Lawyers are busy! In-House lawyers don’t need to do “extracurriculars,” right? Think again. In this episode of The Legal Department, SVP and Senior Managing Counsel Kelley Barnett shares how building a nonprofit to help women lawyers helped her become a better lawyer and leader.
She also shares how making what became a viral LinkedIn post spurred a conversation about bullying women on maternity leave, which also helped her build influence inside her organization and out.
Kelley and Stacy share tips for making time for career development activities outside of your 9-5, while raising a family.
Additionally, Kelley addresses a listener’s Office Hours question about how to get management experience in a flat legal department.
If you’ve been wondering whether you need to be “out there,” this episode is for you.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Use Your Voice And Build Influence With Kelley Barnett Of AmTrust Financial
My name is Kelley Barnett. I’m the Senior Vice President, Senior Managing Counsel at AmTrust Financial. A fun fact about me is that if I wasn’t a lawyer, I would open my own bakery. I do not like to cook, but I love baking cupcakes, brownies, sweet treats, you name it.
‐‐‐
On this episode of The Legal Department, I’m excited to welcome Kelley Barnett, who is a Senior Vice President and Senior Managing Counsel at AmTrust. Kelley, how are you?
Stacy, how are you? I’m doing great.
I’m doing well. I wanted to have you on the show. You’re somebody who has gotten on my radar for a variety of reasons. You’re a very active in-house person. I get a lot of questions. A lot of people ask me specifically about the podcast, but also about other things I do, “How do you do it? How do you have time to do these extracurriculars?” You and I talked about this, and we have a shared value that being involved in activities outside of work or outside of the legal department is important. I wanted to explore that with you.
Building Your Legal Brand Beyond The 9-To-5
It has always been important for me to be involved in the legal community. First of all, when I was in private practice, which I was for twelve years before I came to AmTrust, it was a necessity for client development. You had to get out there and be known in the community, and be known for your expertise in certain areas. I also have always enjoyed it. Not everybody does. What’s particularly important for any lawyer is to have a brand. Getting out there and being involved in your community, whether it’s in a nonprofit, a particular bar association, or whatever, is important to having a brand. That word is cringy.
I don’t disagree. I align with you that it is important, and I agree that it does feel a little cringy.
It does. It’s like marketing, but I think it’s important to be known for those things that you value. It’s like your own personal capital. It’s part of your investment in yourself. It’s your goodwill. It’s how you’re perceived professionally. You might be all of these fantastic things, a great lawyer, an expert in IP, and an advocate for certain things, but if nobody knows about it, it doesn’t matter.
You need to be engaged in your legal community outside of your firm or organization in order to have that brand, even if you’re happy and secure in your job. You just never know. Things may happen at your company. Your interests may change. You may want to get involved in certain groups or boards. You might want to get invited to speak at certain events or speaking opportunities. Your brand may impact whether or not you get those opportunities.
From Prosecutor To In-House Leader: Kelley’s Career Journey
I agree. Let’s dig in a little bit for context, so people understand what your job is now. I am a general counsel. I think that is perceived as a very big job, and it is. I also have a family, but maybe give a little bit of background, so people have a sense of who you are, and what’s your span of control at AmTrust?
Building Influence & Making An Impact In-House
I’ve been practicing law, and this is my 26th year of practice. I started out as a prosecutor here in Cleveland for about seven years. I then went in-house, private practice civil defense firm for about twelve years at a law firm, and then I came in-house in 2019. I’m currently responsible for managing a few different practice areas, labor and employment, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, which is keeping me quite busy right now, data governance, some data privacy, certain vendor contracts, and then all the litigation related to those practice areas. I lead a team of four people, soon to be five. That in and of itself is at least 50% of my job.
Ladder Down Cleveland: Empowering Women Lawyers
Maybe we should also explore a little bit about you’re outside activities, the work outside the department. I also want to tease here that we’re going to be talking about you are somebody who also uses your voice to help others. You made a post on LinkedIn about a workplace issue that went viral and got a lot of attention in the legal press, including Law360, Axios, and elsewhere. I want to talk about that later. You’ve got this job managing 4 or 5 significant areas for the company. What else are you doing? What are your extracurriculars?
The most significant one for me, personally and professionally, is an organization called Ladder Down Cleveland. It’s a chapter of the national Ladder Down program, which was founded in Phoenix in 2012 by two fabulous women lawyers in Phoenix. It’s a twelve-month leadership, business development, and mentoring program primarily for women lawyers at law firms, because they face unique challenges. We will probably talk about their present law firms. Every year, it’s a cohort of 28 women. They have to apply. They get accepted. We offer financial aid.
