Title: Partner
Firm: Locke Lord
Age: 39
Jennifer Capasso Mendonça found her calling when partners at law firm Palmer & Dodge took her and some colleagues to lunch one summer.
“I was sold at that point,” said Mendonça, 39, who has embarked on a 12-year public finance career, the last three as partner, with the firm that merged into Locke Lord.
Working out of Boston with its many universities and other nonprofits is a natural for Mendonça, given her early interest in education law. “This marries everything,” she said.
“We have the larger types like BU [Boston University] and Northeastern to smaller ones like Wheelock and Stonehill,” she said. “We have a full range of potential clients, all with the goal of providing students with the best possible educational opportunities.”
Mendonça, a native of Boston suburb Randolph, focuses on all aspects of governmental and tax-exempt finance, as bond, borrower’s, underwriter’s, bank and disclosure counsel.
Late last year, Mendonça worked with a charter school to carefully craft an advance refunding to placate rating agencies that were poised to downgrade the school. “What we try to do is add value and work to help someone get across the finish line.”
Mendonça has undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Boston College, respectively.
A former college gymnast, she proudly displays on her wall at the firm’s Huntington Avenue office her second-degree belt in Krav-Maga martial arts.
