Jonathan Hawkins: [00:00:00] So, maybe take me through some of the things you experienced and then if you’ve got it, you know, do you have any advice for other women attorneys out there on, you know, how to handle it, how to deal with it, or how to overcome it?

Laura Noble: Sure. So one of my goals is to encourage other women to become leaders, either in their current firms or to start their own practices. So we know that women are graduating from law school in larger numbers than men, and they have been doing so for the last decade, and yet about 25 to 28% of law firm owners are female.

So that doesn’t make any sense. Those numbers don’t add up. So what is going on. It people assume that it’s about childcare issues, but the data suggests that is really a very small reason that keeps women in leadership positions.

Welcome to the Founding Partner [00:01:00] Podcast. Join your host, Jonathan Hawkins, as we explore the fascinating stories of successful law firm founders. We’ll uncover their beginnings, triumph over challenges, and practice growth. Whether you aspire to launch your own firm, have an entrepreneurial spirit, or are just curious about the legal business, you’re in the right place.

Let’s dive in.

Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Hawkins, in this podcast where we get to interview law firm founders. That bring a lot of different perspectives to the practice of law. And today we have one of those founders, and I’m really excited about this episode. I got to see this person give a talk. I know a few months ago now that I thought really was a good perspective on the practice law and I want to dive into that today. So today we’ve got Laura Noble from the Noble Law, which [00:02:00] is a plaintiff employment law firm based in North Carolina, but that’s not just where they practice.

So, welcome to the show, Laura. Why don’t you sort of introduce yourself, short intro and tell us exactly where your firm is. I know you’ve got multiple offices, so tell us about that.

Laura Noble: Yes, and thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk to you as well. So our firm originated in North Carolina. We are in Raleigh and Winston-Salem and Charlotte, and we’ve expanded to Charleston, South Carolina. And I am licensed to practice in New York, so we still have some presence there. And we have two attorneys who also are licensed to practice in the DC area.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, are you licensed in South Carolina?

Laura Noble: I am not, but my, one of my lawyers is.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. Yeah. ’cause my understanding it’s pretty hard. You gotta do, you gotta check a lot of boxes down there, so, I get that. So, so, yeah. So, you know, part of your talk that I mentioned you sort of gave a little bit about your [00:03:00] background.

And I wanna dive into that ’cause I think it’s really interesting story. I think could be very impactful for a lot of folks. So, you started out in the big city, right? The New York and you were a prosecutor, right?

Laura Noble: That’s right. So really my interest in law school was focused on social justice issues. I did some anti-death penalty work, which brought me into the criminal realm. And I had a very influential professor who introduced me to that line of work. And I applied to work at Legal Aid in New York. But they had a hiring freeze.

But. The prosecutor’s office did not, and I was concerned about that, and he convinced me that you can do good on the prosecutor’s side and actually have a lot of power and authority to determine the outcome of these cases and can be very impactful on victims and the likes. So I thankfully listened to his advice and took the job because it was one of the best positions I’ve ever had. Still to this day, I was at [00:04:00] the Brooklyn DA’s office and it was immediately thrown into the fire. I was in court from day one and it was quite challenging and I’m very thankful that I had that experience.

Jonathan Hawkins: So did, so you, you were attracted to social justice. Did you always wanna be a trial lawyer too?

Laura Noble: I always wanted to be a lawyer and I don’t know when or why I just, it’s so cliche, but I really, I don’t have any memory of wanting to do anything else. I wanted to be a lawyer from the time I was 10 years old. I was in advocacy groups in high school. I was a student lawyer in college. There was just, I knew that was my calling and that’s what I wanted to do.

And by the way. I’m still a lawyer who will never tell a lawyer joke. I have such enormous respect for attorneys. I think they do incredible work. The fact that we have a pro bono commitment where we give of our time voluntarily, and I know most attorneys go into the profession because they want to help people.

So I, excuse the [00:05:00] pun, but I do think it’s a noble profession.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s a great name by the way, a firm you got lucky there.

Laura Noble: I did, and maybe that was part of it. You know, I read somewhere once that somebody’s last name actually does influence their outcome. So if your name is James Smiley, you’re likely to be a dentist. So who knows? You know, maybe it was destiny.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s funny. I was talking to somebody the other day that their last name was law, so it’s like I could, it’s the law firm,

you know, it’s

Laura Noble: there you go.

Jonathan Hawkins: or is it just the law firm? Yeah. So, so yeah. So you start out in the prosecutor’s office. How long did you do that? And then eventually you did pivot out of there and sort of take us through sort of the progression and maybe why you decided to leave.

Laura Noble: I was in the Brooklyn DA’s office for about three and a half years. And, I feel like I had 10 years worth of trial experience when I left especially given today where it’s so hard for new attorneys to get any courtroom experience, let alone trial experience. So it was [00:06:00] intense. I saw sort of the worst of humanity, and even when I had a win it didn’t feel great, right?

Because you would often have family members in the courtroom and people crying as their family members taken away to jail. You know, justifiably so just didn’t, it didn’t feel like this is where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I didn’t feel like I was doing enough to move in the way that I wanted to move, so I left.

And the natural progression out of the DA’s office is to go to a large, well-established litigation firm. Which I did in New York. And so moved to the civil side. The firm was comprised of former US attorneys, so I thought, okay, the, you know, these are my people, but I didn’t realize that it was defense firm of for management.

