June 2025

the benefit was melding. “You could take courses at any college and put together your own degree,” she explains. After three years, she transferred to DePaul University in Chicago, enrolling in its International Studies program— and while there, she got a taste of city life. Defever went on to earn her law degree at DePaul University School of Law, and her studies required an internship, which she served at the office of the Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago. Her first position as a full-fledged lawyer was there as well. “I stayed for another year after law school, and the training was fantastic,” she says. Her job was to serve as counsel for indigent individuals and provide criminal defense for people charged with federal offenses. She interviewed clients, conducted investigations, went out in the field and

From libraries to law When she was a little girl, Defever envisioned becoming a librarian. But later, when it was time to consider a career, “People who I respected in their fields gave me advice on what I might be interested in,” she says. They told her that even if she didn’t practice law, a law degree would be useful, and she wouldn’t regret it. “That’s so right. It trains you to analyze situations and is an extremely useful tool,” she says. And once she’d earned her Juris Doctor, it put her on the path to a career she didn’t imagine. And led her west where she would make Northern California her home. Defever, 47, started college at Michigan State University in Lansing. Her focus was interdisciplinary studies in social science and international studies. “Michigan is a massive university. It’s easy to get lost,” she says, but

handled arraignments at the federal level. “People would get arrested, and they’d be held in a room, and we’d show up and introduce ourselves and ask them some questions,” she recalls. Some were high on drugs, while others were traumatized, and their crimes tended to be bank robberies, mail fraud and major drug offenses, as well as running child pornography rings. “If women didn’t want to work on those cases, they didn’t have to,” she says. “And I didn’t.” Career adjustment In 2008, Defever decided to move to California and anticipated working at either the Office of the Federal Public Defender in San Francisco or a law firm that defends white-collar crimes. But before she landed a position, the economy crashed, and the recession was taking hold—she started getting responses from the places she’d hoped to work saying they were no longer hiring (quite the opposite, in fact, they were letting people go). Then she met an attorney with a practice in insurance law, who offered her a job as a clerk. “It sounded so boring,” she says, and she turned him down three times before finally relenting and saying yes. The experience was a revelation. Far from being bored, she discovered that she loved insurance law. “It’s so interesting, because it’s a hybrid of different types of law,” she explains, adding that she’s a big-picture person who likes to take the pieces to make something bigger and better. And insurance law allows her to do that. Defever also has a passion for helping others and worked on disability cases at first, which she found satisfying. “It’s so nice to work with people who really need your help,” she says. Over time disability insurance

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