Kate McGuinness

Kate McGuinness practiced law in courtrooms, conference rooms and boardrooms. She started her career as an intern with the San Diego City Attorney’s office where she prosecuted misdemeanors. Following graduation from law school, she joined a major international law firm. After seven years in the trenches, she was invited to join the partnership, becoming one of only a handful of female partners among the firm’s equity owners who numbered more than a hundred.

Her practice ranged from leveraged buyouts to bankruptcies to investigations of corporate malfeasance. Her work took her from Los Angeles to London with frequent stops in New York City, Dallas and Denver.

After seventeen years at the firm, a Fortune 300 company recruited Kate to serve as its General Counsel. The position came with an office on the executive floor where she was the only female officer. Mercifully, the other women there filled her in on the corporate playbook. Kate left the company following a restructuring.

After the corporate world, Kate studied creative writing at UCLA and USC. She is the author of the legal thriller Terminal Ambition, A Maggie Mahoney Novel. Kate also blogs regularly about women’s rights. Her essays have appeared in Forbes Woman, Women’s Media Center, Jezebel, The Frisky, Ms. JD, Role/Reboot and Fem2pt0. Her bogs are collected at her website. She tweets about women’s issues as @k8mcguinness.

Kate lives in a utopian community in the Midwest with her son, her dogs and innumerable squirrels.