Women Who Wow

Subscribe to Women Who Wow via RSS

In this installment of the Women Who Wow series, get to know Nita Sanger.

Nita is the Chief Executive Officer of Idea Innovate Consulting, a boutique strategy consulting firm transforming businesses for growth in professional, financial and legal services. In addition, Nita is a Managing Director at Corporate Legal Innovation Consultants (CLIC), a consulting company focused on the legal industry and the Chief Operating Officer at In the House, a community for innovative general counsel.

Nita is a C-suite expert with more than 20 years of strategy and operations experience, transforming and scaling businesses for growth at global large and mid-sized corporates, and start-ups. In her previous roles, she assisted businesses to redesign their processes, reduce costs, optimize M&A /post-merger integrations, and drive talent and change management.

Michele Bonds is a New York-based Principal at Heidrick & Struggles and a member of the global Legal, Risk, Compliance & Government Affairs practice. Michele’s primary focus is on law firm infrastructure/business professionals, and law firm culture and acceleration advisory work. She has over 20 years of financial services and legal industry experience.

Prior to joining Heidrick & Struggles, Michele was longstanding Chief of Staff to the Senior Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell. She worked with firm leaders in navigating clients through numerous complex events including the financial crisis.

Michele received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University in political science and her Masters of Business Administration at Babson College. I worked with Michele at S&C and always admired her work ethic, poise and creativity.

Learn more about her in this profile.

The next Woman Who Wows is Dr. Catherine Sanderson, a professor of life sciences at Amherst College.

Professor Sanderson has published more than 25 journal articles and book chapters in addition to four college textbooks, middle school and high school health textbooks, and trade books on parenting as well as how mindset influences happiness, health and even how long we live (The Positive Shift). In 2012, she was named one of the country’s top 300 professors by the Princeton Review.

I met Professor Sanderson at the 2018 Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference where she served as keynote speaker. I was so moved by her talk about why happiness is significant, what truly makes us happy and practical ways that each of us can incorporate happiness into our everyday lives.

Learn more about her below. In addition, Professor Sanderson will be our featured speaker at the next Women Who Wow virtual event, this Thursday, May 21 at 5pm ET. Register here.

Cathy Duke is the Chief Talent Officer at Robinson+Cole (she is the first person to have this role at her firm). She spent 20+ years at Proskauer where she was the Legal Director for its top-ranked Labor and Employment Department. Prior to that, Cathy was a white-collar criminal defense and commercial litigation lawyer in private practice. I met Cathy when we both worked at Proskauer, and I always found her to be a great colleague and incredibly smart.

She was recently interviewed about her new role in Hartford Business. Learn more about Cathy in this Women Who Wow profile.

In this installment of Women Who Wow, meet Sheryl Odentz. Sheryl is the founder of Progress in Work, an award-winning, career management firm that provides attorneys and other professionals within the legal industry with tools and resources to “progress in work” and maximize career success through business development training and coaching, executive/leadership coaching and outplacement/career transition consulting. Learn more about her.

Paula T. Edgar, Esq., is a partner at Inclusion Strategy Solutions LLC, a consulting firm that provides innovative and strategic solutions on organizational diversity efforts, intercultural fluency initiatives, sexual harassment prevention and EEO compliance.

Paula speaks and consults on these and other topics by facilitating workshops, conducting live and virtual professional development training, delivering keynote speeches and coaching executives. Paula is an expert in inclusive executive/leadership development, personal branding, networking, social media and career strategies. She is a past President of the Metropolitan Black Bar Association (MBBA), New York’s largest black bar association.

Paula has previously served as the founder and CEO of PGE LLC, the inaugural Chief Diversity Officer at New York Law School, and as an attorney for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

I met Paula at a conference in 2019 at which we were both speakers. I was so moved by her talk, that I went up to her, let her know that and asked if we could keep in touch. We started following each other on LinkedIn and I became an even bigger fan of hers. Learn more about why Paula is so awesome below.

The next Woman Who Wows is Emily Witt, a managing director at boutique legal search and matchmaking firm Whistler Partners in NYC. Emily spent almost 15 years in the recruiting department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

Emily is also a fully certified comprehensive Pilates instructor. She combines her love of recruiting with helping people physically. One of her first placements in legal recruiting was one of her Pilates clients.  Learn more about her classes – she’s currently teaching online too. And read her Q&A below.

In this installment of Women Who Wow, which will be running all year long, learn more about Jennifer Dezso, the vice president at Acritas US. In her role, Jen handles business development plans and training, client feedback and satisfaction assessments, branding and awareness studies, product concept testing, market sizing analysis, setting performance metrics and benchmarks, identifying new market opportunities. She also presents and leads training on creating opportunities from market trends, developing action plans to grow client relationships, and developing business in the professional services world.

Learn more about her.