NC IOLTA Executive Director Mary Irvine Leads National Organization
“Few leaders are born. We learn to be leaders. We learn by working with other people and working through our philosophy.”
– Frances Hesselbein, former CEO, Girl Scouts of the USA
Whether Mary Irvine, or anyone for that matter, is a natural-born leader is open to debate. The NC IOLTA Board of Trustees, who wisely selected Irvine to serve as their executive director in 2017, would argue that she is, and their case would be strong.
The National Association of IOLTA Programs (NAIP) Board of Directors, who wisely brought Irvine into their leadership circle and installed her as president on July 1, 2024, would argue that she is, and their case would be strong.
But there is no question whatsoever, regardless of what she brought to the table when she assumed leadership of either organization, Mary Irvine has learned to be an excellent leader and works with other people as well as anyone can imagine.
Irvine is a 2007 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and 2011 graduate of UNC School of Law, where she served as pro bono chair for the Education Law & Policy Society and was named 2L Pro Bono Student of the Year. She joined the NC Equal Access to Justice Commission and NC IOLTA in 2014 and began her involvement with NAIP at that time.
“The members of NAIP are actually the IOLTA programs,” Irvine explained, “and NC IOLTA has long been a member of the national organization. But from the time I started with IOLTA in 2014 until 2018, I wasn’t serving in a formal way with NAIP. I attended the professional conferences that we put on, but 2018 was the first time I got to see a little bit more of how the work gets done.”
How did that come about?
“In 2018 I was asked to serve on a working group at our national association that was looking at staffing, because up to that point we hadn’t had any outside staff. It was fully volunteer led throughout their history, with some support from the American Bar Association’s Commission on IOLTA. There was a need to have more dedicated staffing, and at first I agreed to serve as a member of the working group. Then the chair took a position as a judge, so she had to leave the working group because she was no longer involved in the IOLTA community. I was asked to chair the staffing working group.
“Still, at that point, I had only been in the executive director role at NC IOLTA for a year, and frankly I was thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a newbie here; surely there’s somebody who can lead this group who has been in the community for a long time.’ But everybody was great to work with, and it was how I got to know more about what our national association does. I got to know more members from other states and was able to benefit from building those relationships with them. After that, I stayed involved with our national association on committees, and then was asked to serve on the board. Since the beginning, I have felt like everyone is so committed to our work together, finding ways to make our work better by learning and connecting as peers, so I was hooked after that experience and sold on the value of what participation in the association could do to help our program in North Carolina. Opportunities to learn from peers and to lead – it is one of the ways to make the work that we do here in North Carolina stronger and to grow as a leader too.”
Some 60 organizations throughout North America comprise the membership of NAIP. This includes all U.S. jurisdictions, including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia, as well as the provinces and territories of Canada. As a “a non-profit, non-partisan membership organization for funders of civil legal aid,” NAIP “supports the growth and development of Interest on Lawyers Trust Account (IOLTA) programs and works to increase access to justice for all.”
During her term as president, Irvine will maintain the organization’s longstanding commitment to “connecting, educating, and building partnerships.”
“There are always activities within each of those pillars of our mission,” Irvine said. “I think particularly in this moment there’s a lot of opportunity, because programs are bringing in more revenue than they have, to serve as a resource and talk about new ways that programs are creatively using IOLTA revenue to make an impact on access to justice.
“One of the things that a lot of organizations have been dealing with, and this has probably been over the last 5 to 10 years, is that we’ve seen a lot of turnover within the IOLTA community. I think there’s a real value in peer-to-peer technical assistance because no one really is trained to do this work, and nobody understands what the rules are with the banks or how you pursue compliance matters with the banks or how you can improve as grantmakers and support grantees in this unique role that we have.”
Whereas the commitment to access to justice is universal throughout the legal community, navigating those issues through the work of IOLTA programs presents a unique challenge.
“I don’t think that there’s anyone who really walks in with all the tools that they need,” Irvine said, “so the association has done a lot in recent years to try to provide mentoring opportunities for new staff members, provide programming that is relevant to folks who come in with great experience and great opportunity to serve as leaders, but they just need to learn a lot about how to do this work within the IOLTA context, and then just helping them navigate the different kinds of challenges they’re facing in their states.
