Irina Nagayets is a Ukrainian lawyer with a California education, and that's no joke. The Kyiv native took linguistic ability, academic discipline and a bit of old-fashioned luck and parlayed it into a fast-track career.
Nagayets works at the Kyiv office of Baker and McKenzie, which advertises itself as the world's largest law firm. She handles mergers and acquisitions, million-dollar clients and – in her free time – a purebred Pinscher named 'Mickey.' 'Like in Mickey Mouse,' she explains.
Neither Nagayets' job, nor Mickey's name, is a coincidence. Nagayets has a 1998 law degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Also in California, but under different palm trees in the 1930s, Walt Disney invented his famous cartoon mouse, whose name at least one Ukrainian puppy has inherited.
'California is a very specific kind of place,' Mickey's mistress said. 'But I'm glad I went to school there.'
A Bright Light
Nagayets was always bright, but her parents helped. At age four, she attended a special English-language preschool; by age seven, she had entered Kyiv's elite School Number 57, which specializes in language instruction.
'I don't know what they did,' she answered when asked what strings her technician parents had pulled to get their daughter a secondary education usually reserved for Communist Party elite. 'I was pretty young at the time.'
School came easy. By the time she was 17 she wanted to be a lawyer; in part so that she'd always have a marketable trade, in part because she wanted to put criminals behind bars.
'My view of the [legal] profession was not romantic, but rather a fascination with law and the enforcement of it,' she said.
In 1991, Nagayets applied to Shevchenko State University's law program. She took three exams: an essay, English, and general law knowledge. Like six out of every seven applicants to that program, she flunked.
'Since I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and nothing but a lawyer, I knew I would apply again,' she recalled, a shade ruefully.
So Nagayets weaseled a job as a Law School secretary. She wasn't particularly happy to have making coffee for the boss as part of her job description, but working inside academia gave her useful insights.
'I learned how the bureaucracy of higher education functions, what requirements the acceptance committee is looking for,' she said. 'The pay was terrible, but I learned how to get into [Shevchenko University's] law [program].'
In 1992, Nagayets was one of some 280 Ukrainians [out of 1,200 to 1,300 applicants] accepted into Shevchenko's five-year law program. During here time at Shevchenko, Nagayets got her first practical legal experience, working at a local prosecutor's office as part of a two-month practical study.
'It was not just criminal law,' she said. 'Law was being implemented for monitoring businesses … and tax law … the range of practice options in a prosecutor's office was huge.'
She also tried out business law, working first as a legal clerk in a Ukrainian law firm, then in a British-run practice. Private industry, she found, also had its advantages. 'When I saw the paycheck,' she said, 'I was amazed.'
Nagayets graduated with a Red Diploma, Shevchenko's version of a cum laude. She had become a Ukrainian lawyer.
Find Me a Law School
Still, the big paychecks in Kyiv were going to foreign lawyers. The key to becoming an elite Ukrainian lawyer, she realized, lay in a foreign law degree.
In late 1996 Nagayets went through the law-school application ritual; collecting recommendations, writing essays, taking the GMAT standardized grad-school entrance exam, and worrying about financial aid.
'After working in the [British] law firm,' she said. 'Fortunately my legal English was okay.'
She applied to Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and, as a back up, the U.S. government-funded Muskie program, which sends Ukrainians to study at graduate schools in the United States. The program is administered in Kyiv by ACCELS.
Naganets packaged herself as what she was: a Ukraine-trained lawyer, interested in tax work, but in need of a Western legal education.
Harvard and Yale rejected her. Cornell accepted, sweetening the response with an offer to pay half her tuition. But the Muskie program offered a full ticket: tuition, room, board, and a stipend. The kicker was the program decided where to send her.
In early May, Ukraine's 1998 Muskie participants, all tense, gathered to find out where they would spend the next year of their lives.
'When I found out that I was going to UCLA,' Nagayets said. 'I had to ask where that was. I had never heard of it.'
Nagayets learned fast what Southern California was all about. In two months she had learned West Coast English, built a social life (She mostly hung out with foreigners; her best friend was Japanese), and made halting progress toward the California Dream. But in other ways Nagayets remained staunchly European.
'I would walk down the street smoking a cigarette,' she said. 'The Californians would come up to me and ask, kind of with sympathy, 'Are you a foreigner?'' Adjusting to American academia was easier.
'It was more work than at Shevchenko, but not impossible,' she said. 'The main thing was understanding what the professor wanted, and then giving that back to him.'
For Nagayets, Western law school's most useful lessons came in basic courses on things she, as a Ukrainian, knew little about; like securities and corporations.
'One thing that studying in the United States really helped me do is better understand and anticipate the wishes of Americans,' she said. 'Also the ability to analyze, and apply theoretical law to real-life situations.'
Enter the corporate Lawyer
Since the Muskie program strictly obliges participants to return home after graduation, Nagayets prepared herself for that route. She passed the New York State bar exam, first try, in November 1998. But even before that, the headhunters got her.
A job fair in New York led to an offer from Baker and McKenzie in the summer of 1998.
Baker and McKenzie services, according to corporate literature, some 400 Fortune 500 companies. About half of Nagayets' work is with foreign companies looking to acquire a portion of a Ukrainian firm. Another half of her billable time goes to writing up the Ukrainian side of international company mergers.
'When a couple of those big firms join overseas and both have affiliates here,' she said. 'I get to do the Ukrainian paperwork.'
She said she 'would rather not say' which clients she works with.
Courtrooms are not as much fun as Nagayets had hoped. She is not enjoying the case she has in litigation, she said, mostly because Ukrainian court battles are often fought unfairly.
'In Ukrainian court, whatever you do, no matter how smart you are, your work winds up not mattering,' she said. 'Sometimes, what the judge decides just doesn't depend on you.'
Her work day begins at 0900 and ends at 2100; besides Mickey the Pinscher, she spends her free time with a 'big group' of friends.
'I've been working here for about a year,' she said. 'The more you work, the more you see where you need experience.
