Christy Granieri:
You can only represent those wrongfully treated employees of the world. Been doing employment law since 2010.
Sonya Palmer:
Christy Granieri had no intention of being a lawyer.
Christy Granieri:
I had started in advertising, thinking that that's what I want to do. My now father-in-law is a lawyer, and he looked at me and had one of those conversations, "Christy, what the hell are you doing with your life? You're not happy in where you are. You have good LSAT scores, good undergrad scores. Go."
Sonya Palmer:
Sometimes we stumble onto the right path through discomfort. It might feel terrifying to step into the unknown, but for Christy, that uncertainty ultimately felt less daunting than a life that made her miserable.
Christy Granieri:
What was really interesting was, one, people figured out I had gone out on my own and left my own firm. The reach outs, "Glad to see you. It's about time, I was waiting for this. I couldn't believe you were there so long."
Sonya Palmer:
Today's conversation is about trusting your instincts, even when fear tries to hold you back. Welcome to LawHer Season 3. I'm Sonya Palmer, SVP of operations at Rankings, and I'm inviting you to pull up a seat to hear how the boldest women in law get power faster, and keep it longer.
Christy Granieri:
It's having the confidence, and I think there's something, oftentimes women in particular don't want to ruffle feathers. They want to go with the herd. They don't want to express an opinion that might not be agreed to on the other side of the conversation or something of that nature. By taking back power, it's really just standing up for yourself.
How can you do what you want to do, and others be damned because it's your path, and it will make you, brings you happiness, brings you joy. Really finding the internal power between starting a law firm or doing the type of law that I want to do, those were decisions that maybe weren't the easiest ones, made others uncomfortable, but for me that was really the big key was this is what I want to do. I have the fortitude, the strength, and I'm going to go forward and find the path to get to that and get to what I want.
Others, quite frankly, others be damned. Literally applied to law school, I think, in about 24 hours, and luckily the joy of going to the University of San Diego, a smaller school, I was able to call up some professors, get some letters of rec, and it was from there. It was kind of the path had been set.
Sonya Palmer:
Her leap into law may have been impulsive, but it planted a crucial seed. Christy realized that sometimes we have to let go of what we thought we wanted in order to discover something bigger, yet it would take years for her to recognize the power in that decision.
Christy Granieri:
I was made wrong from the beginning of my career. I didn't have the right tone in an email, "Well, I wouldn't have written it that way." It's like, "Well, if you want to write it, you write it." It took years for me to figure out what my voice was because I was told for so long, "Well, you have to do it this way. If you do it that way, you look weak." I'm not you. I'm not a older white man who's been doing this since the beginning of time.
Also, in my day to day, that is not how I talk. It took years into my practice, six, seven, eight years to finally be like, "F you. No, I'm going to do it how I want to. You want to send your email? You send your email. If I'm going to send the email, I'm going to send it in my voice, how I want to." I think that there is a way to run businesses with empathy and with a compassion that oftentimes women bring into the conversation.
There's also a way to do things without it being ego-driven that I think will be really wonderful for the legal community. There used to be this whole thing where you had to be kind of like, rawr, like meow cat thing, and if you weren't scratching the person next to you, you weren't going to rise in the ranks. You can be cordial to opposing counsel. You can be cordial to those around you. That isn't weakness. Being mean to others isn't power.
Use your big girl words and talk about what you want to do, and find a solution that isn't demeaning or putting those down around you to be better. Going back to the current climate and how attacking others has come back, I've seen it a little bit more in some of our younger, newly bar-minted attorneys who are trying to do this weird name-calling thing. I'm hoping that that, as the ladies keep coming up in the ways, and instead we can figure out a way to empower those around.
Fight, advocate your client, fight your facts, fight the that, but the idea that you don't give a courtesy extension, the idea that you're just snarking on the phone, and that you know that tone when someone's talking, you're like, "What the hell is going on? This is but a case. I got a whole bunch of other things." Our cases aren't our identities. It's our clients. I think a lot of people forget that it's not your money. It's not your this, it's not yours. It truly is your client's case.
When people can separate themselves and instead, again, we could disagree on a lot of things, but I routinely have a case is done, and go out for cocktails with opposing counsel, because we had a good fight and we could laugh over things. Again, you fight a clean fight, and you can have respect for the other side, and do it in a cordial fashion. I'm hoping as more women get into the profession, that is truly a path in which we can do, where it's not, stop the below the belt punches, stop being jerks to one another, and instead, let's figure out a way to best advocate for our clients.
Sonya Palmer:
More and more women are entering the field, forging new ways to advocate without sacrificing empathy. Christy's firm wanted a hammer, someone always on the attack, while she wanted to show up differently. Eventually that tension sparked a bigger reckoning. Maybe she needed to leave entirely.