Right. Mostly. And we did. I actually do a couple of employment law cases and I found myself on the side of the V that I did not enjoy, right? So we [00:07:00] had some sexual harassment cases, we had some discrimination cases, and I it just didn’t feel like it was the right fit for me. And it was also excruciatingly boring.

I’m not gonna lie. I mean, going from riding around in a police car and jumping out at crime scenes and pulling bullets out of the wall to a windowless room full of files, just it was a very tough transition.

Jonathan Hawkins: And what about, I assume you guys billed hourly. What was that like? Coming from a non hourly, just government, you know, you don’t have to worry about all that to then all of a sudden you’ve got a bill. And in New York, I imagine you gotta really bill probably right.

Laura Noble: Very long hours. Although the hours didn’t bother me because we had long hours at the DA’s office. Yeah, the billing was onerous and, particularly ’cause I didn’t care for the work and I didn’t realize what a luxury it is to like the kind of law that you’re practicing and like the causes that you’re advocating for.

It really is a luxury, which is why I love what [00:08:00] I do now. So. I didn’t last long there. I think I was there less than a year. And I tell this to new lawyers a lot. I wasn’t a particularly good lawyer while I was there. I’ll be honest, because I hated the work. I hated my clients. I didn’t feel aligned with what we were doing.

And so I wasn’t particularly great at it. So I left and went to a nonprofit, a large nonprofit at Covenant House New York where I put together a lot of, again, what I do today. So I put together their kind of internal law firm where we gave provided services to the homeless and runaway adult young adults who were there.

And we worked with a lot of pro bono attorneys that I also did a lot of advocacy research and writing on public policy issues while I was there.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, it’s it, I was talking to somebody yesterday and I feel like, and just my personal experience in talking to a lot of attorneys over the years that, it seems like [00:09:00] every attorney sort of goes through this phase. I say every many, many, many attorneys go through this phase fairly early in their career.

Where they’re like, man, I hate what I’m doing. What do I do? And then, you know, it’s like, should I quit Braxton Law? Do I hate being a lawyer? Is it the firm? Is it the kinda work? And it sounds like maybe you sort of went through that and you decided to leave. So take me through sort of, you know, maybe what took you to the nonprofit versus going to another law firm or trying something else.

Laura Noble: It really was a misalignment of values at the civil litigation firm. And I looked around at the other firms that were doing the same kind of work and thought, well, that’s not going to provide any better alternative to where I am right now. So let’s go back to either government or nonprofit or work.

That was really value focus for me. And that’s why the Covenant House was such a good fit. Unfortunately, it was in the late [00:10:00] nineties, and I had the audacity to get pregnant and they had not had someone in sort of leadership get pregnant and have a baby before. And they really did not know what to do with me in that capacity.

So I wanted to work at home one day a week, which is hilarious now, right? I mean, new lawyers, our Gen Z lawyers will be horrified at this, but I wanted to work at home one day a week. I had a full-time nanny because I wanted to be with my newborn, and it wasn’t, I was just researching, writing, you know, half of my time and they said, no, I could absolutely not do that. I had to be at work every single day, and it was not a nine to five, it was more of a, you know, eight to seven kind of job. And I made the decision that, you know, I wanted to be a new mom and more than I wanted to be a practicing lawyer. So I left that job. I loved that job, but I left that job and I stayed home seven more years and had two more children.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, it is [00:11:00] kind of crazy to think about nowadays how foreign that idea was back then. I mean, just one day a week. And you know, as I think about it, I remember you know, years ago there, there’s a, and we can talk about this too, I’m sure you agree, but there’s this huge talent pool that leads to law and at least the way it used to be set up they were not set up to tap into that talent pool.

And I’m talking about women who you know, top of their class, all the credentials, all that stuff that have kids and or decide they wanna work less or whatever, and you’re just like, not tap into that. And it’s just seem always seemed to me back then that is insane that they’re not trying to figure that out.

I guess nowadays maybe it’s a little better. I don’t know. What’s your perspective?

Laura Noble: No I absolutely agree. And it’s interesting when I look back on my experience and how I got to my own firm, because sometimes I think that it’s, this is just such a fluke how I got here and how I started a firm, and yet when I talk about it and I [00:12:00] look back each of those experiences really shaped me in profound ways and sort of led me to do what I’m doing right now. The idea of a place that aligned with my values, A place that allows for women and folks that maybe are not in the mainstream of, you know, the practice of law to practice law, a way to do it remotely, a way to balance work and family in a real meaningful way, not in just a, you know, we say it for the marketing purposes way.

All of those things really shaped how I came to develop my firm.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, and maybe I’ll ask sort of probably a series of questions and you can wrap it up in, into your answer. But so, obviously you were in New York and now you’re in North Carolina. So part of your journey is you ended up in North Carolina you took seven years off at least from practicing law. Which, you know. You know, that is not uncommon folks do that. And so, but it’s, it is not always easy to get back into the [00:13:00] practice law after you’ve taken the time off. So, maybe take us through that journey and then I’ll start with did you always think you were gonna start a law firm or is part of your journey down in North Carolina part of the genesis or the impetus of forming your firm, right? Tell us all about that. There’s a lot there, so just unpack it.

Laura Noble: No, I never thought I was gonna start a law firm and sometimes I wonder, you know, there’s that old cliche that the people who don’t wanna be leaders are the one who’s, who should be leaders. And may, maybe that’s true. I’m not sure yet. I’m still playing that one out, but I came to North Carolina with my family.

