Milner's documented background centers on her education in New England. She studied at the University of Rhode Island, a public university in Kingston, Rhode Island, which awarded her a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. Her legal training and professional career then took place in the Boston area.
Milner received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Rhode Island in 1983. The university is a public institution in Kingston, Rhode Island, and it was the setting for her undergraduate studies before she pursued legal education.
She earned a Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School in 1986. Boston College was founded by the Society of Jesus in 1863 and opened in 1864, initially providing a rigorous Jesuit education to the sons of Boston's largely Irish Catholic immigrant population. The law school was formally organized in 1929 as the university's first graduate program, holding its opening classes in downtown Boston.
The law school received American Bar Association accreditation in 1932, three years after its founding. It moved to the Newton campus, which the university had acquired from Newton College of the Sacred Heart, in August 1975, so Milner's legal studies took place at that later permanent home.
Milner joined Ropes & Gray in 1986, the year she completed her law degree at Boston College Law School and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. The firm was founded in Boston in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard Law School graduates. Its early work was largely for individual clients and Harvard University, and after 1878 the addition of a railroad client helped move the firm toward corporate law. By the 1960s the firm had grown to nearly 75 attorneys, and the expansion of Ropes & Gray and other Boston firms during the 1970s and 1980s was part of a wider growth of the city's legal profession.
Milner later became a partner at the firm. Before retiring as a partner, she concentrated on forming and advising private investment funds, and she represented institutional and other investors in private fund and alternative investment matters.
Her volunteer work centered on Rosie's Place, a Boston organization founded in 1974 by Kip Tiernan as the first women-only shelter in the United States. In 2015, Milner and her colleagues at Ropes & Gray organized the Ropes & Gray Debt Clinic there, which provides pro bono help with debt-related problems to the shelter's guests. She was later awarded an Access to Justice Fellowship to continue this volunteer work.
Milner serves on the board of directors of Rosie's Place, which began in 1974 as the first women-only shelter in the United States and now operates as a multi-service community center. The organization offers emergency shelter, meals, education, and outreach to women in Boston, and its board oversees its work through committees. Milner chairs the board's Governance Committee.