Throughout the year, the class receives about 30 hours of coaching in both large group and small group settings from professional coaches on all sorts of things. Your leadership style, learning how to practice law on your own personality, how to deal with particular challenges that women in law face that are unique to women in law, ugly things like origination credit, client development, networking, which is another cringy word, all sorts of things that are designed to help them advance in law firms. It’s not about sitting around and talking around the table about all the terrible things that happen at law firms. We don’t do that. We talk about the challenges, but we talk about them to help women understand what the challenges are and how to develop strategies to work through them.
I know you founded the Cleveland chapter. You said it’s primarily for law firm lawyers. You’re not a law firm lawyer. You’re not getting business this way. I’m sure you do not want outside law firms to do business with you and your company. Why are you doing it?
Frankly, I was just reading the stats. Women and men are coming out of law school at equal rates. Now, there are more women coming out of law school and starting as lawyers, but more women are leaving the practice of law. That’s not new. That has been going on for years. A lot of it, in my opinion, is due to a lack of access to business development opportunities, a lack of access to leadership roles, and certain stereotypes that they face, associated with caregiving, and the assumption that perhaps they’re not as committed to their careers. I don’t know if you’ve read Walking Out the Door, which is a 2021 report by the American Bar Association that looks at a lot of these challenges. It’s something I’d been hearing, reading about, and witnessing, not personally, but as an ally for years.
It resonates with something important to you, so even if this isn’t benefiting you personally, it’s something you want to stay involved in.
One of the reasons I went to law school is that I believe that lawyers have a unique opportunity to make an impact. We’re trained advocates. We’re well-educated and smart. We have a lot of relationships across the communities in which we work. It has always been important to me to have an impact. This was a way that I wanted to have an impact. It took me twenty years to figure it out, by the way. This was in my twentieth year of practice. I wanted to find a way to have an impact in that space, but I didn’t know how. I had never done anything like that before. I discovered Ladder Down, I called the founders, and did a little homework. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, without a doubt, launching that program.
Finding Purpose & Combating Burnout In Law
I want to get into the blocking and tackling around that, but I want to pause for what you’re talking about with finding impact and purpose. I work in healthcare, and we all know that the pandemic, in particular, was very hard for caregivers and healthcare providers. There has been a lot of writing and publicity around this concept of burnout. I’ve learned a little bit about how to combat that. It’s not the number of hours you work. It’s not whether you’re writing the best briefs or doing the best work. The biggest way to impact burnout is to have purpose and feel like you have impact. I wonder about that and your personal experience with that.
You can have the impact you want in almost any role, but to do that, you have to build influence with your company's decision-makers. Share on XI like my job. Let me start with that. Doing these things that we’ve talked about, for example, Ladder Down, those are just bucket filling for me. They make the hard days of our very stressful profession. It helped me balance it all out.
Keying off of that concept of bucket filling, people ask me a lot about the podcast and how I do it. You’ve got a big job, you’re busy, you’ve got kids, and all that. There are a lot of mornings. I wake up very early to work on it most days or many days. I’m excited to get out of bed, to get up at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning and spend time finding guests, outlining an episode, or whatever. I don’t know if it’s a sense of purpose, but it is fun and yet connected to the career. That makes it rewarding.
You’ve touched on something that’s key. You’ve got to enjoy those extracurriculars. When you’re in a law firm, in particular, sometimes you feel like there are certain things you have to do. I had to join a certain board, I had to go to a certain launch, or I had to do certain things because that’s what you do. I didn’t always enjoy that.
You’re not going to get your best from me or anybody if you’re in a space that you don’t enjoy. I give in to the time constraints that I have because I have a family as well, a very supportive family. I try to focus on those things that I enjoy. Sometimes I might be driving to the event or the thing, thinking, “I just want to go home,” but nine times out of ten, I leave that event, that panel, or that dinner energized. I love that, and it doesn’t feel like work. It doesn’t feel like networking. It feels like I want to.