We relocated. We had moved around a bit. We relocated to North Carolina for all the reasons I love North Carolina, you know, great weather, great culture, great people, a good education system, all of that, and really immediately fell in love with it. And so by the time all my kids were in school, I wanted to go back to work. I wanted to contribute. So I sat for the bar, which was quite a humbling experience in my forties. And [00:14:00] passed. And then really thought I would just sort of be a research and writer for somebody be you know, a part-time you know, individual contributor to a larger firm doing some work that I like.

So you know, marched out into the workforce with my resume in hand and tried to get someone to hire me and no one would hire me. I had a very weird background. It didn’t, there was no straight line. I couldn’t say, you know, look at me, I’m a real estate attorney. Yeah. I, or a criminal attorney, or, I just didn’t have any experience that made sense, you know, A to Z.

Although I thought, you know, I brought sort of a host of abilities and experiences to the table, and no one else agreed. And so I was very discouraged. And someone suggested go to the law library and we still have those and sit down and look at all the areas of law and pick one and decide which one you wanna do, and then get really good at that.

And then go out and, [00:15:00] you know, market yourself as that person and then you, somebody will hire you to write some briefs. I said, okay. So I did that and I literally did that, went to the law library and had a giant, you know, encyclopedia of law in front of me. And I was immediately attracted to employment law.

It you know, my personal experience of having a newborn in the workplace, being a new mom every female attorney can give you instances of sexual harassment or gender discrimination. I’m an entrepreneur. My parents are entrepreneurs. I liked the intersection of sort of, you know, individual clients and their journey and their struggles and business and I thought that I could make an impact so that’s the law that I chose.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, it’s funny, you talk to a lot of people, and I get this question too, and they’re sort of like, how did you end up where you were and looking forward, you don’t necessarily see it coming, but when you look back, as you just sort of referenced, there is sort of a direct line. It all makes sense as you look back.

Maybe, you know, [00:16:00] your personal experience. You’ve had, you know, some of the employment experience doing the work. You didn’t know which side you wanted to be on. You’ve got sort of the helping people element. You got all those things so. The other thing that’s interesting, you know, like for my practice area, people ask me, you know, similar story. I mean, I was doing what I was doing, but I basically went and decided this was interesting to me and I just went and learned it. I mean, I just self-taught and it was a lot of work and so I admire that. I had recognized that I had to do it too.

So you choose employment law, you dive in, you start learning it. Is the intent still maybe you’re gonna go help another firm or was it at this point you’re like, I’m starting my own firm?

Laura Noble: I will say I think we’re very fortunate in the sense that we got to pick so many lawyers who are unhappy, I think are the ones who go to that first clerkship. Then the money’s really good, and then they think, well, I’ll just stay here and pay off my school loans.

And then, you know, 15 years [00:17:00] later they’re an IP attorney and they can’t explain why and they’re miserable. Right. So, I always encourage attorneys to get, you know, a variety of experiences and really find the thing that speaks to, because again, you’re not going to excel at it if you don’t enjoy it.

It’s my personal theory. So I again thought that I. I was teaching myself, but I knew that I was not going to be able to be the kind of lawyer I wanted to be without a mentor. So I engaged in a series of you know, meet and greets with folks, took them out for coffee, et cetera, and looked up sort of super lawyers in New York, in North Carolina and made an effort to reach out to them and go and meet with them.

And I met a woman who was very well known in her field, one of the best plaintiff’s employment lawyers in North Carolina. And I called her and introduced myself and said, do you, you know, I’d love to take you out for a coffee and you know, hear about your experience and see you [00:18:00] know, how you got to where you are today.

And she said, I’m not really a coffee drinker. I’m more of a drink drinker. And I said, sure, that works too. So I took her out for some drinks. And by the end of the night I said, I need to come work for you. And she said, I’m not hiring. And I said, I don’t care. I really need to come work for you. And so she describes it.

I showed up in a little basket on her doorstep. But I really did just march into her office and say, don’t mind me. I’m not here. I’m just gonna watch. And you know, put all ego aside. I knew nothing about the workplace. I was so technologically disadvantaged. Again, I had missed it. I had been home raising babies, so she sent me a calendar invite and it popped up, you know, on my outlook or whatever, and I thought, that is so cool.

How do you do that? And I literally called her like, how do you do that? It was so, it’s so embarrassing now, but I was just clueless she was very kind and she [00:19:00] literally let me come in and sit on her couch and watch her work. And so I did that for a month. And then I worked on a matter with her.

Never asked her for money, you know, never asked her to pay me. She kept saying, I’m not hiring you. I said, it’s fine, I don’t care. And then I started working on a case with her and she said, oh, she’s a very fair and kind person. And said, okay, you know, I’m going to we resolve the matter. Here’s your fee.

So then I used that fee to rent an office next to her. Well, first I started in a table in the hallway ’cause I couldn’t afford the office. So then I worked on another matter, and then it eventually was able to rent an office next to her. So it was just me in a little office next to her. And that is how I started getting cases from the cases that she didn’t really want to do that were too small for her.

And then after a few months of doing those cases I realized I needed help. And so I started hiring.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s awesome. So, so many of the lessons there that I think, you know, younger lawyers need to just sort of, I just wanna pick out, so you know, the first one is, you [00:20:00] know, sort of the gift we had to be able to sort of pursue a practice. You know, and one element of that for me is, you know, watch out for the golden handcuffs.

