize that there were many tools. What are some of the other tools that were helpful to him and might be helpful to others?

Watch your back. You can win more battles with sugar than with vinegar. I once had a guy who begged me to make a deal. He was overwhelmed and couldn't handle it. I said, "I'll take it." In Texas, the Attorney General has to approve all bond transcripts. When I sent it up to the Attorney General, they called me up and said, "What are you doing submitting this? We sent you a letter saying we would never approve it." I could not find the guy who had talked me into taking it, but it would have been bad for the firm. There was a $5 million breakup fee involved with a big Wall Street bank in a little town. It was a real mess.

I finally groveled. I threw myself at the mercy of the Attorney General's office and explained, "This is what's going to happen if this doesn't end. These poor people in this town think that this is going to work out. They don't know it's going to cost them $5 million." They found a way to make it legal. The problem was what we were doing was legal under Federal Tax Law but not under the state. They found a way to change the documentation to let the deal go through and close. After it closed, I found out that there had been an upfront fee and he had already taken all the money. 

You did all the work.

I was a partner at this point. He was like, "Whatever." I said, "No." I went to the MAT. I said, "I'll take this all the way to the managing partner." Finally, rather than me going to the managing partner, they reoriented the billings.

You rescued that deal.

I sweated over it. None of the guys would help me. They all said, "That's terrible.” You have to be tough. He didn't want me to go to the managing partner because he was clearly wrong, then he gave in. That's another example of making it worse to do what he wanted to do than what I wanted to do.

He would be willing to level it and try to fight with you but if you leapfrogged it up, that would be too challenging. Also, you have to reveal the situation that the deal was in when you got it, and that you would not have been good for the firm and you rescued it. It seems like that's not good either.

He didn't care if our partners knew, but he didn't want the head of the firm to know.

You have to figure out what that is that someone would rather not happen. You want to go, "Okay."

In a big firm, you know that if somebody has done wrong, they don't want to go to the management committee.

That's not good but they'll try to negotiate what they can partner to partner, for sure. I've never had something quite like that, but certainly the negotiations for billing credit and things like that. I've had some more people say, "I gave your name to someone. Now, I want half the billing credit." I'm like, "Did you do anything other than give my name? If you did more, that's fine. I'm happy to share it. I give your name and other people's names all the time. If I'm not going to bring it in, then I don't get credit for that." You don't know unless you ask, so I don't hold it against him. There might be someone who says yes to that, so they keep asking. Not me but maybe somebody else. It can't hurt to ask. I don't hold any grudge against someone doing that, but it is funny.

People will push to see what they can get.

When you come to hand off your clients to your successor and decide, "Now what am I going to do?" Did you immediately come back to, "I have something to say. I want to go back to my creative writing, interests and roots," or did that evolve?

It's hard when you retire because you've had an identity as a lawyer with a big firm. I've seen this with so many people. There's a loss of your home and identity. One of the things is I had been teaching on an adjunct basis for five years at the University of Texas Health Science Center on legal issues for healthcare administrators. 

They asked me to come to the faculty full-time because I have a PhD. I thought, "I'll be part of the University of Texas. That's dignified." I agreed to do it. When I started trying to work with the administration on ordering books and scheduling classes, it was a nightmare. You have been a business lawyer and you're used to things happening when they're supposed to, and then you work with these people in a big bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy is very different. I do some adjunct teaching. It’s as long as I'm distant from some of those things as possible and have a full-time colleague on the faculty who can help mediate that. Otherwise, you're not used to it.

The way to repay someone’s help is to help someone else in turn.

When I was adjunct, somebody else ordered the textbooks and scheduled classes. I decided after six months, "I don't want to do this." I was going to make $1,200 or something. I told him I was sick so I couldn't do it. Eight months after I retired, my husband unexpectedly died. I was in shock for quite a while. He went in to get a knee replacement and didn't come out of the hospital. They never gave me a reason, not a heart attack, stroke or anything. These things happen. I was a wreck for quite a while. I had a big house and a pool. I couldn't handle that on my own, so I moved. I sold the house and bought another house closer to my daughters in town.

He taught at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, so I was in Clear Lake. I moved back into town and that took up a year. One of my neighbors asked me if I would help start a nonprofit to provide legal resources to immigrants. My grandfather came from Hungary and all East Coast European immigrants. I said, "Okay." I started it. I became chairman of the board because the others were all litigators and didn't know what an agenda was.

I was doing a lot of work with that. It became a full-time job. In the course of that, a friend of mine got me an invitation to Freedom Place, which was the first refuge for sex traffic girls practically in the country but in Houston. I went out there. I had never heard of sex trafficking. I saw all these beautiful young girls between 9 and 17 who looked like my daughters, but they had been living these ungodly lives as sex slaves. I was horrified. I read in the paper that Houston was the biggest hub in the country for this. Children at risk had a band that went around and showed you the sex trafficking sites. I did that.

