Girl in a Hurry

What are the odds that a well-reputed celebrity divorce lawyer in New York would be smart, tough, cool, somewhat ruthless? Before I meet Harriet Newman Cohen ’52, I’m betting this is what she’s like. I am almost entirely wrong. 

Cohen is indeed smart. But she is also warm, lively, an attentive listener with a knack for storytelling and a robust sense of humor that’s miles away from ruthless. When we meet on Zoom, she is chicly dressed, even though, on a Friday before a holiday weekend, she’s the only one in the office. One of Cohen’s talents is being prepared, adapting to moments as needed. When the pandemic arrived three years ago, she set about mastering Zoom and in 2021 opened a new law firm, Cohen Stine Kapoor LLC. She was 88. Cohen says people marvel at her age unnecessarily. “They’re just impressed that I’ve been here,” she says with a chuckle.

The doyenne of family lawyers, Cohen sports an impressive résumé that includes being an author of New York’s equitable distribution law in the 1970s, president of the New York Women’s Bar Association, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Family Law Section of the New York State Bar Association. Cohen has consistently been ranked among the top women lawyers in the city and this year was named one of the “Notable Women in Law” by Crain’s New York Business.

Cohen embraces the accolades but says she was fortunate in that the trajectory of her career rode the currents of history. A graduate of Barnard’s Class of 1952, she credits the College with instilling endurance and self-confidence — to a point. “At that time, Barnard expected us to be highly, profoundly educated so that we could raise important men, important children,” she says. Marriage was a given, and Cohen, who entered college at 16, tied the knot right after she graduated. “Many of my girlfriends couldn’t come to my wedding because they all got married the same day!” she says with a laugh.

At Barnard, Cohen majored in Latin and Greek and minored in music and went on to earn a graduate degree in Latin from Bryn Mawr. Her plan was to become a professor of classics. “Our dean at Barnard was so special — she said, ‘Girls, you can do it all!’” says Cohen. “She was our inspiration.” An even bigger, lasting inspiration was Cohen’s mother. When Harriet was growing up in Rhode Island, a hurricane kept many children home from kindergarten one day. “My mother gave me the choice to go to school,” says Cohen. “I went.” She was the only child who did; Cohen recalls fondly how she and a teacher sat together at a child’s desk, learning cursive. “I was a girl in a hurry,” she recalls.

After getting married, Cohen had four daughters in quick succession. It was a good enough life, but she yearned for something bigger. “At dinner parties, men talked about very important topics. I wanted to talk about important topics,” she says. “Going to law school seemed the best way for me to get that voice and merge it with pro-woman sensibilities.”

Cohen went to Brooklyn Law School at 38 and graduated at 41. The day before she took her exams, her husband, a business owner, said goodbye. The divorce, which Cohen handled herself, was “very painful. I was ashamed, embarrassed when he left. He felt trapped, like life was passing him by.” But the divorce was amicable and, not surprisingly, beneficial for Cohen. Her ex put the title of the house in her name, and he got the business. “The business failed, but I still have the home,” she says. “I got the better deal.”

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Cohen graduated from law school in 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade. It was a pivotal time. “The country was changing,” she says. “Women were going out of the house; matrimonial law was changing. I found myself working, just out of law school, on the cutting edge of a brand-new equitable distribution law in New York. It was fantastic.” It was the right time to be in family law, and being a woman with a Barnard degree was the right brand. “It opened all doors,” Cohen says of her alma mater.

Divorce is often assumed to be a crisis, but from the beginning Cohen saw it as improving the quality of lives — nobody, she says, should be made to stay in a situation that makes them unhappy or unfulfilled. The worst thing about divorces among the wealthy is not money — that tends to be prearranged — it’s betrayal, which Cohen admits is “very hard on people.” Forging personal relationships makes the process easier. Actor Laurence Fishburne, one of many celebrity clients, “picked me because of my name,” she says. “His mom’s name was Harriet!”

1974 was also the year Cohen met the man who became her second husband and true partner, a doctor named Arthur Feinberg. “Our courtship went on for nine years before I got married again,” she says. “Unlike in the ’50s, you could have relations outside of marriage with no stigma.” Over the years, Cohen has been at the forefront of breaking many stigmas and incorporating the resulting new marriage-and-family norms into her practice: gay marriage, surrogacy, sperm donors, two fathers or two mothers. “I’ve really been following the arc of history,” she says with more than a little wonder.

Cohen calls the new firm “my third life” — marriage and kids being the first, law school, a big career, and companionship the second. Though she’d headed her own law firm in various iterations since 1994, this one is different, a culmination of sorts. “I wanted to have a smaller, boutique firm,” she says. “It was time for mother/daughter partnering after so many men partnerships.” Two of her four daughters work with her: Martha Stine is a partner; Amy Cohen ’76 is the firm’s office manager (as well as a professional flutist). All of her kids, she notes proudly, are “big-time professionals.”

Two years into her latest endeavor, retirement is not on Cohen’s mind. Not that it ever was. “It’s the last thing I would ever do!” she exclaims. “There’s a whole new world every day, new adventures, new issues all the time. It’s so exciting.” As passionate as she still is about her career, she remains equally passionate about the second act, especially her “beautiful” second husband, Arthur, with whom she spent 32 years. He died in 2005 at the age of 82. From Cohen’s perspective, that’s young. And it’s getting younger. “90, 92, 93 is no longer longevity,” she muses. “I’m looking at three figures.” She doesn’t have rote advice for success, but she does have a mantra: “Just keep working.” It certainly works for her.

Photos by Tom Stoelker