Live beneath your means. You do not spin everything you make, you know, because you limit your options in the future. So that’s the thing I’d point out there. But the other thing, you know. You moved to North Carolina, I presume you didn’t really know anybody.

You didn’t go to law school there, you didn’t know any lawyers.

And that is a huge disadvantage. I mean, compared to the people that grew up there. Went to law school there, been working there.

Laura Noble: It is and it isn’t. I will tell you, I was too stupid to be afraid, and that helped, right? Because there’s a lot in North Carolina of, do you know who my daddy is? And I didn’t. So I just, I just kept suing people. So there, you know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Well that’s good. But the other thing is, I mean, you made it happen. You went out and just started calling lawyers. I mean, I tell a lot of [00:21:00] law young lawyers to do that. Even if, you know, people make efforts to, you know, systematically continue to meet new law just build your network, build your relationships, number one, it’s good for your business, but also it’s just good for your health.

I mean, it’s a lot more fun. We, when you are friends with people you work with, right.

Laura Noble: Absolutely abs and even the new lawyers that end up joining our firm they all come through the firm as law clerks and it’s hard to get our attention even to hire a law clerk. And so you know, this the process of perseverance and you know, continued engagement and showing up again and again, and again and again.

It does forge the path for you to then eventually join for, I mean, I said for years, I don’t hire lawyers right outta law school. I just don’t do it. I don’t have time to train you. They’re worthless to me. They don’t know anything. I’m not doing it. And the first one I hired, she was just one brilliant but so [00:22:00] persistent would not give up would not give up on us and eventually changed my mind. And now we do hire lawyers, right outta law school.

Jonathan Hawkins: Love that. Love that. So the other thing I don’t think you mentioned was I mean you still had, your kids were in school, but you, there were still, I mean, they weren’t out of the house. Right.

And so what was that like managing the boat? Both of those?

Laura Noble: Well, again, back to the things that influenced me, that led to the creation of the type of law firm that I have. So once I started hiring I realized that I was starting a firm which was terrifying. But I thought, okay, well. If I’m going to do this, and it looks like I, I need to do this. ’cause the work was coming in and I couldn’t do it alone.

I want it to be a different kind of firm than the ones I experienced. And I wanted it to be a different kind of workplace than the ones I had experienced. So, I. I was very deliberate [00:23:00] about it being a place where working parents could survive and thrive, which meant that we had to have technology so that our folks could work remotely. So I started remote work, you know, in the early two thousands, well before the pandemic. And I knew that technology was gonna be the key driver of being able to do that. So, I invested heavily in that education and that cost and immediately put everything on the cloud.

We were paperless from day one. And there was never a requirement that anybody had to, you know, live near enough to the office that they had to be there every day. There’s, we never, no one ever was because I needed to be able to take a kid to soccer practice and, you know, go to a school meeting and be able to access my files in the car while I was waiting for the kid to come out of, you know, for the pickup line. And that’s how we developed the firm.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, that’s funny. You came in sort of [00:24:00] behind the curve on technology and then you blew past every other law firm. I mean, early two thousands in the cloud remote. I mean, that’s like, I mean, that’s like space age for law firms back then.

Laura Noble: People thought I was nuts. I was doing remote depositions with a new company in like 2010, 2012, and would have arguments all the time with opposing counsel on how unethical it was and how could I possibly do that. And I was violating bar rules. We would have to go to the court, I’d have to file motions, and now I can’t get a human to come into my law firm to do a deposition with me.

Jonathan Hawkins: That is hilarious. Yeah.

So You know the other thing too that you’re sort of, you know, just hearing you talk sort of at the forefront, you know, maybe not everybody, but a lot of folks nowadays are talking about culture and building the firm and all this stuff. But you were way ahead of the curve on that too, it sounds like.

And so, and that was part of your talk. And I want to, you know, again, [00:25:00] based on some of your experiences, maybe talk me through, sort of as you deliberately built your firm and the culture, what were some of the things that you wanted to make sure your firm did that maybe others didn’t?

Laura Noble: Right. I mean, we could spend an hour talking about the things I did wrong as much as the things that I did. Right? And I’ll tell you the first five, six years of the firm was about survival. You know, it was about getting clients getting help figuring out how to be an employment lawyer, figuring out I didn’t know the rules of civil procedure for North Carolina.

I mean, I was a baby lawyer in essence, even though I was in my mid forties. So that was just scrambling to catch up to where everybody else was. And I made some mistakes. I engaged with some people who were not the right fit for the firm. I did not have a good vetting process. I did not have a cultural scaffolding in place, and it showed. [00:26:00] So by the time, I was really deliberate about, you know, what I wanted the firm to look like, or I had the luxury of some financial security that I could start thinking about those things. I engaged a executive coach and did a bunch of workshops and trainings on culture and leadership, and we spent a weekend with everyone who was with the firm at that point, the lawyers, the paralegals, the legal assistants, intake folks, and said, okay, who are we?

What is our mission, vision, and values? And everyone participated. We split up in groups. We had long debates back and forth. And we ultimately came up with, you know, sort of our operating principles and that became a core you know, guide PO Post for how we do business.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, maybe name a couple, you know, a couple of things that are important to your firm. And the other thing about values, have they sort of been tweaked over the years, or is [00:27:00] it, once you nailed them, you nailed them.