Time Management Tips: Balancing Career & Passions
Let’s talk tactically. The goal of the show is to give people practical advice. I don’t know if it’s the Ladder Down experience or some other work or extracurriculars that you’ve done, but a question that people ask is, “How do you?” For me, with the podcast, I do by getting up early. As everyone knows, I go to bed early. I’m not on my Instagram or watching Netflix at 11:00 at night. I am in bed by 9:30 or 10:00. If I had my brother’s, it would be 8:30, no joke. I have help. My husband set up the studio for me. He made the kids’ lunches. For me, it’s having support and using my time in a certain way. Maybe we could talk about how you work in these bucket-filling activities. Again, I don’t know if it’s Ladder Down or something else.
I also get up at about 5:00 AM. Nobody else is up in my house. It’s just me and the dogs. I’m alone for a good two hours. That’s where I do a lot of the things that we’re talking about. Sometimes I use it to catch up on emails that came in overnight, for example. That’s when I work on a lot of Ladder Down things. I think about strategy. I reach out to the women that I’m mentoring. I don’t email them at 5:00 AM, to be clear. I will set it up as a scheduled send, but just checking my emails, thinking about some of the philanthropic things that I’m doing. That’s how I do it. I try to limit my extracurricular events or activities to two nights a week.
That’s actually a lot.
It is. To be fair, our son is 21 now. This might not have worked for me twenty years ago. I tried to fit it in when I could. I do a lot of lunches. Zoom has been a great development. I guess one of the silver linings of the pandemic, if there is one, was Zoom, lots of catch-up coffee chats. That’s how I’ve been able to network with women like you, who are on the other side of the country. Every day is different, and it’s about finding the right level for me, which is different every week. It’s different every month. I’m still a work in progress, to be honest with you.
To your point earlier about work-life management, I say this all the time. Don’t sleepwalk through your life. I look at the calendar. It sounds like you do as well. I try to make sure, in my week, that I have scheduled Zoom check-ins with people, not necessarily for work. Maybe it’s podcasts, or maybe it’s somebody I met at a conference. Having those connections and making it an intentional part of the week is a way I do it, too.
I have to plan for it. One other strategy I have is on Fridays, which tends to be a slower day, I make my list of things I want to do, or I look at the list that I created the week before, “Reach out to Stacy, reach out to this person, prepare for this presentation, work on this article, work on this thing.” I try to schedule that time with myself. I make an appointment with myself. Usually, it’s about an hour. You can get a lot done in an hour. I try to book that time with myself, because if you don’t, things pop up, especially in-house. I’m sure you get that where your day looks like it’s going to be clear.
There’s a line out the door. Yes. We’re service providers, so we serve at your pleasure. I do the same thing. In those mornings, I wake up and I make myself a to-do list for whatever it is I’m working on, if it’s an article, if it’s a podcast episode, etc. I think we have to start with why we’re doing it, and that it’s still important. I don’t know for you. I can tell you from my own experience, having this outside presence, speaking on panels, and having a podcast has helped my reputation both inside my organization and outside, in addition to being fulfilling. I’m wondering if Ladder Down or any of the other work you do has helped you, career-wise, outside of the personal fulfillment.
I think it has helped give me influence inside my company because of the way I have handled certain situations. I’m not afraid to take on a challenging project, like launching a non-profit for women lawyers in a firm. I’m not afraid to take on the challenge. You can say no to me, and I’m going to keep coming back. I have a lot of influence with my executive committee. It didn’t start out that way. You don’t walk in the door having influence, but I think being an advocate, for example, for women in law has helped me also hone my advocacy skills.
They know what I’m doing. I don’t hide what I’m doing. They see me on LinkedIn. They see me presenting on panels. I was on a panel for International Women’s Day. They know internally that I’m advocating for people, men and women, and I do it in a way that is credible and impactful. I do think that is part of the reason I have been able to make strides at AmTrust. I started out as an individual contributor, handling labor and employment in June 2019. If you were to look at my resume over the last six years, my responsibilities have expanded tremendously. I’m also a good lawyer, so there’s that.
Again, it also comes back to branding. I want to be perceived as someone strategic, impactful, a good communicator, a good person, and a problem-solver. I’ve communicated that I am all of those things. I’m not going to berate and yell at people to get what I want. I’m going to be tough and I’m going to be assertive, and I’m also going to be your trusted advisor. I hope I’ve answered your question. It’s a lot of things, but being an advocate in the community has helped me be an advocate internally, and that has been noticed.
I teased at the beginning of the episode that you posted on LinkedIn, this was in January of 2023, about a workplace issue for not yourself. Do you want to set the stage for everybody?
