Figure It Out

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in a blue-collar family of five children, Norma Sharara knew that going to college meant a better future, but it would be up to her to figure out how to pay for it. Thanks to the example set by her parents, she had been a hard worker all her life, and thanks to her own resourceful, innovative, and tirelessly curious spirit, she knew that the established and prescribed ways of doing things weren’t necessarily the best ways. That’s why, when it came time for Norma to apply to her dream school, American University, instead of submitting an application form, she asked her guidance counselor for the address of the school’s president.

“That’s not how we do it!” the counselor protested. “Applications must always be sent to a school’s admissions office.” But Norma knew what she was doing.

Dear Sir, began the letter. I would love to attend your school. Let me tell you why it’s in your interest to have me as a student. She went on to describe the energy, enthusiasm, background, and open-minded vigor she would bring to the campus, with her passion for the school’s international program fueling her focus. Before long, she received a reply in the mail from the school’s president, granting her a full-tuition scholarship and requesting to meet her when she came to campus. “If you follow normal channels in trying to accomplish something, you’ll likely get normal results,” she says today. “It’s so important to be original. You have to figure out your own path in life, instead of settling for the path everyone else is taking just because it’s commonly accepted.” Now a partner at Luse Gorman Pomerenk & Schick, P.C., a nationally-ranked banking law firm based in Washington, D.C., Norma’s philosophy has made for a life rich with character and depth, vibrant in its inimitability and with an arc all its own.

Luse Gorman was founded in 1993 and has since grown slowly but smartly to 24 lawyers. It focuses primarily on financial institutions like credit unions (which are tax exempt organizations with special executive compensation rules), private mutual banks, public stock banks, and transitioning institutions with IPOs. With an expertise in mergers and acquisitions, Luse Gorman’s clients are from Main Street, not Wall Street. “Coming from a small blue-collar town, I really relate to the fact that the bankers we serve are the pillars of their communities,” she explains. “When a small community bank goes public and is listed on NASDAQ for the first time, it can be one of the biggest events for that community, and I love the opportunity to help that process go smoothly.”

Norma joined the firm in 2005 when Section 409A was enacted, generating a plethora of deferred compensation work that would need to be managed at the partner level. It was a sea change in the world of taxation, and Norma was ready to make a change of her own. At Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, she had proven that she could work with Fortune 50 companies and go toe-to-toe with Wall Street law firms. The impersonality, however, left something to be desired, and she liked the idea of working for a boutique firm, where she would interact directly and routinely with the people who created and operated the banks. These CEOs and board members genuinely cared about what happened to the people in their communities, and Norma found that she, in turn, genuinely cared about what happened to them. Leaving her position as a cog in a prestigious wheel to have a more profound impact, she wanted to apply her sophisticated background and training in a market where it was sorely needed.

Norma excelled at foreign languages in school, prompting her to study Arabic, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, and in a sense, her career as an executive compensation and employee benefits lawyer is another act of translation. “I enjoy the intellectual puzzle of this exceptionally complex area of law, and I have the ability to communicate the issues in a folksy way that the layman can understand,” she says. “I view the law as a helping profession, much like teaching. By translating its language into common, everyday speak, I equip the business owner, retiree, employee, HR director, CEO, or board member with knowledge that makes a difference.”

This skill is underscored by the innate passion she brings to her work. In the six years she spent teaching her subject matter at the American University Kogod School of Business to graduate-level accounting students who signed up for her class because it fit in their schedules and not because they cared about compensation and benefits, she worked miracles. “By the end of the class, students actually felt dialed in, connected, and intrigued by the subject,” she recalls. “They would leave with the understanding that there is life and logic behind line 17 of IRS Form 5500 with important real world applications. I love helping people see that this subject is alive, and not just some complicated and intimidating aspect of the tax code.”