Christy Granieri:
I was with my old firm for over 10 years. I was a partner there, and I was truly unhappy for about four to five of them. To walk away from a good salary, steady income, the consistency, and go and be like, "Okay, well, I'm going to shut that all down, and I don't know where I'm going to find my next case. I don't know if I have any clients, and hell, I'm just jump off this sort of springboard into starting a law firm." I didn't know what we were doing. I didn't know any of those sorts of things, and that was back in 2021.
Sonya Palmer:
The fear of the unknown proved far less terrifying than the certainty of staying in a place she had outgrown.
Christy Granieri:
My law partner and I made this big decision to start a law firm, and it's been the best decision, because when you are uncomfortable, when you don't know what's coming next, you're just a little hungrier. You're willing to fight for it, you're willing to put that extra effort in, and then the satisfaction of it not being handed to you. You have created your own direction forward, good, bad, or otherwise, and then you're learning along the path.
We've made decisions as business owners that you're like, "Huh, that wasn't a good one." You know what you do? "Oops, okay. Now, let me pivot and go figure out a better way to do things." That's the learning, that's the growth. That's where you can really, I think, grow as a person in this context as a lawyer and everything else.
Sonya Palmer:
Over half of female attorneys leave their law firm jobs within five years, often citing poor work-life balance or limited career advancement. Christy decided enough was enough, and she wanted to build a firm on her own terms.
Christy Granieri:
I want to work when I want to work, where I want to work, and I want to take the cases I want to take, and I want to work with the people I want to work with. It was that simple. I love my office, I love being in my office, but I love also being out of my office. I try to be out and traveling or being somewhere else a good two to three months out of the year. I don't have kids. My law partner has two small children.
His daughter was actually born the Friday, we started our law firm on Monday. 18 months and a day later, his son was born. Him and his wife, she's awesome. She also works full-time, but he wants to be a very active dad in his kid's life. For him being home for dinner is super-duper important, and it should be, and I love that. There's things that we do, and how we switch and adjust how we run our business is that there's things that I take later in afternoon, so he can make sure he's home, or picking up his kid from school, or whatever it might be.
My law partner and I are super good friends, like twenty-plus year friends. Him and my husband are best friends. I'm very good friends with his wife on our, when we are ever going to take vacation, we oftentimes are traveling together, things like I just booked a trip to Europe for three weeks in the fall, because that's really what I want to be able to do.
Sonya Palmer:
In a profession notorious for punishing work-life balance, Christy built a model that could accommodate family, friends, and even travel. It's autonomy and action that she says is what true power feels like.
Christy Granieri:
We just worked from up in the mountains for a week. Oh, that's what we wanted to do. I want to go play in the snow and still be able to work. It's given us that opportunity to be home for dinner when we want to, leave, because it's a crappy Tuesday, and you're like, "I'm out, I'm done. I'm going to go get a massage, I'm going to go for a walk, I'm going to go for a hike, and then you know what? Saturday morning at 6 AM, I'm going to get back to it because that's really what I would like to do."
Sonya Palmer:
When women have agency to set their own hours, workflow, and environment, they're more likely to stay in the profession and thrive. Christy's dream was to structure her practice so that both she and her partner, and even their spouses, could create the balance they needed.
Christy Granieri:
The first year, it was a wing of prayer and holding my breath at all points in time. I didn't think I could do it. I'm under 40. I don't know how to run a business. First year, it was just so scary that I didn't feel power. As we moved into that next year or so of running the firm, and all of a sudden, we're getting clients, we're getting cases, and then all of a sudden, they're like, "Thank God, I need you. Will you come work with me?"
Then I had some defense counsel reach out to ask me to partner with them on some various cases, where it's people that would've always gone to my old boss before, that would've gone to other people, and it was sort of that next round of validation, being like, "Oh, wait, I actually can do this, and people do recognize not only mastery and subject, but that I have the skill set." Then it's like, then the confidence starts building, and we got our second attorney that we had hired, and all of a sudden, I'm like, I'm really in, mildly practicing law really is the aspect of running a business and training those around.
Sadly, took an outside person's making comments that I think really all of a sudden, had that light bulb moment for me of like, "Holy shit, I actually can do this. I know what I'm doing. I can do this," and that fear of like, "Oh, my God, I'm not going to make payroll," finally stopped.
Sonya Palmer:
Christy is living proof that stepping into the unknown can reveal a power we don't even realize we've been building all along. For her, the biggest risk was staying in a life that no longer fit. She chose to leave to reshape her practice around the life she wanted to live, and discovered that you can be formidable without tearing others down.
Power is more than professional success. It's having the autonomy and agency to do things on your own terms, to work with integrity, and to lift others up along the way. This is LawHer. I'm Sonya Palmer, subscribe so you never miss an episode.
