“Mentoring may be one of the most important, if not the most important, aspects of a successful big law firm attorney’s experience,” said Anastasia Kaup on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast. Kaup, a finance partner at Duane Morris LLP in Chicago, said she realized the importance of mentoring very early in her legal career, which began in New York in 2011, and as a member of Duane Morris’s diversity and inclusion committee, she helps ensure that every diverse attorney at the firm is getting specific opportunities for career development.

As an LGTBQ lawyer raised by a single mother, Kaup realized the importance of mentoring very early in her career. She began her career in the early 2010s with a focus on bankruptcy and found that she preferred the transactional side of that practice to its litigation aspects, which led her to shift to finance work. Kaup has built a diverse practice with an emphasis on fund and sponsor finance.

Her early experiences seeing contracts “picked apart by bankruptcy litigators,” she said, have “given me foresight so that I can help my clients avoid some of those pitfalls in structuring those deals from the outset.”

In her spare time, Kaup is a serious practitioner of Krav Maga, which she calls “the most practically applicable martial art for defending yourself in a real-life scenario like a mugging.”

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