Laura Noble: You know, it’s kind of been, once we’ve nailed them, we’ve nailed them. And we so collaboration, leadership, empathy you know, immediately leaps to mind, equity, inclusion, diversity. We, that’s always been part of our our values. I mean, we’re a law firm that represents individuals who believe they’ve been mistreated at work discriminated against, harassed, wrongfully terminated, though that’s a big bulk of what we do in addition to breach of contract, non-compete wage and hour violations and the like.

But that was a guiding principle for me. Again, having experienced what I experienced. I knew that I wanted our culture to be unabashedly inclusive and encouraging of a diverse group of people who may have not had an experience of feeling like they belong at other law firms.

Jonathan Hawkins: So it sounds like you, like everybody early [00:28:00] on, you make mistakes and that sort of helps put you on the right path to sort of get where you’re gonna get. And then so you have these values it helps you, create a lens to operate your firm and maybe how you treat your employees, treat your clients. I’m interested to hear also how it has affected or helped or whatever in terms of recruiting, ’cause we’ll get to this in a minute, but obviously it’s not just you at the firm anymore.

So you wanna make sure you recruit in people that are in line with those values. So how do you incorporate those in sort of the recruiting process?

Laura Noble: That’s a great question. You know, again one of my pieces of advice would be to spend a lot of time thinking about your recruitment and vetting process. Which I didn’t early on because I just needed bodies. I needed was in desperate need for help and that was a mistake because I found that there were some folks who were perfectly good lawyers, but just did not share our cultural [00:29:00] values.

And that will blow up a place quicker than anything you can imagine. So now we talk about, well, we send them a bio of the firm a copy of what our values are and examples of them. We do a initial interview with our HR person and then we open it up and so that, it’s an interview with me.

It’s an interview with lawyers. It’s an interview with the legal team that’s gonna work with them, the paralegals and the legal assistants. And ultimately it’s a you know, no diva policy. So if we have someone who has attitude, you know, has some superiority, complex has a I say jump you say how high management style that is not gonna work for us.

And I don’t care how brilliant you are, that’s just not gonna work in our culture.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so I know that you’re a largely virtual. Are you only virtual? Do you have offices? I mean, do people have a place to come in if they want?

Laura Noble: You know, it’s funny because as much as I love the flexibility of remote work I’m also kind of, [00:30:00] very much a place. I like to have places where people can gather and, you know, my home and my office I spend a lot of time trying to make it reflective of who we are and that it feels welcoming.

So, yes, we have a our main office is in Raleigh. It’s new actually. We just moved in about a year and a half ago. We were in Chapel Hill before that. And then we have brick and mortar in Winston-Salem and Charlotte and Charleston. Yeah, that’s it for, that’s it for now, but

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, yeah, we’ll get to that in a minute too.

Real quick. Thanks for listening. If you’re getting any value out of this podcast, please take two seconds to hit the subscribe button and leave a five star review. It would really mean a lot to me. Now back to the show.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I was looking at your website and something cool on your website that I’ve not seen on any other law firm website is you have a page for pets which I thought was really cool. So, you know, tell me about that. What was the inspiration for that?

And, you know, is that, you know, are they, are you bringing the pets into the office or tell me about it.

Laura Noble: Well, we brought pets into the old office because I owned the building [00:31:00] which is not the case now in Raleigh. It, you know, again, it is the idea that and this is an overused sentiment, but there’s part that there is a piece that’s really valuable, which is to bring your whole self to work, right?

So when I was a working mom with school aged children, I didn’t want to separate that out from the work that I was doing it. There was no way that I could say to someone, I’m not gonna be around for from three to five because I am gonna go see my daughter’s, you know, school play or her practice or whatever.

So and I wasn’t gonna be embarrassed or ashamed about that either. Like that was part of who I was. That’s what the whole me bringing to the table. And that I think, brings value to my ability to empathize with people who find themselves in difficult workplaces. So you know, the idea about the pets is this is a really significant part of people’s lives and it’s a fun part and it, you know, it gets just.

It gives people [00:32:00] instant joy, you know, of course children do too, but children can be complicated and pets are just easy and lovely and everyone has fun with it. So, yeah we, we, we came up with

Jonathan Hawkins: always happy to see you when you come home,

it’s not always the case with the kids. Right.

Laura Noble: Right. Right.

Jonathan Hawkins: So I imagine you get a good response from clients, I imagine but has it helped or do you get comments about it from clients that are

Laura Noble: Surprisingly, not as much for that. I used to have a video, I don’t think it’s still on the website of me. I’m a second degree black belt and TaeKwonDo, and I used to have a video of me in a fight. I mean, a, a, you know managed at the doche and people loved that video for some reason. I think it’s one of the, you know, I’ll fight for you kinda lawyer and I was literally kicking someone, so they thought that was funny.

I used to get a lot of good feedback on that one. I don’t think it’s up anymore though.

Jonathan Hawkins: You gotta bring that back. Put it on your YouTube channel. So, so you’ve sort [00:33:00] of talked about this a little bit, but you know, on your website, you know, you’re the largest female owned you know, sort of plaintiff or employment law firm in North Carolina and maybe South Carolina too.

I don’t know.

Laura Noble: We’re not the largest in South Carolina, but we are the largest plaintiff’s employment firm in in North Carolina.

Jonathan Hawkins: So tell me, my sense is that it’s a fairly conservative jurisdiction in the federal, at least the federal, but I know here in Georgia, 11th circuit’s known to be pretty conservative, but I think maybe your circuit’s even more conservative. I don’t know what’s that been like?

