Word: klieman
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Early in her career, fledgling Attorney Rikki Klieman made a major mistake. She failed to prepare fully for a simple bail hearing, thinking that her friendship with the opposing lawyer would help her win. She lost. "I learned then," she recalls, "never, ever to walk into a courtroom without knowing everything I could possibly know about my case." Today Klieman, 35, is among Boston's best defense lawyers, in charge of the criminal trial division at the city's prestigious firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart. Says one of the city's top criminal lawyers, Joseph Balliro...
From the age of four, Chicagoan Klieman had her sights on the theater. After her dreams of stardom fizzled in New York City, she remembered a professor at Northwestern University who had urged her to try law. When she said that girls did not become lawyers, he replied, "Girls don't, but women do." Klieman looked in on Manhattan's criminal courts and found that "the law is in many ways a lot of theater." After graduation from Boston University Law School and a clerkship with a federal judge, she went to work as a Massachusetts prosecutor...
Shortly after Klieman decided to move over to the defense table in 1981, she agreed to represent the alleged kingpin of a truck hijacking operation. "My client looked as if he broke legs for a living," she says, and the court clerk quipped that the fellow had a shot at acquittal "only if he wears a sheet over his head." Klieman set out to polish her client's image. She ate breakfast with him in the court cafeteria, so members of the jury could spot them chatting and relaxing. In the courtroom she touched him constantly and allowed...