Norma’s interest in the field dates back to the earliest days of her childhood, when her mother would lament the fact that she didn’t have a job with benefits. As a young girl, Norma had no idea what these elusive “benefits” were, but she knew they were something to aspire to—something almost sacred. Her mother worked as a housecleaner, while her father worked for a financial printer, spending tedious hours printing the disclosures for SEC filings and stock offerings. The family struggled to make ends meet, so Norma got a paper route when she was twelve. She bought the routes on either side of her own route as well and employed her brothers, converting an old bicycle and scrap wood into a cart so they could carry the Sunday papers for all three routes at once. “If you wanted home delivery of the Pittsburgh Press anywhere in my neighborhood, you were doing business with me. I realized that ‘monopoly’ was not just a board game,” she laughs.

Having devised a number of strategies to increase subscriptions and tips, Norma earned a princely sum of money during her first year of delivering papers. Her mother had been raving about the latest technology, called the microwave oven, which she had seen while cleaning the houses of wealthy people. Norma knew her mother considered the device only a nice dream, considering its cost, but because the price of microwaves was advertised in the newspapers that she delivered every day, she also knew the paper route had garnered enough money to buy one. She used her natural powers of persuasion and influence to convince her brothers buy in so their parents could have an extra special Christmas that year. An aunt drove them to Sears to buy a microwave for their mother and a snow blower for their father, and on Christmas morning, their parents were stunned. “I had always heard the word ‘can’t,’’” Norma recalls. “A family with five kids can’t go to the amusement park, or can’t go on vacation, or can’t go out to eat. I wanted to show them that we could do things.”

Norma’s worldview rested firmly on the idea that all people are created equal. She was born in 1963 amidst the Civil Rights Movement and the climate of Martin Luther King, Jr., and her mother underscored the tenets of the time. She taught her daughter that some very wealthy people had low class behavior, while some very poor people had high class behavior, so wealth and class had nothing to do with one another. For Norma, the idea that everyone is equal naturally bore the question, why not me?

The inquiry sparked an innate ambition that was reinforced by the young girl’s inclination to read anything and everything she could get her hands on. Late at night, she’d read under the covers with her flashlight, and when the Irish Catholic family attended church on Sundays, she’d study the maps of the Middle East in the Bible. She read the Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover, as well as the dictionary. “It was something to do,” she laughs. “While the wealthier students at my school went on summer trips to the shore or exotic places, I read. I quickly saw connections in the material and asked hard questions in school, which got me in trouble a lot. People thought I was being a smart aleck, but I just wanted to learn.”

In high school, Norma worked as a country club waitress and at a bakery. Her parents had taught her to never say no to an opportunity to earn money, so she often juggled multiple jobs at once. One summer, she worked as a proofreader in her father’s financial printing office, where she observed lawyers playing pool and eating pizza for large salaries while she was hard at work for five bucks an hour. “My parents always demonstrated incredible work ethic, so I’ve always been comfortable with hard work,” she recalls. “But I wanted to see what it was like on the other side of the table, where I had the knowledge and authority to review the work of others.”

Norma also thought about her future when she had the opportunity to travel to D.C. for the Cherry Blossom Festival as a color guard with her high school’s band. When the students were given two hours of free time, Norma and her three friends took off like jack rabbits, determined to see as much of the city as possible. They got lost for six hours and were thereafter infamous as the girls who delayed the bus home, but they got to know the essence of the city, and Norma knew it was a place where she could truly thrive.

Norma crammed her schedule with AP classes but still managed to finish high school early, and the day after she graduated in January of 1981, she hopped on a plane to Paris. Through housecleaning, her mother had befriended a Dutch woman with connections in Paris, who knew of a family in need of an American au pair. Norma, who had practically lived in the foreign language wing of her high school, leapt at the opportunity to spend a year abroad living with a French family, where she pledged to live life to the fullest and embrace every opportunity that came her way. She hitchhiked to Brussels, spoke Farsi with Iranians soon after the American Embassy hostages were released, absorbed the dynamics of France’s election of a communist as president, and was the only one who knew all the words to the songs when Bruce Springsteen came to town. When she returned to the U.S. to attend American University, she was a new woman.

