Wolverton charts course for female attorneys

Listen to this article

Mary Wolverton knew she never would be just another attorney.

“I woke up in sixth grade when they said I couldn’t be an altar server,” joked Wolverton, of Peterson, Johnson & Murray SC, Milwaukee. “There were so few of us that we weren’t individuals. One of us was always the woman attorney.”

Wolverton began her career in 1979 in medical malpractice, largely because it was the only field that would accept her kind.

“In the health care field, clients were accepting of women, which was not necessarily true in defense work,” she said. “They couldn’t send me to a construction site. There were all sorts of things I couldn’t do. But med-mal, women could do.”

So Wolverton combined her experiences as a former chemistry major and medical journalist to carve out a niche as one of the top attorneys in health care defense. Along the way, she took up the mantle for the rest of women.

“Whatever we did reflected on every other one,” Wolverton said. “So if I hadn’t been willing to step up and do things in my statewide defense attorney organization, it wouldn’t have been, ‘Mary doesn’t want to do that.’ It would have been, ‘They don’t want to do that.’

“So I took every opportunity. I always said yes, if there was a chance. I thought, ‘Why not you?’”

She readily accepted duties as president for such organizations as the women’s networking group Professional Dimensions, the National Conference for Women’s Bar Associations and the Wisconsin Defense Counsel, of which she was the first woman president. She also took positions with the Wisconsin Supreme Court Planning and Policy Committee, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law, and the Association of Women Lawyers, an organization Wolverton helped establish and for which she coordinated the first annual Women Judges’ Night, an event that has helped raise more than $100,000 in scholarships for female law students.

Wolverton also is a mentor.

“She could have just been a very successful lawyer in her chosen field, but she chose to reach out and try to help as many young women as possible,” said Laura Kwaterski, an assistant U.S. attorney and president of the Association of Women Lawyers.

Wolverton said it’s just a matter of doing what needs to be done, work she plans to continue into retirement.

“I’ve got other things I need to do,” she said. “It’s time for me to move on to work with my gender-equity concerns.”