How to Bounce Back From Setbacks

In 1982, the political lords of Queens came knocking, asking for 5% of the fines that the business collected from parking violators. Dowd felt trapped. He didn't think saying no was an option. Not only would he lose the business, he thought, but he might endanger his life as well. So he started paying. But less than two years later, torn up about the arrangement, he decided to stop. "I felt tremendously guilty about my failure to have courage," he says. "I should have said no from day one and borne whatever loss I would have suffered and whatever hardship I would have endured."

Then, in early 1986, he took an even more dramatic step. He decided to blow the whistle on the kickback deals. He went to the U.S. Attorney's office, which at the time was headed by a crusading prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani. The next morning, Dowd's name was in the papers, and camera crews surrounded his home. He had misjudged how he would appear in the public eye. Instead of being lauded as a whistle-blower, he was impugned as a criminal. "I was stunned by the accusation that I was a crook," he says.

Talk about a setback. A onetime lapse in judgment was haunting his livelihood and his professional status. Dowd couldn't convince people that his actions were right. But he wasn't going to walk away from a fight. He had to go on with his life. Two days after the media frenzy, he walked into the Queens courthouse to select a jury for his next trial. He knew the selection would be difficult because people might recognize him from the media reports. "In that situation, you're making choices, and it seemed worse to run or to hide," he says. "The absolute key is to maintain your self-respect and dignity. Without that, you're lost. And you're sending a message to other people that you're lost. It's a terrible message that people seize upon."

He picked a jury and successfully tried the case. After a lull in his caseload, he found new corporate clients, took on more battered-women's cases, and rebuilt his practice. Then, in 1990, he discovered that he was being investigated by the Grievance Committee for the Second and Eleventh Judicial Districts for his involvement in the parking-violations scandal. The committee charged Dowd with professional misconduct for the kickbacks and for not reporting immediately that the Queens borough president, who was also a lawyer, was involved in unethical conduct. Judges, prominent lawyers, and Giuliani testified on Dowd's behalf. But in August of that year, he was suspended for five years (ultimately, the suspension lasted only four years). "I didn't think it could happen," he says. "It was mind-numbing. You're not capable of absorbing the enormity of it. It was catastrophic financially. I was already close to filing for bankruptcy. And it was painful, because I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn't know how to define myself."

The test for Dowd was how to survive the suspension. In struggling to define himself, he learned that he was more than just his job -- a realization that too few people ever reach. "Changing your belief about the role of your job or the trajectory of your career can be liberating," says Andrew Shatté of Adaptiv Learning Systems, "if you see the benefit in doing other work, rather than the loss."

Dowd decided that even though he had to walk away from law, he wouldn't walk away from a cause. He wanted to continue as an advocate for battered women. During the suspension, then Governor Mario Cuomo appointed Dowd to New York State's Office of Domestic Violence. Dowd also spearheaded the Battered Women's Justice Center at Pace University School of Law (now the Pace Women's Justice Center), a place where lawyers and judges can get training and then take on women's cases pro bono.

But then came a pivotal moment for this new mind-set. Three professors objected to the plan, stating that Dowd was a negative influence on students because of his missteps in the parking-ticket business. Dowd was incensed and considered not creating the center. "But the objective of creating something unique and doing something valuable was bigger than my pride," he says. Once again, he didn't walk away from a fight. He did start the center, and it still runs today, with a full-time staff. "He sees past a single event in a person's life and doesn't let people get defined by their mistakes," says Julie Blackman, a social psychologist who has worked with many of Dowd's clients. In effect, his work with the center's clients turned out to be his rebound as well. Dowd reapplied to the bar early and was readmitted in 1994. He has since built a healthy solo practice defending battered women and white-collar criminals.

Dowd sets down his glasses and considers how others autopsy his past. "If my obituary is worth more than a paragraph, I doubt I can avoid some mention of that whole event," he says. "We all have crises. If we're lucky, they don't become public."

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