This older and worldlier version of Norma happened to meet a young Egyptian man in an elevator during her freshman year of college, and the two hit it off immediately. In the wake of the Camp David Accords of 1979, Egypt and Israel each sent fifty of their brightest young scientists to the U.S. for advanced studies, and he was one of them. “We were both hardworking people from opposite sides of the world, and we found that the similarities far outweighed the differences,” she remembers. They married when she was nineteen—a decision made despite the disapproval of her parents, friends, and community. “While the worldview of my parents tended to vector inwards, mine vectored out,” she says. “I wanted to marry this Arab Muslim and raise bilingual and bicultural children in an international city like Washington, D.C.”

Having majored in International Studies and launched an international family, Norma was shocked when she graduated from college and found that there were no decent paying international jobs to be had. She had always been told to follow her heart and pursue her passions, but when she entered a harsh job climate with student debt to pay off and no marketable skills, she vowed to never earn an obsolete degree again. With that, Norma set about doing what she does best—figuring it out. Perusing the want ads in the Washington Post, she saw a posting for a human resources position at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. She wrote in saying she was qualified for the position because she was human and resourceful, and they got such a kick out of her willingness to jump in that they offered her the job.

In that capacity, Norma was the assistant to the HR Director of the seventy-employee research organization. She was horrified when she was told that one of her first duties would be to handle the COBRA, but she soon learned that it had to do with health insurance and not snakes. She was eager to learn, and her boss was eager to teach her all about the benefits her mother had praised all through her childhood. She also learned how to talk to boards and get CEO approvals. “The experience really hit home that I could do anything I put my mind to,” she says. “Whatever the opportunity was, why not me? I was as capable as anyone. That’s how I saw myself, and that’s how I found my way.”

Through that experience, Norma gave birth to her daughter, Amira, and earned her masters in linguistics. Her husband had come to the U.S. on a J-1 visa, which meant he would have to return to Egypt to teach at the University of Alexandria for two years. When the young family moved to the 5,000-year-old city in 1987 to fulfill the obligation, Norma visited the American Cultural Center to see if they had any jobs for English teachers. When she was informed that they only hired teachers with linguistics degrees, she proudly held up her master’s degree. Thus, she began teaching and fully immersing herself in the culture. The Egyptian Supreme Court was preparing to send several district attorneys and judges to the U.S. to learn about the American legal system, and as Norma was considering law school herself, she volunteered to help prepare them. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was her student, and while everyone else treated him as a superior, she treated him like all her other students, earning his respect in the process.

While most Americans in Egypt lived in compounds with walls, guards, and housekeepers, Norma walked the streets freely with her daughter. Because she could speak Arabic, and because she was married to a local, the community was protective of her and treated her as one of their own. It was a good life for the Shararas, but when the two years were up, they decided to return to America, where there was more opportunity to succeed and evolve. With a PhD in mathematical statistics, Norma’s husband became a professor at the University of Maryland and worked on projects at the Goddard Space Flight Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Meanwhile, Norma decided that, if she wanted to go to law school, she had better investigate first to see what lay on the other side.

With that, she landed a job as a legal secretary in the compensation and benefits department of a mid-size law firm, where she observed paralegals, associates, and partners. “I realized practicing law wasn’t magic, and that I could do it,” she recalls. “Since I had a young child, people suggested I settle for being a paralegal, but I saw those attorneys’ offices with windows and discussion tables and thought, why not me?”

Norma attended the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore, where tuition was discounted thanks to her husband’s professorship. She had been told that she shouldn’t hold outside work during her first year because her early grades would determine the caliber of job she landed for her second summer, so for the first time in her life, she was unemployed. “I was married with a daughter and a mortgage, so I related more to the professors than to the other students,” she recalls. “They would fret about being called on in class, but after being shot at in Egypt, I didn’t get worked up over that kind of thing. With eight years of life experience between college and law school, I had a very different perspective.”

Few people go into law school with the intent of studying compensation and benefits, but Norma was sure it was the field for her, so she mapped out her coursework in tax, securities, labor, family law, bankruptcy, and corporate business issues. Most of her classmates planned to focus on a single area of law, but she wanted to do it all. Once students paid for a certain number of credits, they could audit additional classes for free, so she sat in on as many courses as possible, just to let the knowledge wash over her. She was there to be a sponge and absorb as much as possible, treating knowledge as a buffet that was there for the taking.

