How I Made Office Managing Partner Q&A: ‘You Have to Be Focused on the Team,’ Says Carolyn Daly of Cohen Seglias

By: ALM Staff

Carolyn N. Daly, Partner at Cohen Seglias Pallas Greenhall & Furman, Newark, New Jersey

Carolyn Daly spoke with Law.com on how she made managing partner for Cohen Seglias Pallas Greenhall & Furman’s Newark office.

Practice area: Family law

Law school and year of graduation: Seton Hall University School of Law, 1996

The following has been edited for style.

How long have you been at the firm?

I joined Cohen Seglias in March 2023, so just over one year.

What year were you promoted/elected to your current role?

I was promoted to serve as the office managing partner of Cohen Seglias’ Newark office on Jan. 1, 2024.

Were you a partner at another firm before joining your present firm? If so, which one, how long were you there and when did you leave?

Before joining Cohen Seglias in March 2023, I owned my own firm for nearly 13 years, so in that sense, I was a partner at another firm.

How would you describe your career trajectory (was it organic or an active pursuit)?

My career trajectory was definitely organic. From the moment I became a lawyer, I don’t think I ever sat down and planned what I wanted to do. In law school, I knew I wanted to have a job, and at that time, clerkships were considered a prerequisite to getting a good job, so I took a clerkship in the Essex County, New Jersey, Criminal Division. I thought I would be a prosecutor. A month before my clerkship was supposed to start, the judge called me and said we’d been moved to the Hudson County, Family Division. Thus began my career in family law, which I never left. It was only 25 years later, after running my own practice for nearly 13 years, that I consciously made a decision about the trajectory of my career. I asked myself, “What am I going to do now?” I knew I had reached the limit of what I could do running my own practice and being chief bottle washer and cook. I knew I had to get a bigger platform with resources in areas like marketing, billing, IT and accounting—the things no one thinks about until they’re running their own practice—so that I could focus on building a team. I knew what I was looking for in a bigger firm, which I found in Cohen Seglias.