From Classroom to Courtroom
Cynthia Danel, who was named a Pennsylvania Super Lawyer in 2005, 2006 and 2007, never intended to go into law. With her passion for rhetoric, which she was pursuing through a master’s degree at Penn State, Danel assumed she would go on to get her doctoral degree and settle into the academic environment she so enjoyed.
It didn’t take long for this Johnstown-area native to figure out that the love she held for academia was unrequited. 
“It was immediately clear to me that all of the tenured professors were male,” she said. “As much as nobody talked about it, as a woman, it was something that was obvious.”
The more she observed, the more convinced she was that it was “going to be too much of a fight to enter the ranks of academia." Considering that Danel, ’71, ’76g, went on to a lifetime of sparring in the courtroom, her view speaks to the degree of bias then existing in colleges and universities.
The decision to pursue a career in law was a natural evolution from her studies in rhetoric, where she learned the science behind using language effectively for persuasion—a skill at the heart of the legal profession.
When Danel started law school, she quickly saw that the legal profession wasn’t much better integrated than other realms of academia. She remembers Duquesne in the late 1970s as about 30 percent female and 70 percent male. According to the Law School Admissions Council, law schools started out the decade of the 70s with about 10 percent of applications from females; today, women make up about 50 percent of law school applicants.
Once she passed the bar, Danel went to work for the City of Pittsburgh. After two years there, she realized there were only three cities in the state with legal departments doing the type of work she was learning. Danel decided to contact the firms where she had interned. One was a small practice, with only two lawyers, one of whom was the public defender Edgar Snyder. Snyder invited Danel to work with him in 1983 and the rest seems to be advertising history.
Now well known for his TV, radio and billboard ads, Edgar Snyder wasn’t always a public persona. Until the early 1980s, the Supreme Court prohibited lawyers from advertising. When the law was overturned, Edgar’s wife Sandy saw an opportunity to put her marketing training to work. By placing the firm’s first ads on the sports pages, rather than the classifieds where other lawyers were advertising, she started a long line of publicity successes.
Meanwhile, Danel was busy securing success in the courtroom. She clearly remembers the judge’s reaction the first time he faced women on both sides of the court, as prosecutor and defender. “He had never seen two female lawyers in the courtroom. He made a big deal of it and was sort of condescending. It confirmed my suspicions.”
Those days are now far behind Danel. She is a successful lawyer with a long history of representing injured people in the courtroom. Even in her male-dominated profession, she has found that juries care less about who is standing in front of them and more about what that person is saying. For Danel that’s when she relies on her background in rhetoric.
“There are three principles for winning an argument going back to Aristotle that are as true today as they were thousands of years ago: establish credibility; demonstrate cause and effect; and develop pathos.”
Apparently it’s a winning combination. In addition to being named a Pennsylvania Super Lawyer for the past three years, Danel is past-president of the Western Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association, and she serves on the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association’s Board of Governors. She clearly enjoys giving back to the profession that has given her so much.
“You either really like this type of work or you don’t,” said Danel. “I happen to really like it.”