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Cynthia Larsen

Partner, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe

Cynthia Larsen’s parents stressed education to all of their 10 children, and it paid off. Nine of the 10 achieved advanced degrees while the other became an athlete and physical education teacher. Larsen became a lawyer with an impressive career that includes being involved in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“As an adult, it is a wonderful thing to have nine people to whom you’re that closely related. And it’s a rowdy bunch; rambunctious, a lot of fun,” she says. 

She grew up in Boise, Idaho, where those values were instilled in her at an early age by her teacher mother and professor father. “We had a really nice life in a very small town, but an important town to the state. I actually grew up about five blocks from the state Capitol. I would walk through the state Capitol and see the houses of the legislature at work on my way to and from school,” she says.

Sitting in a conference room on the top floor of the Wells Fargo building on Capitol Mall, with floor-to-wall windows that offer a spectacular, sweeping 360-degree view of the Sacramento region, Larsen has come a long way from that formerly small town. She got her bachelor’s degree in English from Brigham Young University, then her law degree from the University of Idaho. Always interested in current events, Larsen knew she wanted to be an attorney and expand her experiences beyond Boise. 

“I wanted to become a lawyer from the time I was about 16, and so I thought it would be a wonderful way to have a kind of broader field for my life,” she says. “I felt that going into the courtroom would be not only fascinating and interesting every day, which it is, but also an avenue for personal growth that, you know, would just enhance a lot of my communication skills and ability to be on my feet and feel competent. And I was right. It has turned out that it has been a great specialty.”

She began her legal career in Washington, D.C., where she worked for the U.S. Department of Justice. She chose the civil division, which handled cases such as aviation disasters, the U.S. government giving LSD to soldiers in the 1950s as an experiment, and whether radioactive atomic testing in Nevada caused cancer. “It was pretty exciting stuff,” she says.

She left the Justice Department after eight years and entered private practice where she would get one of her biggest cases, the 1982 crash of an Air Florida passenger plane that struck a bridge on takeoff and plunged into the icy Potomac River, killing 78. (The recent January crash where a military helicopter struck an American Airlines plane over the Potomac brought back memories for Larsen.) She has also handled an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court involving a helicopter crash in South America. 

“Honestly, I get tremendous pleasure in life and having a full plate and always having something that is a goal out there in front of me to accomplish. Or maybe multiple goals.”  

Larsen had Ivy, the first of her six children (the rest being Alexander, Agatha, Clara, Grace and Daniel) in D.C. before moving to Sacramento. She represents government entities in all kinds of litigation and also private clients against the government, including affirmative action cases and issues of the day. “I’ve had the same kind of interesting cases in California that I had back in D.C.,” she says. 

Because women were scarce in the legal field when she entered, her mentors were male. Larsen, who was the head of her Orrick office, now mentors female attorneys. “I did get the opportunity to have a lot of women that I worked with and had the chance to mentor. It was extremely satisfying,” she says.

Larsen enjoys her morning workouts, her five grandchildren and doing pro bono legal work, such as representing the family of a disabled boy who wanted to get him in day care. (They won.)

“Honestly, I get tremendous pleasure in life and having a full plate and always having something that is a goal out there in front of me to accomplish,” she says. “Or maybe multiple goals.”  

View the list of honorees from 2015 through 2025.

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