Laura Noble: So very challenging and yet. I think has worked to our advantage in this sense that when I started the firm, the conventional wisdom was, you can’t make any money as a plaintiff’s employment firm in North Carolina. It’s too conservative. The laws are too poor for workers. And you know, you can scrape by but you’re never gonna have a real firm, you’re never gonna be [00:34:00] profitable.

And, that was just sort of throwing down the gauntlet for me to say, I think you’re wrong. I think we can and, well, no one’s tried it before, so let’s do it. So there we were able to sort of see a niche and create a niche and, you know, using the technology so that we could be fast and furious against our big firm counterparts has really helped us.

And being, critical thinkers about the kind of cases that we take and then following the systems that you know, I put in place for how we deal with cases made us very efficient. And so those combinations, I think led us to you know, knock on wood being successful.

Jonathan Hawkins: And maybe that outsider mentality probably helped too. ’cause like, screw y’all, I’m gonna show you.

Laura Noble: I, again, I was too stupid to know what I should be afraid of, so.

Jonathan Hawkins: [00:35:00] Yeah. So, so shifting a little bit, you know, this is back to your story and your history, and I think this is something you mentioned in your talk that I saw. But and this is a, I think a common experience for female lawyers. That I think especially old school male lawyers don’t understand, and that is, you know, being misidentified or not identified as a lawyer.

So, maybe take me through some of the things you experienced and then if you’ve got it, you know, do you have any advice for other women attorneys out there on, you know, how to handle it, how to deal with it, or how to overcome it?

Laura Noble: Sure. So one of my goals is to encourage other women to become leaders, either in their current firms or to start their own practices. So we know that women are graduating from law school in larger numbers than men, and they have been doing so for the last decade, and yet about 25 to 28% of law [00:36:00] firm owners are female.

So that doesn’t make any sense. Those numbers don’t add up. So what is going on. It people assume that it’s about childcare issues, but the data suggests that is really a very small reason that keeps women in leadership positions. And the larger barrier is a cultural one, which is that most women, not all but most women, work from a leadership style that is collaborative empathetic tries to again, to sort of bring your authentic self work with others. Try to achieve a consensus building towards decision making. But most law firms having been created at the time where women were excluded from the law tend to be, focused on more of an individualist, kind of genic approach, which most men not all adopt, which is I am an, you know, the one in charge, I’m the individual, I’m [00:37:00] aggressive, I am, you know which goes in line with a lot of what we know about trial lawyers, right? But that doesn’t work as a leadership philosophy for most women.

So they feel. Like they’re, they have to put on a jacket of a different personality when they walk into a firm and they have to be some, you know, hardass litigator, tough guy and, you know, knock everybody down and stomp on them to climb to the top. And it feels fake. And it, again, my working theory is you don’t do your best work.

If you don’t feel aligned, if you feel fake, if if you’re, you know, getting, you know, just trying to get along to, to get ahead doesn’t bring out the best in you. And so I wanted to create a firm where we cultivated that experience so that we could nurture and grow more female lawyers into, into leadership positions.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so, and this sort of circles back to the recruiting I imagine and the culture, all the stuff now that you’ve sort of [00:38:00] built this firm that really you couldn’t find anywhere else. You know, it, it repels the people that don’t buy in, but it also attracts the people that want what you’re selling, right.

And so, Has that helped? I mean, I’m sure you broadcast, I mean we’re talking about it now, but you broadcast, Hey, this is who we are. This is who we are. It probably helps you, I would think, in the recruiting nowadays. You know, you talked about earlier you just needed bodies and you didn’t care.

Well, now sort of you’ve got a track record and sort of a message that hopefully attracts the right people. Have you found that to be true?

Laura Noble: Absolutely. it’s been remarkable the number of people that reach out to us and so rewarding. We’ve had so many intake specialists, law clerks legal assistants, paralegals come through the firm. Who then move on for, you know, a variety of reason, reasons who come back and, you know, many of them have then gone on to law school and become really outstanding lawyers or you know, [00:39:00] involved in different careers.

And they say, you know, you created a model workplace. Not everyone I’m sure you could find people who say we were horrible, right? I mean, that we’re not the right fit for everybody. But that was the goal, right? So as part of our values, vision, mission, we established the triple bottom line, which is we do have to have a financial goal, right?

We’re not a nonprofit. And we have to be mindful of doing well for our clients, doing well for the people who work for us. We have a a client goal. Obviously, we want to try to be as successful as we can and their clients achieving a goal, but we also have a social impact goal, and that can be through appellate work.

That could be through you know, raising awareness by taking on. Interesting outside of the box cases or it could just be advocacy or pro bono work or you know, getting involved and collaborating with other firms, all of which we’ve done and we’re not done yet. You know, my partner, my partners and I have lots of goals, lots of things that we [00:40:00] want to do and accomplish.

We’ve been at it for about 16 and a half years. So, you know we are able to look back in a pretty decent body of work where we’ve met those triple bottom line goals.

Jonathan Hawkins: I like that triple bottom line. I’ve never heard that before. I like that. So yeah, so we’ve talked a lot about sort of the firm, you know, it’s, you’ve grown it from, you know, the table in the hallway to what it is now. So like, tell us what, you know, how many attorneys you have. I think you’ve got four at least offices.

Sort of tell us some of the stats.

Laura Noble: Right. So we’re eight attorneys now. My firm administrator is actually an attorney, but she’s not a lead counsel. She’s doing a wonderful job as firm administrator, which again, it’s kind of is interesting in terms of the culture that we have. So she came to us as a law clerk and then she became an associate and then she became a lead attorney and enjoyed the work and did great.

