Athena Awards: Perfect Matchmaker

Ask attorney Michelle Sheehan about her childhood aspirations, and she offers full disclosure. Originally, she wanted to be a secretary. Then an executive secretary. Then a court reporter. And then a paralegal. “And then someone said, ‘If you’re going to be a paralegal, why don’t you just be a lawyer?’ ” she says.

Growing up next to a trailer park in Niles, she thought owning her own trailer would be the epitome of success. Then her parents divorced, and she moved to Woodmere Village with her mom and two brothers. There she learned two valuable lessons. First, tight jeans and concert T-shirts were no longer fashionable school attire. Second, people went to college.

“I didn’t even know about college because no one in my family ever went,” she says. “So I always say my lucky break was moving from an area where most people didn’t graduate high school into a school district where I had a higher set of expectations.”

She holds her three children to the same standard. When they were younger, she put up a comic drawing in her daughters’ closet of a mom reading a bedtime story to her kids. The caption read, “Once upon a time there was a law student who made partner and lived happily ever after.”

Miami University, the only school Sheehan could afford to apply to, paved the way to Sheehan’s own happy ending. After joining Reminger Co. as a law clerk, she made partner at age 30, practicing appellate, insurance and retail practices law. She became president of the Ohio Women’s Bar Association two months after giving birth to her third child at age 35. She formed and served on a rating committee that gives the OWBA a voice in educating the public about Cuyahoga County’s candidates for judgeships.

Sheehan knows judicial campaigns well. She ran husband Brendan Sheehan’s 2008 campaign for Cuyahoga County common pleas court judge. He won the primary by a 3-to-1 margin and went on to win the general election.

“What I enjoyed most was the freedom to make the decisions and to organize it in an efficient way that I believed would produce results,” she says. “To me, it was like getting ready for trial. I knew what my end goal was, and I organized it [thinking], How am I going to get there?”

Since then, Sheehan has mapped campaigns for women running for juvenile and domestic relations court judgeships. She also rallied support for former lieutenant governor Lee Fisher’s 2010 run for U.S. Senate.

“I don’t want her to get in trouble with her law firm, but let’s just say she spent a significant amount of time helping me,” says Fisher, a 20-year friend of Sheehan’s. “She was instrumental in mobilizing support, not just among women, but among lawyers and activists in her extensive network of contacts.”

Sheehan’s desire to help her friends advance goes far beyond politics. She’s like a one-woman headhunting firm, carrying a list of people looking for a job, new business or volunteer work.

“One of my former managing partner’s mantras was, ‘The best thing you can do for someone is to help them find a job,’ ” Sheehan explains. She often invites people to lunch so she can play matchmaker.

“For some reason, I can see the big picture better for others than I can for myself,” says Sheehan.

In 2006, Sheehan organized the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association’s Food for Thought program. Each August, it takes applications from female lawyers and forms groups of eight to 10 for monthly meetings over breakfast, lunch, dinner or cocktails.

“A lot of it is just educating each other about what you do,” Sheehan says. “It may not be today that you need somebody, but tomorrow if you need a domestic relations lawyer, you’re going to call somebody you know and trust.”

Ultimately, Sheehan hopes to be seen as a problem-solver in her work and through her professional connections. “To me, that is the greatest gift I can give someone,” she says. “We are a service industry, and we’re here to solve people’s problems.”