2025 Distinguished Alumni Awards
Young Alumnus • Dani Borel
Class of 2014
Equity Partner • Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson
Dani Borel was an extremely nervous third grader the first time she ever set foot inside a courtroom.
“Unfortunately, there had been a serious incident that required me to testify against someone,” she explains, “and as you can imagine, the court was a very scary place for me at that young age.”
The public prosecutor handling the case made time to reassure Borel, explaining how the trial would proceed and trying to calm the young girl’s nerves.
“She was an absolute hero to me,” Borel says. “She was the strong lawyer who was helping us get rid of the bad guy. That left a huge impression on me.”
When the trial was over, the public prosecutor had won the case—and Borel had inadvertently been set on a path that has made her one of the most accomplished young attorneys practicing in Louisiana today.
“By the end of the whole ordeal, which carried on for several years, I had decided that I wanted to be a lawyer, too, and from that point on that was my goal.”
Borel is a highly involved person who is serious about setting—and reaching—goals. In high school, she played a variety of sports, was on the cheerleading squad, and served in student government. As an undergraduate at LSU, she took up debate to hone her oratory skills and wound up being a back-to-back Louisiana Parliamentary Debate Champion.
“I did that with the goal of becoming a lawyer in mind,” she notes, “and as soon as I got to LSU Law, I got involved with moot court. I always had these goals in mind: I wanted to become a lawyer, I wanted to work at a firm, and I wanted to make partner.”
At LSU Law, Borel won five moot court competitions, served on the Louisiana Law Review board, and graduated as a member of The Order of the Coif, among many other accomplishments. She clerked at Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson for two summers while in law school, and joined the firm after graduating in 2014 as an associate, practicing in the areas of commercial litigation and health care litigation.
In 2020, she made partner and in 2023 she became an equity partner.
Extremely outgoing and highly driven, Borel tends to find herself in a wide variety of volunteer and leadership positions. Notably, she is a recent past chair of the Louisiana State Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division and she’s currently serving as 2024-25 chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Young Lawyers Division.
“For starters, I keep a very meticulous, color-coded calendar,” she says when asked how she keeps up with her demanding schedule. “It’s the only way to try to keep all the balls in the air, because I feel like I have two full-time jobs right now between my work at the firm and my duties for the ABA Young Lawyers Division.”
The mother of two young children credits her husband, Nathan Judice, for helping her navigate and overcome the challenges that accompany her busy career and homelife.
“He is a true partner in every sense of the word, he’s always been very supportive of everything I want to take on, and he keeps everything moving when my focus is elsewhere or I’m going through hard times.”
Her love of litigation and desire to mentor aspiring attorneys drives Borel to continue serving as a moot court coach at LSU Law despite her hectic schedule. In 2021, she was honored with the Kalinka Award for Advocacy Programs Coach of the Year in recognition of her work with the LSU Law National Pretrial Competition team—which Borel was a member of when it won a national championship during her final year in law school.
“That’s something I do purely because I love it. It takes a lot of time, but it’s incredibly rewarding to work with the students and see their progress and improvement. I always joke that if money wasn’t an object I would dedicate all my time to being a moot court coach.”
A year ago, Borel returned to LSU Law for her 10-year class reunion. Along with catching up with her former classmates and professors, the milestone provided a rare opportunity to reflect on all that she has accomplished since leaving the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center—and ponder what she might want to do in the decade that lies ahead.
“Looking at the past 10 yeas was like, ‘well, what now?’ I’ve been very fortunate to have hit just about every goal I set for myself at this stage in my career,” she says. “And, you know, I’m not sure what the next 10 years looks like for me. Do I want to take a break? Do I want to set some new goals? I think I’ll be in a rebuilding phase this summer, taking some time to really decide where I’d like to take my career from here.”
