Writing to Connect: Charlotte Attorney Marc Gustafson Revels in Writing About the Law

February 19, 2025

Building connections with others in the profession often begins with a shared experience. When someone else opens up about a challenge or asks a question you have been thinking through, you might be surprised.

You might even say to yourself, “I feel seen.”

To be able to relate to someone else, you first must know where they are coming from. Hearing their perspective is the starting point. And, perhaps, listening to their story encourages you to share your own. In finding common ground, a bond is formed. A seed is sown, one that can grow with time and conversation. Before you met, you thought it was only you who felt a certain way, but connections have power to help you see in a new light.

The sense of being known is one way of countering the idea that you are on your own.

Creating opportunities for conversation is something that Marc Gustafson values. As a litigator, employment law attorney and certified mediator, he has found writing to be an open door to new connections, and to starting a dialogue with others in the profession.

By composing pieces about hot topics in the legal field, Gustafson has discovered how much he enjoys writing for a legal audience. Over the past seven years, Gustafson has written blog posts published on NCBarBlog on a range of themes, including artificial intelligence, loneliness in the law, potential clients, due diligence reviews, work-life balance and more. Gustafson, a North Carolina native, has practiced law for more than 20 years and is based in Charlotte. He graduated from the University of North Carolina and from Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law.

He is especially thankful for how writing has allowed him to clarify his thoughts on a topic, and to connect with others over shared ideas, goals and values.

In our conversation below, Gustafson describes why writing about the legal field is personally meaningful, and how it has played a role in his professional growth and his sense of being a part of a community.

What inspired you to pursue the field of law, and more specifically, employment law?

I often get this question from people, about how you got to this point in your career, or a younger lawyer saying this is where I want to get, and I always tell people, I can tell you maybe where you can begin and end, but I can’t tell you what happens in the middle.

In law school, I got an opportunity to intern with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta. I had lived there for a brief time growing up. I really love the city and was looking for an opportunity to go back there. I did that and had a really great summer experience. And then, being from North Carolina, I thought that I should give North Carolina its fair chance. I clerked with Bell, Davis & Pitt, where I currently am, and Van Winkle in Asheville.

One of the things I tell people is that I remember as a summer associate hearing from Bell Davis & Pitt that they weren’t going to be hiring any attorneys. And I remarked to the partner that was telling me this, ‘Well, one day I hope you’ll keep me in mind as a maybe.’ I ended up back here. So, the punch line of that story is, 18 years after I was a summer associate, I returned back to the firm. A lot happened in between. It’s hard to predict the path. But also, if you know where you want to go, and stay true to yourself, I firmly believe you will end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.

Where are you from in North Carolina? 

I grew up in Monroe, just southeast of Charlotte, and lived in suburban Atlanta, among a few other places, and really enjoyed it. So the U.S. Attorney’s Office got me exposed to the legal profession down there. When I heard from Bell, Davis & Pitt that they weren’t hiring at the end of that summer, I started looking and ended up in Atlanta doing securities litigation, which is about as away from employment law as you could ever get. What was great is I had a lot of really good federal court work and really good experience in brief writing and appellate work.

When I returned to Charlotte, I did some similar work, some financial services litigation. And then for a brief period, I worked in-house at LendingTree, which was a great experience, and a lot of people said that my personality kind of fit for in-house counsel, and I learned a lot from that experience. And then LendingTree was a mortgage-based business and affected me, just like everybody else in the financial crisis. But I look back at that as an opportunity. Having worked for two really big law firms, and had I not gone in-house, I never would have looked around for other opportunities and found Essex Richards, where I worked after LendingTree. And it was a great place to land. It is a very well-respected, very small firm, but with some high-quality practitioners. And so that’s when I got linked up with employment law.

One thing you realize when you go to a small firm is it you never knew these things even existed. When you’re in a big firm and a high-story building, you don’t realize how much goes on at the 10- to 40-person law firm level. It’s quite active. I very much enjoyed that. There were a couple of partners there that did employment law. That was something that I took an interest in. I swore I would never do family law, but I think employment law is a not-too-distant relative. It involves a very emotional circumstance for a lot of people, and that’s the part that I’ve enjoyed the most.

