Life Lessons
Face-to-face communication is really important.
In this age of e-mail, voice mail and text, it’s easy for people to avoid a walk down the hall to a co-worker’s office or a trip out of the office to see a client. But you build much stronger personal relationships when you are talking to people in person.
When I first became partner-in-charge, it was like a fire hose of information. You can respond to e-mails and voice mails all day long. But you can’t let the technology drive you; you have to use it to make your life easier.
You have to stop and ask yourself: What is your strategy, and is what you’re doing right now related to that strategy?
Being visible in the community is really important. We have tried to do that with the time our lawyers spend in the community and where we put our dollars. I chose organizations I’m passionate about and that I can help with my expertise..
April Miller Boise didn’t even have time to elope.
A few months into her tenure as partner-in-charge at the Cleveland law office of Thompson Hine, Miller Boise and her fiance, a partner in the firm’s Cincinnati office, were struggling to squeeze in even a quick Las Vegas wedding. So they worked in the morning, grabbed a judge and a witness, and got married on a lunch break at the Cleveland Courthouse. Then they flew to Miami for a conference.
“We’d both been married before, so we wanted to do something small and intimate,” Miller Boise says. “But even eloping got to be too complicated.”
Still, she says, it was the best day she’s had in her hectic first year as the second African-American to lead the firm’s headquarters and the first woman to lead a major law office in Cleveland.
A Shaker Heights native, Miller Boise is the second of three children. Growing up, she imagined becoming an obstetrician. Helping people and delivering babies seemed very attractive until she hit college and realized that science wasn’t her strong suit. “I’m kind of squeamish,” she admits.
Instead, she found a place in the undergraduate business school at the University of Michigan, where a female business and real estate law professor got her interested in corporate law.
She attended the University of Chicago Law School at the same time President Barack Obama was a professor there. She never took his electives and never thought twice about it until she attended a small fundraiser early in his campaign.
When Miller Boise told Obama she had been a student at the University of Chicago when he lectured there, he asked why she hadn’t taken his class.
“I told him I
did take his class,” she remembers. “He said, ‘No, you didn’t. If you had taken my class, I would have remembered.’ So I felt a little bit badly lying.”
As an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, her career got a boost while representing a group of Japanese shareholders of the InterContinental Hotel chain who were auctioning off $3 billion in assets during the Asian financial crisis in early 1998.
“It was a global transaction with all of these prime hotel locations around the world,” she says. “It was such a sexy transaction.”
It also led to other big merger and acquisition deals, including a $10 billion purchase of Bankers Trust by Germany-based Deutsche Bank later that year.
In 1999, she joined Thompson Hine to find a better balance between working full time and raising a family. She has a 10-year-old son, Max, and a 7-year-old daughter, Zoe, whose favorite pastime is spending time with her mom at the office. “She is a proud daughter,” Miller Boise says.
An expert in complex business transactions, she helped to close the $1.5 billion sale of Goodyear’s engineered products division in 2007. But the past year has been less about big deals and more about strategy and understanding the challenges clients face in the marketplace.
In just her second week on the job, Miller Boise had to make personnel cuts that had been decided before she took over. “We really pride ourselves on having a very collegial work environment,” she says, “so to let part of your team go was very difficult.”
Going forward, she hopes to use the changing market to attract large corporate transactions. Compared to firms on the coasts, the Cleveland office’s cost structure positions it well to attract legal work from New York-based firms, she says.
“Many companies are looking at the hourly rates that they have been paying for legal services from Wall Street firms and seeing that they are not getting better results,” she says.
Miller Boise can look to her law school yearbook for motivation. “It was funny to see my picture and Barack Obama’s picture in the same book,” she says. “It’s very inspiring.”
In a similar way, women and minorities throughout the country have been inspired by Miller Boise’s new leadership role. “Sometimes, I’ll get an e-mail from someone saying, ‘I’m really proud of you, you’re doing a good job’ — somebody that I don’t even know. It makes me feel good to be a role model for people.”