I read an article in the paper about a woman in Mexico who went into Monterey to interview for a secretarial job. She woke up in a brothel in El Paso and was there for ten years. All this was happening while I was taking creative writing courses at Inprint, which is the literary society. I started writing a short story based on the woman being drugged. I was writing, reading and studying everything that was available. Everything that was available was by survivors. It was horrible and nobody would ever read it. I kept writing and thought this could be a novel that people would read and learn what's going on in our city because nobody like me knows. I started writing Searching For Pilar and it was published in 2018.

The first 2/3 of it are based on true stories that were happening in Houston at the time. The last 1/3 is the legal part that I had to make up to end the story. It's about three girls who were kidnapped in Mexico City and trafficked to Houston to work in the glitzy men's clubs in Galleria, and then in El Barrio Cantina that was inhumane. 

The main character's brother didn't stay with her when she was kidnapped and feels guilty. He's a soccer player. He gets good at what he's doing, transfers to the Houston Professional Soccer Team, and spends four years in Mexico and Houston searching for Pilar. He was helped by some Houstonians, some second-generation Hispanic lawyers. It's a legal book but it's done very well. I have sold lots of copies. I talked to universities, nonprofits, book clubs and a lot of people. They all say, "I had no idea." 

When I started, people would say, "We don't have sex trafficking in Houston." Who knows we do? I tried to write it to bring empathy to these victims because half of the victims of sex trafficking in the country are international, and half are domestic. In the beginning, I thought I was going to write about a girl from Russia, Mexico or somewhere, but I decided that was too broad. I focused on this one character. If you want to learn what sex trafficking is like, it's a good book. It's a book about Houston too. It’s about people who don't see, who don't want to see and who want to help.

It has certainly heightened the awareness that it's going on and what it looks like. Has it impacted lawyers taking action or any community efforts that have become more robust around trafficking?

There are a lot of groups now working on trafficking in Houston. Some of my friends have gotten involved on boards of various anti-sex trafficking groups. I try to make people aware of what the signs are. The three girls from Mexico are three examples of how this happens to girls. The main character's husband loses his job and they're desperate, so she goes to an interview for a secretarial job. The second one is in an abusive relationship at home. This guy comes along and says, "I'll take care of you and love you." He's a trafficker. The third one is a young girl who wants to be a movie star. A man comes along and says, "You could be on a telenovela if you take me as your agent." 

Those are the other ways. Now, the internet is a big source. They are grooming girls in high school. I'm talking to The Breakfast Club and I'm getting ready for that. I had to expand the ways in which this happens, but I always try to tell people what the signs are and what to do if you see them. Call 911 or call the National Sex Trafficking Hotline. If it's nothing, they'll take care of that.

That's helpful to help people identify that because there's quite a bit of it in areas that you wouldn't think. In suburban areas and areas where you're like, "I wouldn't have thought of that." To be aware of that and to be able to report things would help. That's exciting that that's where you went with your first book. You also have Crude Ambition, your second book. That one is more about the law firm setting.

That was published in June 2021. The Crude is a double entendre for crude oil. It's a large law firm with a large energy practice. It's about two young women. In the beginning, one is a second-year lawyer in a big firm. She's from a small town in Central Texas. The other girl is a summer intern from New Jersey who goes to Penn. The second-year lawyer is asked to bring her sponsee to a recruiting party down in Galveston at a beach house. She takes her with her and they're having a great time. The second-year lawyer drinks a little too much. The owner of the house or his son who's a partner says, "There are lots of rooms upstairs for anybody who wants to go up and go home in the morning." 

They did and in the middle of the night, the second-year lawyer wakes up and the girl is not in her bed. She hears men arguing downstairs. She goes down looking for her and nobody will talk to her when she's asking where Laura is. She finds her in the dining room on the floor, bleeding unconscious with a broken arm. She called 911. Why not? The police will come. Nobody is saying anything. She takes her in her car. One of the guys helps her get her in the car and takes her to the hospital on the island. She's still unconscious. They said, "Get a little bit of sleep and come back in the morning. We’re going to watch her." She comes back in the morning and the girl is gone. 

She doesn't know where she is. None of the guys will talk about it. All she hears is, "She decided to go back home where her boyfriend was." She knows that's not true. She struggles with, "Do I endanger my career by making a fuss when I don't know what's going on or not?" She seeks advice from several people, none of which is helpful. She struggles with that. The other girl, the one who was assaulted, makes her way home. Her life has been destroyed for a while. She eventually gets herself in better shape, and then everybody comes together in the end.

You mentioned that there were some other good reasons to read that book in terms of law firm life and some tips for women associates looking to do well in a law firm.

Carolyn, the main character, desperately wants to make partner. She was from a small town and always wanted to make it big in the big city. She's very ethical and that's why she struggles with her conscience. She is with her best friend who's another woman lawyer in her class. She grew up in River Oaks, the best part of Houston, and is more familiar with law firms. She’s getting advice from lawyers in her family. There are lots of things I put in there as tips or things I had I learned to help women who want to get ahead in a law firm who want to make partner, and how to handle different situations. It would be a great book for young women law students or lawyers to read and learn some things that will help them in their careers.

That's a good reading recommendation for folks, either one or both of Patricia's books. Are you working on another book or are you in between?