Navigating Controversial Social Media Issues In The Legal Field
It was in January 2023, I believe. A text was sent to a woman lawyer who had just returned from maternity leave. She had been at the firm for 4 or 5 years. She was given legal work to do on leave while she was in the hospital. Her daughter was born prematurely. Her daughter was in the NICU. Not that that matters because she was on maternity leave. She shouldn’t have to do work on leave if she didn’t want to. She returned from that leave. She resigned at the end of the week after returning, having accepted an offer from another firm.
She resigned. She notified her managing partner. Later that day, I believe shortly after she resigned, as she was leaving the firm, she was walking out the door. Right after she walked out the door, she received a text from another lawyer at the firm, saying what I could only describe as pretty offensive things, referring to maternity leave as “sitting on your ass,” telling her that karma is a bitch. He would tell anyone who reached out to him about her that she is soulless and morally bankrupt, and a few other things, but I think you get the gist of it.
There’s a lot to unpack here. I don’t know that this happens with men, but a lot of women have heard this from colleagues, friends, etc. This was a very offensive and inappropriate text, but it’s not the worst I’ve heard. Why did you decide to take that “public?”
There's just something so special about women when they get together to problem-solve and connect. Share on XI’ve had people, not just women but men, reach out to me. As I’m sure you have with situations they’ve encountered or problems they have, whether it’s an issue of what they perceived as someone being unprofessional, being excluded, or a challenge. I always try to offer strategies for working through it, whether it’s having a conversation or figuring out a way in. I try not to jump to conclusions about why a thing has happened. Whether it’s something somebody said or a decision they made, I try not to jump to conclusions. I try to put myself in everyone’s shoes. With this post, I tried to do that.
This person is leaving the firm. They don’t have to work with that jerk again. He’s going to possibly trash her reputation or say bad things about her or whatever. Life is going to go on for her.
Right, but as a woman lawyer, as a parent, and as a human, I felt like if I didn’t say something, it was so objectively terrible to me. What he wrote in that text to her, when this should be a special time for a woman, a new parent.
By the way, her baby is in the NICU.
I felt like I had an obligation to say something. I felt like if I didn’t and remained silent, I was acquiescing. It’s how I felt. I would never have done it without her permission. I want to make sure you know that. She was all for it, and we sat on it for a few days, but I felt like this happens at firms, usually not put in writing. I felt like I had an obligation to say something because I thought it was so terrible. I thought nothing would happen to address it if I didn’t say something. That’s why I did it. Not everyone agrees with what I did or how I did it, but that’s why I did it.
It did get quite a bit of attention. I think there were almost 15,000 comments on the post. As I said, it was picked up by Law360, Above the Law, and many legal publications. We’re not spilling any tea here, but the lawyer at the firm who made the comment left the firm. I think he was maybe fired. It did have an impact. I don’t know if that was your intention. How did you react to all that attention?
It was a little jarring. I certainly expected the post to get some attention. Otherwise, why do it? I wasn’t sure. Interestingly, the night before, another woman lawyer whom I had been talking to about this was also at a different firm. She also posted about it on LinkedIn, but she didn’t include a screenshot of the text. She quoted it. It got very little attention. Maybe over the course of the week, it got 100 to 150 reactions. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I did not expect it to go viral. I wanted it to have an impact. I wanted conversations to happen. I wanted to spur conversations about this particular issue. That was the point of it, but I didn’t realize it would go that far. I have no regrets, by the way. I’ll do it again today.
Did it have any negative impact on you?
No. Certainly, not everyone agrees with what I did. That’s okay.
Do you mean the fact that you did it?
Correct, and that’s okay.
I love that you had the quote receipts, like the screenshot. It’s like, “Now we know that really happened.”
That’s the thing. Going back to the post that another woman lawyer had done the night before on the same issue, but she just quoted it, “Do people not believe this happened? Do people not care?” I wasn’t sure what to make of it. In terms of any negative impact on me, certainly nothing at AmTrust. Nothing but support here. Obviously, they saw the post.
They’re like, “That brand is growing.”
That wasn’t quite the strategy I had in mind, but here we are. One very senior leader called me. As it started going viral, I thought, “I wasn’t quite expecting this level of attention, but here we go.” He called me. When I am nervous, I tend to make self-deprecating jokes. I said, “Are you calling about my big mouth?” He said, “No, I’m calling about your brave mouth.” That’s why I work here. That’s why I work at this company. I did get a little bit of hate mail. Lots of private messages on LinkedIn, mostly positive. A lot are from women who said, “Me too, but I’m afraid to like your post or comment on it because I don’t know how my firm will feel about it,” or things like that.
