The head of the litigation department at Debevoise & Plimpton, White was the first woman to be named U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

After earning her law degree at Columbia, White clerked for a federal judge and worked as an assistant attorney for the U.S. Southern District. After a detour into private practice at Debevoise, she went back into public service in 1993 when then-President Bill Clinton tapped her for the U.S. Attorney's job in Manhattan. She soon gained fame for prosecuting everything from white-collar crime and insider trading to drug smuggling to international terrorism. Some of the high-profile prosecutions on her watch: the original World Trade Center bombing case and the terror conspiracy case against Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman; the plot to destroy the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that resulted in the deaths of 224 people; and the successful 1992 prosecution of mafia boss John Gotti on charges of murder and racketeering. White stepped down as U.S. Attorney in January 2002 to rejoin Debevoise. [Image via Getty]