When Margaret Tahyar was a teenager, she spent her free time working as a carhop for the local Big Boy Restaurant in Rochester, Michigan. As far from law as waiting on car patrons may be, Ms. Tahyar says the job prepared her well for her current position as a partner in the Financial Institutions Group at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. "I learned to deal with surprises in a fast-changing environment and I learned what its like to be in a service business," she says. What's more, she says she learned that regular customers who you know are the best to work with—something she says is still true today. Ms. Tahyar recently relocated back to New York with her husband and three sons after seven years in Davis Polk's Paris office. Elizabeth Garone spoke with her about her global career . Edited excerpts follow.

Margaret Tahyar Margaret Tahyar

Full name: Margaret E. Tahyar
Age: 50
Hometown: Rochester, Michigan
Current position: Partner, Financial Institutions Group, Davis Polk & Wardwell
First job: Restaurant Carhop
Favorite job: Journalist at the Michigan Daily, a student newspaper
Education: B.A. in Asian Studies, University of Michigan; J.D. from Columbia Law School; Clerkships for former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Judge Robert Bork
Years in the industry: 20
How I got here in 10 words or less: Husband who helps, love of traveling and meeting new people.

Q: What, exactly, do you do in your job?

A: During the financial crisis, it was one emergency after another in the financial regulatory world. Now, it's all about the legislative and regulatory reform of financial institutions both in the U.S. and Europe and I'm spending most of my time on those changes. It's going to be a new set of rules for financial institutions and the rules are increasingly going to be global. So, suddenly it's all coming together for me, with my experiences in Paris, London and New York.

Q: How did you end up jet-setting between New York and Paris with stints in London and Washington as a partner in a top law firm?

A: I grew up in a very small town in Michigan and never really went anywhere until I was selected as an exchange student for a summer in Germany when I was 16. Living in another culture for that summer and learning a bit of German was a transformational experience for a girl from small-town Michigan. I've been traveling and dabbling in other cultures and languages ever since. I then did a summer in Hong Kong learning Mandarin Chinese and a junior year abroad in Aix-en-Provence in France. I kept trying new languages because I wasn't very good at languages and eventually I settled on French.

Back in those days, "nice" Midwestern girls learned French, and a junior year abroad in France was an acceptable "finishing" school. I was supposed to come home a bit more sophisticated and speaking French. Instead, I came home with an Indonesian-Chinese man and announced that we were going to get married that summer. So, I took a year off in England while my husband finished his degree and then came back to Michigan to finish mine. It was 1982, unemployment was high, and we ended up going to New York City to work as paralegals and then quickly jumped to law school. Clerkships took us to Washington.

How You Can Get There, Too

Best advice: "Marry a man who is not threatened by a successful woman and who will cheer you along," says Ms. Tahyar. "If you possibly can, have your children early in your career as a lawyer because delay often makes the juggle harder and the wear and tear on your body more difficult."

Skills you need: You'll need a sense of humor and the ability to focus on detail and see the big picture at the same time, according to Ms. Tahyar. "You [also] have to love the essence of being a lawyer, which comes down to solving complex problems for your clients."

Degrees you should go for: Get a law degree from "the best school you can get into," recommends Ms. Tahyar.

Where you should start: Apprenticeships are a great place to start. "You really need an older lawyer to show you how to do it in ways that law schools can't teach," says Ms. Tahyar. "Good lawyers are not born from study but from being taught by practice with an older mentor."

Professional organizations to contact: There are many from which to choose, says Ms. Tahyar. Her advice is to find one in an area in which you want to be active and can make a difference. For her, it was the International Bar Association. "Because I love travel, and I work with many foreign clients."

Salary range for your position: Ms. Tahyar says the salary range for a partner is "broad." The most recent AmLaw 100 (American Lawyer's annual rankings of the top-grossing law firms) reports $2.3 million for compensation on average for all partners at the firm.

Q: It would be a huge coup to land a clerkship with either Judge Robert Bork or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But somehow you landed both. How did you do it?

A: Clerkships happen on the basis of grades, recommendations from professors and a large portion of random luck. My grades in law school were really good. It was a surprise because my university grades were not very good. In fact, they were quite bad my first two years. It turns out that I'm much more naturally inclined to the law than to languages, but I never knew it at that time. In law school, a number of older male professors made a big effort to reach out to me to guide me in important ways. They were key to my getting the clerkships.

I've learned over the years that young women often don't reach out to older mentors. But these professors -– at a time before there was such an emphasis on mentoring of women so we didn't' even have a name for it then –- reached out to me and made a huge difference. Without them, I wouldn't have thought about clerkships and I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten them.

Q: What did you learn from Justice Marshall and Judge Bork?

A: Of course, their judicial philosophies are very different, but the daily life of a young lawyer working for each of them wasn't as different at you might think. Both of them shared a relentless focus on quality of analysis and clarity of expression. One did not go into a meeting with either man under-prepared or unready to respond to a searching series of questions.

Q: Your undergraduate degree was in Asian Studies with a minor in French. Why the decision to go into law? There are a number of other international careers you could have chosen.

A: In 1982, unemployment in Michigan was near 17%. No one was hiring Asian Studies majors or French speakers for any kind of professional or interesting work. I'm part of that in-between generation that is too young for the heady optimism of the baby boomers and too old for the Gen Y boom. I grew up in the 1970s when we first started talking about the rust belt, when the economic scenario was tough, and opportunities in business looked weak. That's probably why a lot that it happening now is eerily familiar to me. It seemed like everyone around me was losing their jobs and moving away from Michigan.

In that uncertain economic environment, I decided to go for a technical skill like law. I felt that once I had a professional degree and a technical skill I would always have it and could move anywhere with it. At the time, I also felt that it helped if a woman had a technical or professional degree to be taken seriously.

Q: You mentioned that you and your husband worked as paralegals. Is this something you recommend for someone who is considering law as a profession?

A: Maybe. The upside is that it can give you a view into the life of a lawyer and the type of work that is done. The downside is that it can be a trap, especially for women, because it's a support function not a line function. Everything depends on who you work with.

Write to Elizabeth Garone at cjeditor@dowjones.com