WJA 2023: Maylin Mahoney

Attorney, Wolk & Associates, St. Louis

Maylin Mahoney’s journey to fight injustices began with one of her own. The future attorney was wrongfully arrested while working at a department store after being misidentified in the passing of a bad check.

“In jail, I wasn’t really worried because I thought, ‘well, I obviously didn’t do it’,” she recalled.

Unfortunately, the San Francisco native had to spend the day in jail and pay restitution for the crime she hadn’t committed.

Mahoney was a premed major in college and developed backgrounds in nursing and acupuncture. She also earned a business degree. It was later in life, after raising her children, that she acquired her J.D. from Saint Louis University.

She started in solo practice dealing in a variety of matters before becoming a staff attorney at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri where she represented homeless or at-risk children and veterans.

“That was actually very rewarding to represent people that had nothing and can’t represent themselves,” she noted.

Two years later, she’d join Berg, Borgmann, Wilson & Wolk dealing in general civil practice with an emphasis on domestic relations, commercial litigation, landlord-tenant and employment matters.

In 2000, she was a founding member of the Missouri Asian American Bar Association and would later serve as its third president. A recipient of the Leo C. Brown Award from SLU, she was also honored with the Mound City Bar Association’s Torch Bearer Award in 2007.

Starting in 2006, she was in private civil practice at Wolk & Associates often working on family and juvenile cases, estate planning and other matters.

Today, she is a contract attorney for Hire Counsel, a role she’s held since 2016 doing document review in a wide array of legal practice areas.

Mahoney said that females are often expected to manage both a home and a career and feels the legal profession could do more to help with better pay and clearer career tracks for partnerships.

“I think a lot of women are leaving the profession because I think women are realizing that with quality of life, they can’t be working 60 hours a week and raising a family,” she said.