I'm in between. You have to do a lot of marketing when you publish.

That's why I asked that because there's the writing time for the book, production and editing, then there's the other part of it when it comes out like marketing and all of that.

My daughters have been urging me to write something. They say I'm becoming opinionated. I've started writing my thoughts on things in the world nowadays. They said, "Take a month and see where this goes. If it doesn't go anywhere, whatever." I like writing about social issues. Crude Ambition is about the moral challenges you face in a professional career. Sometimes, things that are good like the relationships that help you in your career need to be reevaluated from time to time as time goes on because things change. You need to keep your moral compass.

It's interesting coming back to the comment you made at the beginning which was, "I was interested in writing but I didn't have that much to say when I was eighteen." Now that you've had all of these various experiences professionally and personally, you have a lot to say for the public’s good in a lot of ways. Continue with your good public theme of public finance and now in the novels. 

One of the things I'm struck by from guests like you is that there are many different parts to our lives, and our particular skills and interests come together in a unique way for us to contribute in different ways throughout our life. Only you could have done that because you have all those different parts of the experience together that make that possible. It might seem like it's all in order and planned but it's not. It naturally flows from what you're good at and what you like.

When I was in graduate school, there was a psychologist who originated the concept of adolescence and midlife crisis. I was taken with him when I wrote my dissertation about the different stages Tolstoy and Gandhi went through in their lives. Both of them went through a midlife crisis. His thesis was that everything you've learned comes together at one point. You reevaluate your life and think if it was worthwhile or not. If it wasn't, then you get old and die. If you decide it was, you draw on all those things that you've learned. You go on and have a creative last stage. There's a woman who wrote a book called Stages that is a follower of his. It's about women's lives in different stages. I'm in the post-midlife crisis stage.

You're where it's all coming together in the creative outlet. The range of things you've done and have done so well is amazing. I'm excited about your writing career because it's very hard to do. It takes a lot of discipline to write and stay with two novels and the whole thing that’s involved in publishing. There's a lot more to that than a lot of people know. A lot of good things of good discipline and hard work from your law practice days go into the writing as well, I'm sure. You mentioned your daughters. What are your daughters doing now? 

You need to reevaluate the relationships that help you in your career as time goes on because things change, and you need to keep your moral compass. 

My older daughter, Hillary is with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She's co-head worldwide of their capital markets practice. She's a securities lawyer who does a lot of advising boards and M&A work. She loves it. She was a partner at Baker Botts, but then five of them left and opened the Gibson Dunn office. She is happy there. She does a lot of writing about law. She's got something on LinkedIn practically every day about securities. She has two children. 

I didn't tell you about my fourth career, which is golf. I start playing golf and I love it. I'm working with her younger son on his golf. My younger daughter, Ashley is an environmental geologist and a project manager for a large engineering company. She represents Shell, Kinder Morgan, . She has a little red-headed boy. I'm very fortunate. I have three gorgeous grandsons. I love to be with them.

Family is important. It's great that you're all in the same area too so that you can enjoy the grandchildren more than not.

I tried to get the boys to write. I have them dictate and I type out their stories. Some of them are hysterical. We'll see if we get a writer out of it.

It's good to start early to see if there is a spark that someone is interested in. Even if not, children have some pretty good stories. I wanted to close with a little lightning round of a few short answer questions and see where you land on these. The first one is, what talent would you most like to have that you don't have?

Singing. I can't hold a tune. I go somewhere and hear people with these beautiful voices come out. It makes me happy.

Who are your favorite writers?

Leo Tolstoy. I finished The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. His book is good but his book, A Gentlemen in Moscow, is my favorite. That was wonderful. I also finished Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land. I liked it. I had read the synopsis, 4 different people and 1 Greek epic. It's wonderful. That's my latest but I read a lot.

Most writers read a lot as well. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

My children and grandchildren.

Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you invite as a dinner guest?

Leo Tolstoy.

Not Gandhi?

He's a little sanctimonious.

Who is your hero in real life?

People who stick to their morals and are not ego-bound and think about other people. I'll have to think on that one.

The last question is, what is your motto? 

Keep moving. That was my mother's motto. She passed away at the age of 97. She was still in her house and moving around. All of a sudden, she got pneumonia. Things slowed down and she passed away. She was the nicest and kindest. Maybe she's my hero. She was a good person. I never heard her say a bad word about anybody. She had a good sense of humor and never criticized. Her kids were always supportive. She was the best person I have ever known. I took three memoir classes at Inprint. I decided I was the only one who didn't have a mother who was a murderer, crazy or mean.

I found that in the writing classes too in the creative nonfiction. There was always some very dark past that people wanted to revisit. I don't have that.

I remember asking the instructor in one of the first classes I took, "Can you write if you're happy?"

It seems like not because there's a whole lot of angst going on. I remember working out the angst. Thank you so much for joining the show and talking about all of your different experiences and some very good advice for handling some of the challenges that women face in business, particularly in the law. Thank you so much, Patricia.

This has been delightful. Thank you. I love talking to you.