PERFECT
BALANCE
BY JIMMY MAGAHERN PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID SCHMIDT
Pamela Overton Risoleo juggles
high-stakes litigation, her family and
empowering young women
WHEN KRISTINE CAMPBELL STARTED
her career at Greenberg Traurig, she was
impressed with Pamela Overton Risoleo’s
legal work. Overton’s representation of a
string of Fortune 500 companies put the
Iowa-bred litigator on the front page of
the business journals, and her extended
work defending Lorillard Tobacco Company
in the landmark Big Tobacco liability suit
ultimately banished the likes of Joe Camel
and the Marlboro Man from the nation’s
billboards and proved she was able to handle
controversial cases.
But Overton’s desire to sneak into
the back of a school auditorium without
embarrassing her teenage son impressed
Campbell even more.
“My first year, we had this huge court
hearing down at the Arizona Superior Court,”
says Campbell, who started at the firm in
2002 and was one of a number of female
attorneys that Overton brought onboard
after helping form the Phoenix branch of the
international full-service law firm in 1999.
“We had prepared for weeks, had the
hearing and did really well. But on the way
back, she said ‘Can we stop at Brophy?
My son Teddy is doing his speech for the
freshman class.’ So we stopped and snuck in
the back and watched his speech.”
The detour proved reassuring for
Campbell, a first-year litigation associate
who was considering having children herself
but worried about how motherhood might
affect her career.
“I thought it was just amazing that she fit
both things into her day,” says Campbell, who
assisted Overton for nearly nine years before
accepting her current post as a commercial
litigation attorney for U-Haul International.
“To Pam, there was no difference in
importance between the big court hearing
and her son’s high school speech.”
Throughout the city, Overton, the co-chair
of Greenberg Traurig’s Phoenix litigation
practice, has been a mentor to female
attorneys. Overton spends much of her free
time championing causes like the Fresh Start
Women’s Foundation, a nonprofit resource
center dedicated to helping empower women,
where she is a founding board member.
