About two years ago, Chelsea Hilliard attended a string of events in one week where she heard from some of Dallas’ trailblazing women lawyers.
By the end of the week, Hilliard pieced together significant connections between the pioneering female attorneys and local legal organizations that were not documented in a comprehensive way anywhere that she could find. She felt compelled to string the connections together to preserve the history, but she was unsure how.
In early 2024, Hilliard, at the time president-elect of the Dallas Women Lawyers Association, and Kandace Walter, then the president-elect of the J.L. Turner Legal Association, serendipitously found themselves brainstorming over a table at the SMU Law Distinguished Alumni Awards Ceremony.
The result of that conversation is a 90-minute documentary titled A Law Unto Themselves: How Women Lawyers of Dallas Transformed Law and Community — Together, featuring interviews with about 20 women attorneys and even more are showcased throughout the film.
Since its debut on March 8 (International Women’s Day), the documentary has earned the 2025 State Bar of Texas Star of Achievement Award and the National Conference of Women’s Bar Associations has honored the Dallas Women Lawyers Association with its 2025 Outstanding Member Program Award for its role with the project. The national award will be presented at the organization’s Women’s Bar Leadership Summit in October in West Virginia. The project has also been submitted to numerous film festivals across the U.S., Canada and Europe.
“I don’t think we had any idea how big this thing would be,” said Hilliard, a partner at McGuireWoods. “As it evolved, it just became more and more important and one of those things where it was like, this has to come out.”
Like A “Well-Sourced Appellate Brief”
At that awards ceremony, Hilliard shared her desire with Walter, managing attorney of Walter Legal, director of SMU Law’s Small Business and Trademark Clinic and associate clinical professor. Hilliard wanted to partner with at least one other local organization, given the overlapping histories she had begun to piece together.
Walter asked Hilliard what format she envisioned. That was the part Hilliard confessed she couldn’t decide on.
A luncheon? “We can’t have all these amazing people talk for two seconds in a luncheon,” Walter said. A roundtable? “But then people would only hear from the person that they were sitting with,” Walter countered.
They agreed that the history needed to be recorded. Walter suggested a documentary. They soon connected with filmmaker Alex Garcia Topete, and embarked on nearly a year of research, writing, interviews and production. Hilliard later compared the effort to crafting a “well-sourced appellate brief.”
Standing on Their Shoulders
“Every woman attorney in Dallas, including myself, stands on the shoulders of Louise Raggio, Sarah Hughes [and] Adelfa Callejo,” Hon. Linda Thomas, former Chief Justice of the Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals, says early in the documentary. “They are all people who, by the time we were coming through in the ‘70s, had established themselves as very successful female attorneys in different ways.”
From there, the film takes viewers through history, beginning in the 1960s, when a small group of women lawyers — including Hughes and Raggio — held informal gatherings at the Adolphus Hotel, the same location where the Dallas Bar Association met.
Hilliard initially thought the project would begin with the origin stories of women’s legal organizations such as Attorneys Serving Community, Dallas Black Women Attorneys, and DWLA, which had produced a shorter historical film for its 50th anniversary in 2019.
However, as her research progressed, Hilliard found that nearly every origin story could be traced back to Judge Sarah T. Hughes — the first woman to serve as a state district judge in Texas and the federal judge who famously administered the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Beyond that iconic moment, Hughes is remembered for championing the careers of many women attorneys.
One example comes from Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who, in the film, recounts how Judge Hughes encouraged the late Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson to enter politics, who, in turn, would later urge Crockett to run for office. Crockett shared that Johnson often spoke of Hughes’ legacy on both of their paths.
“I never met Judge Hughes, but somehow she impacted my life so many years later,” Crockett said.
The film recounts numerous stories of trailblazing women, including the litigation brought by the so-called SMU Five — a group of women law students, among them now-Senior U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn, who sued top law firms for discriminatory hiring. It also highlights State District Judge Rhonda Hunter’s persistence through six unsuccessful bids for board leadership in the Dallas Bar Association before ultimately becoming its first Black president in 2004 and the first person of color to hold the role.
Raggio and Callejo, the other women Thomas spoke of, were the first woman prosecutor in Dallas County and the first Hispanic woman to practice law in Dallas, respectively.
Currently, the film is only available through small screenings hosted by member organizations while it is being considered for film festivals. Walter and Hilliard hope to eventually share it more broadly so that both current and aspiring lawyers can be informed and inspired by the women who came before them.
“Can you imagine that you went to law school and there’s only one other woman or you go to a job and the only other woman there makes coffee? And that was just a few decades ago,” Walter said. “Now look at everything that we’ve done. So I think that it gives people hope for a better tomorrow.”