14 SUPERLAWYERS.COM ATTORNEYS SELECTED TO SUPER LAW YERS WERE CHOSEN IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROCESS ON PAGE 8.
DWYER, 62, GREW UP IN A NOISY
Irish-American family that has lived in the
Bay Area for four generations. Her father
came out of the Marines in World War
II, got a job writing the prices on the big
blackboard at the Pacific Stock Exchange,
and went on to become a broker and
investment adviser. He eventually became
mayor of their town of Saratoga.
The older sister to two towering
brothers—she clocks in at 5 feet 7 inches;
they’re both 6-foot- 5—Dwyer developed
a range of strategies for controlling the
rambunctious boys when her mother was
not around. “I learned manipulation,” Dwyer
says. “I learned every trick in the book;” tools
that she admits came in handy later.
Dwyer had a comfortable, outdoorsy
upbringing. The family had horses, so she
rode almost every day. At Saratoga High
School, she played water polo, field hockey
and tennis, and worked on the student
newspaper and yearbook. At Santa Clara
in the late ’60s and early ’70s, she adopted
long blond hair in headbands, the requisite
bell-bottoms and had a boyfriend who
drove a Volkswagen van.
Working a series of retail jobs to help pay
for college, Dwyer had vague notions of
writing. She majored in English literature,
but one small problem: “I didn’t have
anything to say.”
Enter that life-changing gauntlet thrown
by her mother.
At the time, Dwyer didn’t understand
what lawyers did. The handful of lawyers
she knew were small-town civil litigators,
and men. She had no role models, but she
took the LSAT, did well and enrolled at
Santa Clara University School of Law.
“It was really hard, and I had no idea
whether I’d flunk out,” she says. “The new
vocabulary of the law was incredibly hard.
It was like learning a foreign language.”
She became fluent enough to land a
job at the American Stock Exchange. “I
wondered if the guy hired me because I
was cute,” Dwyer says, laughing. “I had no
earthly qualifications for the job.”
The most junior lawyer on a 15-attorney
team, she handled whatever the general
counsel threw at her, including basic
regulatory work and dealings with exchange
members. She created a scene every time
she visited the trading floor: a slender,
calm-voiced young woman explaining to
aggressive, shouting traders when and how
they were breaking the rules, and why they
needed to change—ASAP. Some of the
traders weren’t so welcoming.
“Their vocabulary was spectacular,”
Dwyer remembers. “I knew most of the
words they used, but I had never heard
them used so frequently, or so creatively.”
Dwyer rose through the ranks. By the
time she departed the Exchange after 12
years, she was general counsel and senior
vice president. “I had a 2-year-old, and I
decided to take a few years off to be with
her,” Dwyer says. She and her husband
added a son, and two years turned into
five as the growing family moved from
Manhattan to Brooklyn to the leafy
Westchester suburbs.
“For a while, after you quit a job like that,
you feel like you don’t have an identity,” she
says. “But you can’t really appreciate hard
work and the need for flexibility until you’ve
been home with two little kids.”
Re-entry into the corporate world wasn’t
easy. “No one would give me a job,” she
says. “Many of the people who always
told me how great I was wouldn’t even
take my phone calls.” She finally landed a
part-time assignment at Milbank, Tweed,
Hadley & McCloy in New York. Soon after,
Arthur Levitt, who had been her boss at
AMEX, was appointed chairman of the U.S.
If the classic financial-services lawyer tends to deny wrongdoing,
avoid responsibility and resist consumer-protection regulations—
all the while brimming with confidence—Dwyer breaks the mold.
She admits to bouts of doubt. “I kept telling myself, ‘I think I
can do this,’ but you never really know.”
Securities and Exchange Commission. He
asked her to come to Washington as his
chief counsel in 1993 to help move forward
his ambitious agenda for the SEC.
“Arthur was really committed at the
SEC to being an advocate for investors,”
Dwyer says. “It was something that
resonated with me.”
One of her biggest enforcement cases
involved price fixing against NASDAQ
and the National Association of Securities
Dealers; several big-capital markets
firms, including Charles Schwab & Co.,
were implicated for going along with the
price fixing. The rest of those firms denied
wrongdoing, or assured Dwyer that their
conduct was standard for the industry.
“Chuck Schwab kept coming in and
talking to us,” Dwyer says. “Schwab was
advocating for reform.” She was impressed
with Schwab, and Schwab was impressed
with her. When the case ended, Dwyer
was invited out to the firm’s San Francisco
headquarters to talk about a job. In those
pre-Web days, ordinary investors had little
access to information. They read the latest
prices in the newspaper and called their
brokers. Brokerage houses and exchanges in
effect sold access to customers. In contrast,
Schwab offered its most active customers
stock-price machines for their homes, so
they would have the same up-to-the-minute
information as Schwab’s brokers and
traders. “What a radical, investor-friendly
thing to do,” Dwyer thought at the time.
Schwab’s history of a customer-first
culture, along with a long-simmering
desire to move back to the Bay Area, led
Dwyer to leave the SEC after three and a
half years. “And Schwab paid better than
the government did,” she adds.
In late 1996, Schwab created a top-tier
position for her, combining all the firm’s
legal oversight into one role. Technically,
