Anyone who met Brian Davis and Katy McNeil in 2021 would have assumed they led a charmed life. Both had graduated from Michigan Law in 2014 and were climbing their respective career ladders. But behind the scenes, Davis was beginning to experience unsettling health problems.

Henley and Zellars first met as members of the Black Law Students Association at Michigan Law, and the alumnae recently opened a new boutique law firm with offices in Detroit and Washington, DC.

Resolving legal conflicts by way of shouting is not how Jayne Rizzo Reardon, ’83, handles things. But that wasn’t always the case, and it took a particularly fraught negotiation early in her career to set her on a search for a better way to practice law.

The early tenure of Clarence Armbrister as president at Johnson C. Smith University was not for the faint of heart. Two weeks before his term started on January 1, 2018, he learned that the school’s accrediting agency had placed it on probation for financial reasons. Then came hurricanes and the coronavirus pandemic.

Eric Cox and Rob Burnett, ’17, first met in their Law School supersection, and the self-described best friends now work alongside one another at Netcapital, a tech firm in the nascent but beginning-to-boom financial technology sector.

Kate Powers, ’20, serves as the executive director of Global Accountability Network (GAN), an organization that works to bring justice to victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. 

Virginia Morrison, ’03, left her employment law practice to become CEO of Second Chance Beer Company, based in San Diego, which not only produces award-winning craft brews but also gives rescue dogs a second chance at life. 

When Allie Greenleaf Maldonado, ’00, first donned the robes of a judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals at her January swearing in, she became the first tribal citizen to sit on the court. 

Azadeh Shahshahani, ’04, a prolific writer and speaker on the subject of immigrant rights, was first drawn to Project South because of the organization’s work to combat Islamophobia.

Zack James, ’17, can recall the exact moment when building tractors started to pay off. It was August 2019, and James was sitting in his truck, watching an autonomous tractor move up and down a field, planting seeds. “It was the first time I was being paid to do farming services.”