The Atlanta Bar Association recently announced it had elected a Barnes & Thornburg LLP partner as its next president. Here, Christina M. Baugh tells Law360 Pulse how the bar has helped her career, how she pays it forward and some of the most challenging types of cases she works on.

Baugh and the other board of director members are set to serve from June 1 until May 31, 2022. The bar also announced that Chris P. Lightner, a partner at Alston & Bird LLP, was elected as the association's vice president and president-elect, and Nelson Mullins associate Amy B. Cheng was elected as secretary.

Baugh will lead the association, which has nearly 6,000 members in the Atlanta region, replacing the group's current president, Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak & Stewart PC shareholder A. Craig Cleland.

At Barnes & Thornburg, Baugh advises clients in business litigation covering everything from intellectual property and shareholder disputes to officer liability and insurance coverage, among other areas, according to her firm bio.

Outside of work, Baugh is also the immediate past president of the Georgia Association for Women Lawyers, she said. She also volunteers with The Junior League of Atlanta Inc., and before the pandemic, she volunteered with Everybody Wins! Atlanta, which aims to improve children's literacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You've been involved in the Atlanta Bar Association since you graduated from law school in 2007. What are a few of the ways that being a member of the Atlanta bar have helped you either professionally or personally?

I think there are many ways that the Atlanta Bar has helped, not the least of which would be that the Atlanta Bar Association has some of the best content and programming out there.

All lawyers are required to complete 12 hours of continuing legal education every year. Some people sort of feel ... it's one of those obligations where you show up and check the box, but the Atlanta Bar puts on quality programming where you actually learn something useful that you can either implement in your practice or use to help balance your personal life. I've found those to be extremely useful.

There's also the connections you make with other attorneys who are members of the bar association. You get referrals or, particularly if you're a younger attorney, you can get a job out of it or you can lateral at some point, but you also end up forming friendships with different attorneys in the bar association. So it definitely helps on a professional and personal front.

How has the Atlanta Bar Association been impacted due to the pandemic? And how have you adapted?

A lot of the challenges that our association has faced are very similar to what everyone has gone through over the last year.

We haven't had the opportunities to meet in person. One of the largest benefits of participating in a bar organization is those personal interactions, and while it's possible to move some of that to a virtual platform, and we've done so, you still lose some of that human nature.

People are struggling with balancing a lot more these days as things have shifted to home. There are less clear ends to the day. People are also home-schooling kids or doing other things. So just understanding that life's been very challenging the last year.

What the bar association has done is try to focus on how we can still have those personal interactions at least to some degree, whether it's a 10- to 15-minute ability to interact and touch base with people before a program gets started or smaller events where people can interact more.

We are shifting to new guidelines allowing our sections to set up small, in-person events safely where you're outside; you can follow distancing and mask requirements and things like that. So people can be safe but we can team up and do an outdoor community service project, for instance.

We're looking at how we can continue to add back the in-person events without damaging any of the progress being made where everyone is fighting against COVID-19.

Some of the things we've done for innovating and keeping things fresh is we've added programming at the bar-wide level. The sections have always had the majority of our programming because so much of it is practice-driven.

Our current president, Craig Cleland, started to hold Zooms at noon where he would invite national speakers to talk on different subjects that could be applicable to the legal profession as a whole. It was fantastic programming and really useful for our membership.

There was also a heightened focus on our Wellness Committee, trying to acknowledge the fact that life has been very challenging this past year and what people have done and found useful to still be able to maintain some balance and mental and physical wellness. It has held some great programs as we're all trying to figure out how to practice law in the situation that we find ourselves in.

How does the Atlanta Bar Association help women and minorities advance in the legal industry?

The Atlanta Bar can provide a platform on which women and minorities can really help to build connections in the legal community and help them find and grow relationships that can fall under mentor, promoter, ally or referrals.

I think that's really important because a lot of the legal profession is relationship-driven, and historically when you look at the attorneys who were successful, they did tend to be predominantly white males. Oftentimes when you're thinking about who you are going to mentor or who you are going to ask to mentor you, you tend to gravitate toward people who look more like you or remind you of yourself.

I think what the Atlanta Bar is good at being able to do, though, is help transcend and help connect across lines where you're not necessarily going to find someone who looks just like you, but you will find someone who is willing to invest in your future and help as you're trying to grow in your own career.

In particular, when you're looking for external sources, you get a broad base from the Atlanta Bar that you can really pull from and get that support.

The bar association also provides great leadership opportunities, which can be hard to find, at least in the earlier stages of your career. Leadership experience is particularly important if you're an associate and you're looking to gain the skill set to be successful and transcend up to partner.

It's challenging to convince a client like a Fortune 500 company to send you work when you're a fourth-year lawyer, but you can take on leadership in the bar and really start gaining those skills of leading groups.

