December 2002

When Ojen Sirin graduated from the School of Law in 1999, she made a conscious decision not to conform to the image of law school graduates as being predictable and restrained. In October of that year, the 25 year-old had just taken the Florida Bar, but instead of accepting a great job offer from Goldberg & Hirsh, a small practice where she had been working for the past year and a half, Ojen capriciously opted for the lure of New York City.

Within a couple of weeks, Ojen broke the news to her employer and family, registered with a temp agency, packed her bags, and moved to New York. "I was nervous about relocating without a job, but I had a friend from law school who was doing well in New York, and ever since I arrived, I've been impressed by how well-regarded my JD from Miami has been in New York." Ojen arrived on a Sunday and the next day she received a call offering her a position with Shearman & Sterling, one of the largest firms in the city.

Ojen started at Shearman & Sterling by assisting with the preparation of a complex securities case for trial. When she was nearing completion of this six-month project, securities litigation had become a hot area and the firm asked her to come aboard full time to assist with more securities cases, including a multi-million dollar lawsuit against one of the Big Four accounting firms. After receiving an excellent appraisal on her first performance evaluation, in June 2001, Ojen was offered a management position administering the firm's litigation department.

One of Ojen's favorite responsibilities is managing the firm's legal assistant program. "We recruit college graduates from the top schools all over the nation for a two-year program to work intensely as a paralegal. The program is basically geared to be a crucial step before they enter law school to get a taste of the legal profession and work for a few years in an intense atmosphere to determine if law school is something they really want to pursue." Shearman & Sterling depends on paralegals more than most firms and Ojen supervises approximately 35 of them. She conducts a rigorous six-month training program that teaches new paralegals to manage every case that comes into the firm. Ojen says the structure of the program is based on the law school model. The paralegals are regularly assigned homework and the Socratic method is used to review their work. Ojen admits that she runs a tight ship, but she points out that her paralegals are a semester ahead of their classmates when they go to law school and almost all of them get As in their legal research & writing classes.

Ojen was born in Bronx, New York, but she considers Fort Lauderdale her hometown. She graduated magna cum laude with a dual degree in political science and international affairs from Florida State University. She is also fluent in Turkish. In law school, she was active in moot court and the Student Bar Association. She spent her first summer as a legal intern with the Family Division of the 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida and she earned some additional experience by doing freelance work as an independent legal researcher through the Student Legal Research Society. At the end of her second year of law school, Ojen started clerking at Goldberg & Hirsh, where she worked in the areas of personal injury, medical malpractice, and nursing home neglect.

Ojen has been in New York for three years now, and while she misses South Florida, she finds it increasingly difficult to seriously consider leaving her burgeoning career in New York. Her work ethic has made her a star with the partners at her firm and she credits her assiduous nature to her parents' immigrant background. "As immigrants from Turkey, my parents never had the educational opportunities that I've had. They've made countless sacrifices for me. My mom has worked two jobs since I was a little girl. All my life I've wanted to make my parents proud. That's always been my main motivational factor."