For her second and third year, Norma found a paid compensation and benefits internship with The Rouse Company, a publicly-traded real estate development firm headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, with 62,000 employees nationwide. It was 1992, and the company needed someone to work twenty hours a week on the new proxy disclosure rules that had gone into effect. Norma grew tremendously over the next several years, addressing the SEC executive compensation disclosure work, ERISA, and securities, as well as 401(k) and health plan issues. After she researched and solved a given problem, the general counsel told her to check her work with the firm’s outside counsel, Piper & Marbury. Her capabilities were so impressive that the law firm—one of the largest and oldest in the area—offered her a job upon graduation. “It was a recession, and a very difficult time to find a job,” she explains. “I was so shocked by their offer that I asked them to put it in writing. I hung it on my refrigerator to remind myself that it was real.”

Piper & Marbury wanted her to start immediately, so she began making the 84-mile round-trip commute from Bethesda to Baltimore each day, all the while balancing her obligations to her family with the weight of studying for the bar exam. She passed with flying colors and, over the next three years, continued to excel at the firm. Eventually, however, she decided she wanted to work in D.C., spending less time in the car and more with her fifth-grade daughter. After a headhunter call, she accepted a position at a small tax boutique called Silverstein and Mullens, which was later acquired by Buchanan Ingersoll. The national firm was headquartered in Pittsburgh, and she found herself traveling to her childhood home for work, attending functions at the very country club where she had waitressed all those years ago.

Despite Norma’s incredible success, the Sharara family fell on hard times when her husband was diagnosed with leukemia, passing away in January of 2001. She was up for partner the next year, but was held back a year because of the loss and its aftermath. Despite the hardship, Norma found herself achieving that large office on K Street she had set her mind on as a legal secretary, complete with a discussion table and windows. She did well there, but when a headhunter called about the opportunity at Luse Gorman, she recognized the chance to do better for the community and stretch her skills further. “I love discovering new things, whether they’re 15 minutes from my house or 15 hours by airplane,” she remarks. “It’s why I love traveling the world, from Thailand, to Peru, to Fiji, to Brazil, to Cambodia. It’s why I see complicated rules as interesting puzzles and perfect opportunities to bring value to my clients. I love discovering new things—I want to know what I don’t know.”

Now, Norma approaches her work at Luse Gorman with the same resolve she saw in her parents as a child growing up. Her parents taught her to stand by her decisions, follow through on her commitments, and never break promises to the people who were counting on her. She also strives to help young people who not only go the extra mile, but take the path that is less traveled and more true to their natures. Norma has mentored and trained several successful lawyers over the years  who began as determined, enthusiastic kids who boldly went out on a limb to pursue their dreams, and she’s proud to watch them succeed. “You can’t teach hunger for knowledge, or attitude, or how to have a fire in your belly,” she points out. “Those are the raw traits with which true success is built.”

Norma’s own success has landed her the John Nolan Award, a prestigious recognition given by the American Bar Association’s Tax Section to future leaders in the field. She accepted the award wearing hot pink sandals and a colorful scarf, standing in stark contrast to the other dark blue suits on the stage and proving that she excels at what she does not in spite of her personality, but because of it.

In fact, it was her indelible character that led her to enter a contest when she was a freshman at American University, in which the best lip print on an index card won an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Acapulco. Everyone else kissed their cards with typical pink and red lipstick and promptly submitted them, but Norma found out when the contest would be judged and returned that night with harlequin-designed lip prints in vivid colors, like ice blue and silver. The judges went wild and awarded her first, second, and third place. They went even wilder when she gave the trip to her parents, hoping to bend the trajectory of their worldview outward, ever so slightly. “In life, do you want to be one of those pink or red lips?” she asks. “Those won’t get you to Acapulco. You have to be different, independent, and strategic. And most of all, you have to be you. If you take the time and make the effort to figure it out for yourself, you’ll get there.”

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