“All the programs are structured somewhat differently, but I think there are some things at the core that are not unlike much of the work of the Bar Association. Invariably, our work involves partnerships and being able to come together with other people and talk about issues that they are facing and trying to understand better how we can be most responsive to the legal needs in the community.”
The ability to listen and distill problems, Irvine added, and then working through solutions and serving as a convener, is one of NAIP’s most important roles.
“Regardless of the state, there’s always going to be a number of stakeholders at the table who are invested in access to justice efforts and who are doing work to contribute,” Irvine continued. “I think playing that role of getting folks together and building partnerships and building relationships with others is the top line for a lot of the work we do.
“We all have this role, responsibility really, to be good stewards of the funds that really couldn’t be generated without the support of lawyers and banks across the state. Finding ways to communicate about the work that we’re doing and sharing information about it is another thing that folks are trying to do a better job of. How can we bring people along and encourage them to be invested in this work? One of the best ways that we have to do that is by sharing with them about our impact and sharing about the opportunities that are out there.”
In that regard, North Carolina and its NC IOLTA program are held in high regard throughout the national organization.
“I think that we definitely have a lot to offer being where we are in this space,” Irvine said. “We’re certainly not the biggest state that’s out there. We don’t have the most money of all the other programs. We’re also not the smallest state. Within our program we try to keep administrative costs reasonable. We’ve tried to invest where we can in places that it makes sense internally to build up our staffing or work with banking consultants so we can ensure compliance goes well. But we’re not doing it with a huge budget, if that makes sense.
“It’s been interesting to be in that position because there’s parts of our program and the work that we do that I feel like I can really relate to some of the bigger programs, and there’s times when I can really relate to some of the smaller programs. I think that it has been helpful, too, just recognizing that every program looks different and the resources and capacity that they have look different. We try to make sure that NAIP’s programming and the opportunities that we present for people can be relevant regardless of their size and structure.
“They are all different. Every single program is different. There’s a lot of programs that are their own separate entity. There are programs that are tied in with the court system and state government. There are programs that are tied with voluntary bar groups in some way. It’s all different; every single state is different.”
Accepting responsibility for leading her national association, Irvine said, would not have been possible without the steadfast support of NC IOLTA leadership.
“I can’t remember what year it was,” Irvine explains, “but I was sitting down with a few members of our executive committee and I had recently been asked to join our national association board. From the beginning they were exceedingly supportive and wanted to see me pursue it. They also acknowledged, because these are all folks who have done a lot of this voluntary work in the past, that it can take a lot of your time and your focus; they wanted me to know that they were both supportive and prepared to step in if it was helpful on different things.
“I feel really lucky that there are a lot of folks here at the State Bar and certainly folks who have served on our board, past and present, who have also taken their turn serving national organizations or statewide organizations, and they’ve provided a lot of mentorship and support when issues have come up. They get it because they’ve been there before, and they know that it can help us be a stronger organization here at NC IOLTA too. I really value that and I’m thankful that that I have that support.”
In a similar vein, Irvine readily provides her support to those within NAIP who will follow in her footsteps.
“When I first started in my role as Executive Director at NC IOLTA, I connected with folks within NAIP,” Irvine said. “I had a mentor that I was assigned through the IOLTA community, and I started getting to know people in the community and understanding more about the resources that were available.
“That’s really what I’ve tried to do as I’ve grown in leadership with the NAIP board – just making sure that new folks who are coming into the community feel welcomed, because we want them to know that they have support of a larger network. And create new ways for the community to stay connected and draw on the collective expertise of others. I hope to be able to continue that work that others have put in and build upon that foundation.
“I think at the end of the day, for there to be strong IOLTA programs in other jurisdictions, that helps us with our work too. We have this system for lawyers to contribute as a profession to access to justice and other issues. If lawyers have confidence in our program and IOLTA programs across the country, then I think it really builds goodwill with the banks and with lawyers and with the community. Being able to help other programs to strengthen and grow their work, and learning and growing in the process – it all helps us here in North Carolina, too.
Russell Rawlings is director of external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association.