Employer: Squire Patton Boggs
Title and Practice Area: Senior Associate, Litigation

What was the most valuable lesson you learned in your first year practicing law? Assume the first draft is the final draft. There is a tendency to convince ourselves that "someone smarter than me will figure out this difficult issue" or "I will fix that later," but more often than not, nobody knows the issues better than you do and there isn't time later.

Describe your biggest win or accomplishment in practice. Managing a team of more than 40 attorneys and experts developing an arbitration case concerning a public infrastructure project. It's a massive undertaking with more than $2 billion at stake. Our opening submission was the culmination of five years of work, totaling about 3,000 pages and 8,000+ pieces of evidence.

Who is your greatest lawyer mentor and what has he or she taught you? My colleague, Meagan Bachman, who has a gift for bringing out in people their strongest talents. Meagan once told me that "Everyone is the master of his or her own story; you just have to own it"—meaning, we all have what it takes to achieve success, and we each get there in our own way.

Please share a brief key to your success.  Ownership. I treat every case like it's my own—my client's successes are just as important to me as they are to my clients. Personal investment is a difference-maker.