She’s a brilliant lawyer but needed to take a step back and try to reassess her work-life, balance, her goals, what she wanted to [00:41:00] do long-term, and decided that litigation really wasn’t her cup of tea. And so she, we worked out sort of a leave of absence for a while. We said, no, you are too smart and valuable to leave us forever, so just go and take a breather and keep talking to us.

And we kept talking and a position opened up as a firm administrator and we worked it out that. She took the position, which was, you know, not what any one of us that had envisioned. But it’s a place where we like to work towards people’s strengths and we’re not so focused on, you know, labels or titles or identities, but what are you good at and how can we use that strength to benefit the firm?

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s awesome. Finding the right, right seats for the right people. So that’s all of that. So what’s it like? I mean, you had to learn how to build a firm, learn how to operate a firm, learn all the business learn all that stuff, and now you’ve [00:42:00] got these multiple offices, all these people. And I think, do you still actively litigate and try cases, right?

Laura Noble: I sure do. I sure do. It’s very challenging.

Jonathan Hawkins: yeah, how do you do all of that?

Laura Noble: That’s a good question. Well, I have the smallest docket of any of the other lawyers. So that’s one piece of it. I have I try to hire people smarter and better than I am who are really good at their jobs. I work with our systems. We do, you know, we have a fantastic intake department.

That was not my idea, that was somebody else’s idea, but we’ve grown it and nurtured it and developed it. So, we automate all of that. We have a wonderful, you know, electronic case management system and we’ve just, I shouldn’t maybe tell my opposing counsel this, but we’ve just onboarded a new AI system, so we’re using artificial intelligence to help us with our [00:43:00] drafting and some of our legal analysis and it is going to be a game changer.

It is really cool technology.

Jonathan Hawkins: I’ll tell you I have just recently just gone down the AI rabbit hole if for a while. I mean, I played with it for the last couple years. I’m like, it’s cool. It does some cool stuff, but I really felt like it was just Silicon Valley overhyping it like they did Crypto or something just to try to get people to buy whatever. But in the last couple weeks I’ve seen some stuff that has just blown me away and I am, I’m drinking the Kool-Aid now and I’m like, oh my God, I need to rush into this as quickly as I can because otherwise I’m gonna be left behind. So.

Laura Noble: Do you remember when electronic discovery you know, was the topic of every CLE that you went on and you had some old school attorneys that said, this is ridiculous. I just print everything out in a binder and that’s how I do my discovery. And then eventually we got to the point where the bar said, if you do not understand electronic discovery and what your [00:44:00] obligations are, you’re committing malpractice. I think we are going to see in the next five to 10 years a similar bar position because it is so far superior than any technology we’ve seen before. I mean, you can take, and we’ve done this 10 deposition transcripts and load it up into your AI and say, find the inconsistencies in witness X testimony.

Throughout these depositions and three minutes later, it will give you a chart

Jonathan Hawkins: It’s amazing.

Laura Noble: that would’ve taken a first year associate three days to do. It’s incredible.

Jonathan Hawkins: it’s amazing. You know, I was talking to somebody this morning about it and, you know, which I think is great for somebody like you, me experienced attorneys. It, I think it’s gonna be a problem for the new attorneys. They’re gonna, they’re not gonna get, I think it’s gonna be hard to train them.

Laura Noble: I a hundred percent agree, which is why we’ve really been refocusing our efforts on internal training. So we [00:45:00] did a mock trial this year with everybody at the firm. It was such a blast. So we had our non-lawyers, our intake specialists, our client services people, you know, the back office folks act as our jurors.

And then one of my partners was the judge. And then we split up teams into, you know, plaintiff and defendant. We had a case file that was an employment discrimination file and everybody. And then our paralegals were the witnesses and our paralegals and legal assistants. And we did a whole trial and it was fascinating and great experience and I was so impressed by the new lawyers.

But they don’t get much court time like you and I did. And they still did a wonderful job.

Jonathan Hawkins: That is so cool.

Laura Noble: it was great. We’re gonna do it every year. It was so much fun.

Jonathan Hawkins: That was awesome.

Laura Noble: I will tell you that it was, we didn’t get to a full verdict because we didn’t have enough time. Next year we’re gonna do two days.

We only did one day, but we polled our jury, you know, afterwards and I was on the [00:46:00] plaintiff’s side and we thought we crushed it. And they’re like, ah, I dunno, I kind of could see why she got fired. I thought, oh my god, you work for a plaintiff’s law firm.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s hilarious. That’s awesome. So, you know, so we don’t have that much time left, but there, you, there’s so much I wanna touch, but I do wanna hit this. So, because I’m always fascinated when a firm grows beyond one office. And it’s, you know, it’s probably challenging to open a second office in the same state, but then when you go across state lines, it probably the challenge goes up a lot.

So what was that like for you crossing outta North Carolina to open your South Carolina office?

Laura Noble: So one of my good friends Wayne Outten of out in Golden advised me many years ago to not follow the geography, but follow the people. And so if you find a lawyer that you fall in love with and is the right cultural fit, onboard that lawyer and figure it out. [00:47:00] So, our attorney Tory Cappa is in Charleston.

We were recruiting, we wanted to look at South Carolina. We’re in Charlotte. We’re already in Charlotte, and then we, it’s, you know, very close border and we get a lot of crossover and she’s licensed in both states. And she just, you know, worked with the firm and had great ideas and was, you know, the right cultural fit.