As a litigator advising businesses of all sizes, what are some of the biggest challenges facing your clients right now?

A lot of companies are really looking at the same things, frankly, that many individuals are looking at. As we're potentially reaching a stabilization point with the pandemic, I think a lot of us are trying to figure out what's next, what does it mean to return to normal?

Does that mean you're going to require your employees to start showing up physically to a location? Are you going to maintain remote working capability? Are you going to shift to more remote work options? Does that mean you lessen your physical footprint in a building?

What does it mean if you are bringing people back? Are there vaccine requirements? Can you even do that; is that legal or can you simply incentivize? What's going to expose you to risk like liability or litigation? Are you going to end up breaching a lease or can you work with the landlord so that you don't get sued but you don't need the same footprint that you thought you needed?

Another consideration is making sure you're not infringing upon your employees' rights but you're also making sure you're keeping people safe.

I think there's a lot of reevaluation of how we work and what makes business sense. Does it make more sense to invest in the electronic VPN and other remote-type access points? Or does that expose you to data or privacy issues? Are you better off keeping a physical footprint?

And, of course, some of the different contracts that over the past year have not been honored, not necessarily because someone didn't want to, but because things changed; I'm seeing that play out in some litigation as well.

What was the most challenging case that you've worked on and what made it challenging?

To protect client confidences and not improperly air client issues, I'm going to talk more about the type of cases that are more challenging.

I would say there are two buckets of things that make the type of cases I work on extremely challenging.

The first bucket is where the case is dictated and directed more by emotions than facts or law. My cases are business-related so I think a lot of people assume the phrase 'business is business' and people come into it with a sterile business mindset. And that's just not accurate, whether you have a split-up of a business that someone has grown with their partners who may have been best friends for 30 years and now you believe the other person was misappropriating assets out of the company or is competing on the side — emotions come in.

Another example is companies that have worked together for a long time and have developed a mistrust because they feel like one company sandbagged the other company or hasn't been forthcoming.

Sometimes it's just part of the process and you know you're going to work through that, and once you get past the emotion you get back to the business side and you can help the client reach a better resolution.

The other bucket is where you have a case where liability is clear and collectability is suspect.

I've had a few times where you are working with a client and it's clear; maybe the other side breached a contract or fiduciary duty or did something to cause considerable harm to the client, but the best I can do is get a great judgment that the client will never collect on. That can be very hard to work with a client on. They look at it like, 'How is this the justice system? That's not fair.'

It's really just working with them, telling them, 'Yes, I understand that, but it's really throwing good money after bad' kind of concept and acknowledging that there are times where you are right but this is not a fight that you need to fight. It can mean some pretty hard discussions with clients.

You've spent the bulk of your legal career in private practice in Atlanta. What makes the legal market unique and what has kept you based in Atlanta?

Atlanta is obviously a pretty large city and we have a relatively large legal community here. But for a large city and a large bar, we have what feels like a small bar. It's just amazing how often you do know another attorney because you've practiced with them before or you know them through the bar.

We have a small-town feel but are a big city, so you get the high quality of work, you have great clients in the area — startups, educational institutions, Fortune 500 and small companies and individuals. There's also just a breadth of industry types so you get great quality of work, you have great attorneys, a great bench and you get that collegial feel to it while still having all the benefits of a big city. That's the great part of Atlanta.

Beside that, I really just love the city of Atlanta. It's a great, caring and engaged city, [it's got] vibrant neighborhoods, the quality of the business and work is fantastic, and we have some great weather.

What work are you most proud of in your career?

I would say watching some of the attorneys that I've helped mentor or have the honor of working with grow and develop into a stronger, more confident version of themselves.

To the extent that I've been able to have any positive influence on or be a role model or a mentor for other attorneys — I don't even want to say younger attorneys, because you can have a mentor that's younger than you — but to just watch people take ownership and thrive in their own life and practice, that's really rewarding to watch.

Sometimes it's even just helping them to understand the right questions to ask to be able to get themselves the information they need to make a better decision for themselves, and reinforcing that it's OK to ask.

I remember one instance when I was asked to speak to about 12 younger women lawyers at this breakfast put on by the bar association. I was asked to talk about what it takes to make partner. I started by asking, 'How many of you have had the discussion with your partners at your firm about what qualifications they are looking for to make you a partner?'

And not a single one raised their hand and I was like, 'Oh goodness, let's start talking about what you need to be asking.'

I ran into one of the women a few months later and she said, 'Thank you, I had that conversation and we put a plan in place of metrics by which if I meet them I'll make partner in however many years. I never would have thought to ask that.'

Some of these things were you spend one hour and you think, 'Well, how much difference can I really make in someone's life?' but then you watch them actually take that and do something with it and really grow in their own career — it's rewarding.

--Editing by Bruce Goldman.
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