‘Give It A Go,’ Says Woman Who Has

Some dancer, Jacqueline Kessel. She danced her way into Britain’s Royal Ballet despite parental misgivings.

She did a soft shoe shuffle into the executive ranks at a software company, almost by default.

She waltzed into law school without ever having taken a college class.

And today, she boogies down the fast track as head of her own Silicon Valley law firm.

Impressive as her footwork is, though, it’s Kessel’s wicked wit and bulldog tenacity - camouflaged by an English upper class accent - that come through most strongly. They’ve been there, apparently, from her earliest days as the middle child of three offspring of a lawyer and his wife in North Devonshire, England.

“From the age of 18 months, every time I heard music, I took my clothes off and needed to dance,” Kessel says. “As I grew older, I learned to keep my clothes on but still kept this passion for dancing.”

That passion bumped head-on into her parents’ wishes that she study something more, well, substantial. To dissuade her from the arts, her father got her to agree that if she wasn’t good enough to be the best she’d drop her dancing dream - and then arranged for her to audition with the Royal Ballet, the toughest program to get into.

“To his absolute chagrin and dismay, I not only passed the first audition but also the second,” says Kessel, who had absolutely no doubts herself.

From age 8 to 14, Kessel studied with the Royal Ballet, stopping only when a serious ankle injury forced her out. Her parents, by then, were convinced that she was artistic, however. Although the label was not without its cost.

“I think in my mind there’s probably a little tie between artistic and autistic,” she notes. “My parents would always say when I did well academically or won prizes for this or that, ‘Isn’t that extraordinary. Jackie’s done so well when she’s artistic!’

“To be honest,” continues Kessel, 49. “I don’t think my father wanted to pay for the university because, after all, I was ‘artistic.”’

Kessel’s work experience has included modeling and public relations work in South Africa, where she met and married her husband, Rolf, a half-German, half-Dutch computer whiz working for IBM. She had two children, and the family then moved to England and on to the United States - to Southern California - as Rolf went out on his own in the software business.

“We were selling office automation systems that integrated very tightly into the Prime Computer data base,” she says, “and the business just took off.” Her husband was flying to jobs around the world, and in his absence, Kessel ended up basically running the company.

But the stress of business management eventually got to her in the most pointed of ways: She was in her early 40s, and failed a life insurance medical examination.

“I was told I could have dropped dead at any minute from cardiac arrhythmia, caused by stress,” Kessel says. “I had a mid-life crisis. I said, ‘Gosh, a business isn’t worth dying over. I’ve got to change my life. What would I like to do next?’

“I’d worked with a lot of attorneys, negotiating contracts and licenses for the previous 12 years,” she continues, “and I’d found that most attorneys really and truly didn’t understand the software business at all. We’d end up with contracts which had black holes in them. I thought about Dad, and by then I’d convinced myself I wasn’t autistic - I thought I had a little gray matter up there. So I said, ‘I think I’ll go and be a lawyer.”’

She researched California law schools and learned that most required a college degree for admission. Kessel found that one law school - Pepperdine - occasionally made exceptions to the college degree rule, although usually for students who were only a class or two short of graduation, not for students such as Kessel who had never taken a college class in their lives.

“So I called up and asked for an interview,” she says. “They said they didn’t interview prospective students. I told them that if they didn’t interview me they didn’t know what they were missing. ‘You must have 20 minutes,’ I told the dean. ‘At least I’ll make you laugh.”’ By the time Kessel’s hourlong interview was over, the dean was telling her she could gain admittance to Pepperdine if she passed the LSAT test. And she aced it.

She formed HiTech Law in February 1995, primarily to aid technology start-up companies.

Kessel encourages other women to go for what energizes them, no matter their past experience (or lack).

“You’re really frightened to try something new,” she admits, “but give it a go. What the heck? Go for it. You may surprise yourself. Have the courage to be different.”