And we said, let’s do it. So, it’s been, from an accounting standpoint, not great. But that’s not my job. So, you know, I can outsource that. But managing the office has not been difficult again, because we’re. We’re remote. We always have been. So we do we do four town halls a year two virtually and two in person.

And so that allows us to, to have a cadence of regular contact with our attorneys. We do two attorney meetings a month where every attorney is on a, you know, zoom call. So we have a lot of FaceTime. There are occasions where, you know, she has to come up [00:48:00] for a hearing in North Carolina or we go down, but it’s it’s been remarkably easy to be honest to manage it.

Again, because I see her not much less frequently than I see my Raleigh attorneys because we’re, you know, we’re in the office maybe once or twice a week.

Jonathan Hawkins: I do like that. Follow the people, not the geography. I like that. That’s another good one. You’re dropping some gold. So I’ve got sort of two main questions left. So the first one I like to ask everybody, you know, you, you’ve seen a lot, you’ve been doing this. You’ve had great success growing your firm.

You’ve made mistakes. All the stuff to, to the younger lawyers out there that maybe have just started a firm or are thinking about it. Do you have any pieces of advice?

Laura Noble: Yes. So, much of which are already talked about, but one is really be be yourself. You know, you don’t have to be me to start a firm. In fact, I don’t recommend it. Be who you are and what your strengths are. Know, spend a lot of time on that kind of self [00:49:00] exploration, self-awareness because then you can really harness your strengths and you can delegate.

Those things that you’re not great at because everyone has something they’re not great at. And so, and then be very transparent and authentic about it. So, I am time challenged. I’m not great at getting to meetings on time. I think that’s a pretty common entrepreneurial problem. It’s not great.

Nobody loves that. But I tell people that right up front when they when they start working with me, I say, look here’s my issue that if this is a thing for you, if you’re a stickler about that, you don’t wanna be on my team, that’s gonna really annoy you. So let’s like move you over to somebody else who’s really good at that stuff.

That’s not my strong suit. You know, I’m not great at, you know, forms and sort of like paperwork for the purpose of paperwork, but some of that time some of that needs to be done in a firm. So let’s delegate that out. But that comes from a lot of time of really look, if I could give one thing [00:50:00] to every employee in the world, that would probably put me outta business.

Is it everyone have a personal therapist. Because you can’t separate those things that you struggle with at home from what you’re struggling with at work. So. You just can’t. So if you have, you know, insecurities, if you have aggression, if you have anger management issues at home, that’s gonna show up in the workplace.

They’re not, you can’t separate your soul when you are. It’s not like severance, you know, you can’t go in and forget about who you are entirely. So really being your authentic self and embracing that is I think, the key to it, to your success.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s so, so important. Okay, so last question. We talked about this a little bit in Nashville, but I want to explore it a little bit more, but, you know, you’re looking out in the future Now what’s your vision? You know, you’re the biggest firm in North Carolina for your practice area.

You’ve ventured into South Carolina as you look forward what are you gonna do over the [00:51:00] next decade?

Laura Noble: Hmm. Decade. That’s generous given my age. But you know, I wanna continue to expand, but not for the purpose of expansion alone. I want it to be, for a strategic reason, which is I want more people to understand, particularly in the Southeast the challenges they have with the kind of legal landscape that we have set up, you know.

Employees most, most of the public still thinks that your employer has an obligation to treat you fairly. They do not. That is not required under the law. They do not have to treat you fairly. They just can’t treat you illegally under certain kind of very rare exceptions. And I want a platform where I can.

Empower more employees to understand, you know, their rights and their ways to navigate a very challenging employment environment. I wanna do that through more lawyers, more offices, of course, but also [00:52:00] through, you know, just more education, more public awareness, more advocacy. I’d like to see some laws changed or even introduced.

For instance, in North Carolina, we don’t have a state anti-discrimination, anti-harassment law. We have a wrongful termination common law, but we don’t have an anti-harassment law, so sexual harassment is not against the law in North Carolina, under North Carolina state law. So these are the kind of things that I think about that I would like to do.

I’d love to have more clinics in law schools that, that emphasize first of all, practical skills so that people can get out and actually do the work of a lawyer. And second of all, employment law, obviously. So, that we have a lot of goals still to look forward to.

Jonathan Hawkins: You gotta have goals. It keeps you getting up in the morning, right? So Laura, this has been fun and I mean, I’ve got a ton more to ask you, but I wanna be respectful of your time. And but for those out there that wanna, want to get in touch with you, maybe again, you said you follow the people, not the geography.

So if anybody’s interested in learning more about your [00:53:00] firm or how you built it, what’s the best way for them to find you?

Laura Noble: Absolutely. So we are at thenoblelaw.com. You can look up my me, Laura Noble in North Carolina. We’re involved with NELA, we’re involved with the North Carolina Advocates for Justice. You know, we’ve done I think a pretty good job of our website educating people about who we are and what we do. And I would love to hear from you.

Jonathan Hawkins: Awesome. Thanks Laura.

Laura Noble: All right. Thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

OutroUpdatedWebsite-1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the founding partner podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on the latest episodes. You can also connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn and check out the show notes. With links to resources mentioned throughout our discussion by visiting www.lawfirmgc.com. We’ll see you next time for more origin stories and insights from successful law firm [00:54:00] founders.