Message From the Chair

By Amy Oppenheimer

Amy Oppenheimer is an attorney and retired administrative law judge whose law firm focuses on workplace investigations. She has written a book about investigations, testifies as an expert witness on employer practices in responding to and investigating harassment, and is the founder and past-president of the board of the Association of Workplace Investigators (AWI). Ms. Oppenheimer has trained employers and employees throughout the country in preventing and investigating workplace harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, and on understanding and eliminating implicit bias.

Happy International Women’s Day! I would like to take this as an opportunity to honor my foremothers – my mother, Muriel Wolfson Oppenheimer, who died six months ago at the age of 95, and my grandmother and namesake, Amy Vorhaus Oppenheimer, who died in 1952, two weeks before I was born. And I would like to contemplate how far women in the legal profession in the United States have come in my lifetime, and how much further we have to go.

My mother was born in 1920 in the Bronx. Her father was a traveling salesman and her mother sold handbags on the first floor of Macy’s department store in Manhattan. They lived a modest life.