In 2009 Michele Coleman Mayes, then the general counsel of Allstate Insurance Company, teamed up with SNR Denton partner Kara Baysinger to write a book about women GCs. Their first plan was simply to recount the stories of women in a field traditionally dominated by men. But another idea soon took shape: to pass on the wisdom of one generation of top women lawyers to the next. With a team of SNR Denton partners, they interviewed dozens of former, current, or potential general counsel on how they had reached the topand what they had learned on the way. “Long after I’m dead, if people read that book, those messages are timeless,” Mayes says of the result, Courageous Counsel: Conversations with Women General Counsel in the Fortune 500. “And they are true regardless of gender or ethnicity.”
Her book is perhaps the highest-profile example of Mayes’s passion for mentoring. Usually, she says, she’s mentoring five peopleranging from professional contacts to law students to the children of colleaguesin addition to her own staff. “I worked hard,” she says of her three-decade in-house career, “but there were times when people would give me the benefit of the doubt and a helping hand. So my question was always, ‘Where is the next person, who isn’t getting a helping hand?’ “
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