Addressing Uncomfortable Workplace Situations
Let’s dig in on that a little bit. As the stats show, this is an issue that resonates with people. It’s not the only uncomfortable situation that women have in the workplace. You mentioned that you oversee labor and employment for AmTrust. I’m wondering do you have any strategies or tips for women, or any lawyer who finds themselves in an uncomfortable or unprofessional situation?
The most important thing to remember first is that how and whether you address a situation, regardless of what it is, is a very personal decision. Some people might not want to deal with it or address it. Maybe they’re picking their battles. Maybe that’s not something that they want to tackle, and that’s okay. However somebody handles that struggle that they face, the right decision is the one they make. I don’t want to suggest that by not doing something, you’re doing something wrong.
It’s very personal. It depends on a lot of things, such as the context, the working relationship, and your own style. You may decide, in light of all those things, that you’re not going to respond or address the situation. For me, personally, when I am dealing with an issue, I try to remain calm always. I try not to jump to conclusions about why somebody may have said or done a thing. There are good people out there who are trying to do the right thing. Sometimes they don’t, and it’s not intentional.
Being a great manager or people leader is being able to inspire and motivate. Share on XIf it’s something offensive, for me personally, I shut it down right away. One example I can give you is when I was a baby lawyer in court. Somebody made a comment about part of my body. For me, that is something that I’m shutting down right then and there. I’m saying, “You can’t talk to me like that. That’s not respectful. That’s unprofessional.” I can thankfully say that I’ve had a few situations like that that I’ve had to address.
There had been other situations, for example, where I’ve felt disrespected about my family life, something that was said to me on a call, or the way I was shut down on a call or in a meeting. In those situations, I have chosen to have a private conversation. For example, I had a situation a few years ago where I was on a call and was giving advice, and we had third parties on the call. It wasn’t just people within my organization. A leader that I respect very much was very disrespectful to me. I felt like it was very disrespectful. He literally told me to stop talking. It was a very heated, emotional situation. There’s that context that I’m leaving out.
People are raising their voices on all sides. It was a high-stakes type of conversation. He just wanted to talk. I didn’t appreciate the way he communicated that, but I didn’t think it was necessary at that time to embarrass him and call it out. What I did was I talked to him privately and said, “For the sake of our working relationship, I need to talk to you about how you addressed that situation and what you said to me.”
He has nothing but remorse, for lack of a better word, and being appreciative that I brought it forward and was understanding, “I will do better.” That’s how you hope those types of conversations would go. They don’t always go that way. I understand that, and I also made a calculated decision. It was a calculated decision to have that conversation. This is somebody who could have impacted my job.
Developing Leadership Skills In A Flat Legal Department
Back to your other colleague saying that you have a brave mouth, and framing all this with your opening remark around the situation, it’s how to handle this as personal to everybody. Being calm and taking a beat will serve anybody in those situations. It sounds like it worked out well, but TBD. We’re around the bend here. As you may know, I started a segment of the show called Office Hours. I get a lot of outreach from folks, in-house and law firm lawyers. I love hearing from law firm lawyers, too.
There’s a segment I do in the show called Office Hours, where I like to noodle a problem from a listener’s question. You are somebody who has a long career, a lot of different situations, and I think that you can help this person. It’s not related to workplace issues or extracurriculars. I’m going to read this, and then we can give this person some feedback.
The listener asked, “I’ve been told that I need to develop management skills. I work in a flat legal department where all attorneys report to the GC. While two of our paralegals report to me. When I interviewed for deputy GC positions or other leadership roles, I’ve been told that I lack experience managing other lawyers. Is this a key skill? If so, how can I develop them in a flat legal department?”
That’s a great question. A lot of people find themselves in that situation. Even if you aren’t managing lawyers, I think it’s possible even in a flat organization to develop those specific competencies that you need to manage lawyers. You know what they are. Being a great manager or people leader, being able to inspire and motivate, conflict management, decision-making, delegating, effective communication, emotional IQ, problem-solving, all those things. What am I leaving out?
All of those things are involved in managing, whether you’re managing lawyers or some other type of professional. You can develop those competencies by focusing on the competencies and not on how you get them or develop them. You can do that by volunteering to take on stretch projects, joining committees and boards, whether they’re your internal committees in your organization or external boards or committees.
