Kara Michelle Diamond and Andrew Nicholas Stahl were married Jan. 25 at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Ky. Jeremy Crouthamel, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated.
The couple met at Columbia, from which they both received law degrees.
The bride, 34, is an investment funds associate in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis, the Chicago law firm. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which she also received a master’s degree in accounting.
She is a daughter of Sue Ann Diamond and Robert J. Diamond of Ponce Inlet, Fla. The bride’s father retired as a partner in Luckett & Farley, an architectural firm in Louisville. Her mother was a stay-at-home parent.
The groom, 31, is a litigation associate in the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell. From August 2017 to August 2018, he served as a law clerk to Judge Jane R. Roth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, with chambers in Philadelphia. He graduated from Georgetown.
He is the son of Marie D. Stahl and Gregory J. Stahl of Minoa, N.Y. The groom’s mother is a pediatric nurse practitioner at a private pediatric practice in Cicero, N.Y. His father is a director of development for the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University.
The couple met at a happy hour event that was part of an orientation at Columbia Law School in August 2012.
“We talked for a couple of minutes, but I couldn’t stay very long because I had tickets to a baseball game that night,” Mr. Stahl said. “But I had mentioned to a friend that I was definitely interested in Kara, and that there seemed to be a mutual attraction there.”
Though they were in different sections of the law school and did not take any classes together, they occasionally heard about each other from mutual friends.
When Ms. Diamond happened to tell one of their more liberal friends that she liked Mr. Stahl and thought he was cute, the friend, who noted that Mr. Stahl “dressed in a preppy and kind of conservative fashion,” said “he’s in my section, and I think he’s a Republican.”
In March 2013, Ms. Diamond and Mr. Stahl reconnected at Columbia’s annual Public Interest Law Foundation gala. “I saw him there and was really hoping he would come over,” Ms. Diamond said. “Even though we hadn’t talked much since orientation, I thought he was so funny and smart and really nice, and I still liked him.”
A few minutes later, Mr. Stahl was heading in her direction. “We ended up talking for several hours and then went to an after-party together and talked some more, and by the next day, we were dating,” he said.
They continued dating through law school graduation, and were established as a couple by the time they each began jobs at New York law firms in fall 2015.
In August 2016, Mr. Stahl temporarily moved to Philadelphia for the first of his two judicial clerkships (the first with Anita B. Brody, a District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania). Ms. Diamond remained in New York, and they began a two-year, long-distance relationship between New York and Philadelphia that included spending numerous Friday evenings and early Monday mornings on the Acela.
“It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure, and sometimes very frustrating,” Ms. Diamond said. “But the joy of just knowing we were going to see each other on all of those weekends really helped get us through.”
