MMM Partner Seslee Smith was awarded Best Mentor by The Daily Report, Law.com, and ALM at the 2024 Southeastern Legal Awards. The award recognizes a lawyer who devotes their time and expertise to supporting and guiding young lawyers.
Smith has been with MMM for nearly 24 years. In March 2022, she was named the first female general counsel in the firm’s 47-year history. In addition to her role as general counsel, Smith maintains a full-time commercial litigation practice and serves on the firm’s management committee.
Smith shared with The Daily Report that her passion for mentoring stems from her experience as a young attorney in the late 1990s. She says that it was “a different era of the practice of law” and that she does not recall partners or senior associates putting a lot of effort into “seeing that the next generation understood the law as a business, how to navigate your career as a lawyer.” Smith explains that the gap she saw between well-seasoned and younger attorneys continues to serve as “the primary impetus for me to be really present for a lot of younger lawyers, to listen to them and really just encourage them to go out and do what they innately can do.”
Smith is particularly passionate about encouraging and mentoring young female attorneys, as there were few female litigators in the 90s and early 2000s to guide her through her early career. In 2010, Smith founded the firm’s Women’s Initiative, marking its first diversity outreach effort aimed at recruiting, retaining, and mentoring women to become equity partners. MMM’s Chief Strategy Officer Kate Pearch describes Smith as “a dedicated advocate for diversity and mentoring” and notes that in addition to her efforts leading to more than a 20% increase in women partners, she “spawned complementary firmwide efforts providing focused mentoring for all diverse associates.”
Smith’s dedicated leadership has led to the success of numerous attorneys, and she hopes that “we all live in a world where we are all giving back and realizing the need to pay it forward, as they say.”
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