Maybe you can identify a gap in your organization, whether it’s in the law department or perhaps in the business, and come up with ideas to address the gap. Another good way is presenting on panels, and public speaking in your industry on areas of interest for you or areas of expertise for you. I don’t want to overlook the fact that the person who wrote to you with this question, and anyone else in their shoes, might already have these skills. Again, it comes back to branding.
I was going to say that. This is a packaging issue, from what I can read.
If you’re not perceived as having those skills, but you have them, how can you effectively communicate that? Do you know who Carla Harris is?
I don’t think so.
She is a senior advisor at Morgan Stanley on Wall Street. She has this great, I think it’s a TED Talk, called Carla’s Pearls of Wisdom. She has a great clip on branding. She talks about how when she started on Wall Street, of course, she wanted to elevate within Morgan Stanley. She’s pretty tough. Someone said to her, “I don’t know that you’re tough enough.” She literally said, “What’s he smoking?” That was what she said. She decided, “I am tough, but obviously, this person, this decision-maker doesn’t perceive me as tough.” She said, “For the next three months, I walked tough, I talked tough, I chewed tough.” It’s a great illustration of how important it is to brand and how you do it. I didn’t mean to detract from your question, but I do think that is the issue here.
I think that is absolutely an issue. I want to refer this listener. I did an episode with Brittney McDonough at BarkerGilmore, which is a legal search firm. She gave very concrete advice about how to sell these things on your resume and in interviews. I couldn’t agree with you more, Kelley. Anybody in-house has management skills. It is part and parcel of the job. To say that somebody doesn’t have it because they don’t have other lawyers reporting to them is a little bit of a paper tiger. Now, we are going round the bend with a lighter topic, which is music. I always say it is how I get pumped up for The Legal Department. Kelley, what is your pump-up song?
My pump-up song is Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles. Literally, I need the sun to come out because it’s been a long, cold winter. Figuratively, I think that song is somewhat symbolic of hope. I could use a little bit of that right now, and I think a lot of people could. We’re going through some challenging times. Listening to that song gives me hope. It resets and reframes what’s important to me, and reminds me that I can still do the things that are important to me. That hasn’t changed, and that’s not going to change regardless of what’s going on around me. Here Comes the Sun, that’s my pump-up song.
I love it. Thanks for being on The Legal Department, Kelley. It’s great talking with you.
Thank you.
Episode Resources
- Kelley Barnett on LinkedIn
- AmTrust Financial
- Ladder Down Cleveland on LinkedIn
- Ladder Down
- Walking Out the Door
- Carla Harris on YouTube
- Carla’s Pearls of Wisdom on YouTube
- Deputies: How To Position Yourself For A GC Role With Brittney McDonough, BarkerGilmore
About Kelley Barnett
Kelley Barnett is Senior Vice President, Senior Managing Counsel, at AmTrust Financial Services, Inc., a multinational commercial property and casualty insurer headquartered in New York City and operating in more than 70 countries. Kelley and her team are responsible for advising U.S. and International businesses relative to intellectual property, artificial intelligence, data privacy and governance, labor and employment, technology agreements and other commercial agreements, antitrust matters and certain matters within the AmTrust’s corporate litigation portfolio. Prior to joining AmTrust in June 2019, Kelley was a Partner at Frantz Ward in Cleveland, Ohio, where she was a member of the Litigation Practice Group for 12 years, focusing on commercial and business disputes, product liability matters, labor and employment issues, and general civil litigation. Kelley began her career as an assistant prosecuting attorney in the Criminal Division of the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office for nearly 7 years, and was ultimately selected to be a member of the Major Trial Unit where she prosecuted the community’s most violent offenders.
Kelley is passionate about mentoring and advocating for others, particularly women in law. In 2019, she founded the Cleveland Chapter of Ladder Down for Women Lawyers and dedicates much of her free time to mentoring Ladder Down Cleveland alumna and other women lawyers. Kelley also served on the Board of Directors, and the Executive and Governance Committees of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center (CRCC) from 2016 to 2024, served on the Board of Directors for the Association of Corporate Counsel, Northeast Ohio Chapter, and is an active member in the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association’s Racial Equity and The Law (REAL): Interrupting the Legal Profession’s Systemic Inequities workgroup which focuses on strategies for promoting the advancement of diverse attorneys in the legal profession.