Doing employment work allows lawyers to really put our counseling skills to work. In difficult circumstances, whether that’s being caught up in a noncompete and trade secret case, or being terminated from their employment, or having to terminate someone from their employment, those are difficult situations, and I think that’s where we can really provide our skills to help people through those things.

As an employment law attorney, you have practiced for more than 20 years and have experience in both litigation and mediation. What are two of your biggest takeaways given your experience in both areas? Has your experience in one area informed how you think about the other one?

Absolutely. I think that I look at everything now through the perspective of the mediator. And one thing I do is, because of the size of our firm, I’m often local counsel in cases for bigger firms and in bigger matters. And I think that one thing I can do is come into that case, be a little bit more objective and look at it from a mediator’s perspective and think about ways that might lead to a productive settlement.

The way litigation is frequently set up, particularly noncompete cases, is that the fight occurs hard and early. If we all approach things with mediation in mind and a solution first, then maybe we wouldn’t go through some of those things. And I think in both things, what I’ve realized is, in my job, while lawyers bill by the hour, my job is to conserve people’s time. Now, time for some people equates to money. But I focus more so not on the money but on time, and getting people either through a separation and onto the next job, or out of a non-compete so that they can go and practice in their profession. Whatever the circumstances, I am trying to get people back to doing what it is that they enjoy doing and make a living doing and focusing on other things than being in the middle of a lawsuit.

Since 2018, you have written seven blog posts on NCBarBlog. You have written articles about the legal profession and on other topics for various publications. What led to your interest in writing?

As I reflected on this, and my sons that are now 10 and almost 12, I think about when I was at those ages and how I didn’t like to read and how I didn’t necessarily like to write. It was always math.

What I’ve found over the course of time is that writing is a good way of not just expression but of organizing thoughts. And that lots of times, we have thoughts that are floating around in our heads. Sometimes I’ll wake up at night and shoot myself a quick email just to get it out of my head. Then, I try to stitch those thoughts together and develop an article out of it. A little bit of it is to unwind my own brain, and then it is to express my thoughts. Another piece of it is to try to share with people my experience.

My parents weren’t lawyers. My dad worked in the poultry business and my mom was a school teacher. I had been around lawyers only briefly before becoming a lawyer. I think a big part of the practice of law is learning from the experience. I guess I’m now old enough to realize that I have that experience. So it’s not writing as if I have all the answers, but this has been my experience, and I think lawyers share a lot of the same experiences.

There’s so much value in writing about your experiences. Some attorneys who have written pieces for NCBarBlog have shared with me that a person from a different state has called them to talk about the article they have written. It’s exciting to hear that.

I think the joke is that, oh, well, I’m glad someone even read something that I wrote. But you know that if one person reaches out to you to say, ‘Hey, I found some value in that,’ that is probably more than that one person shared in that experience. I think that is part of what we’re trying to do. Even as parents, we try to do the same thing. We’re all going through very similar experiences. Sometimes we’re afraid to share them. If we talked more about the things that we were going through, then it’d be affirmational – that we’re all in this similar struggle, and sometimes, we have doubts about whether we’re doing it the right way. And if you see that someone else is doing it similarly, then that’s confirming that maybe you’re on the right path.

And circling us back to mediation, I think that’s one of the beauties of mediating matters, that I get to see how other practitioners do it. I get to see how other practitioners do it in ways that I wouldn’t do it myself, but it’s also a nice way to see that other people that I respect are doing it the same way, and that confirms that, again, I’m headed, I hope, on the right path.

One of the themes I have observed in your writing is the idea of key values in the practice of law. In describing the role of attorneys, you have said, “Lawyers are at their best when they’re counselors to their clients, and when they’re empathetic to not just their legal needs but their emotional, financial and social needs. Often people come to us when they’ve exhausted the rest of their resources, and they have no place else to turn.” What are some ways you have sought to prioritize these values, compassion and empathy, in your practice?

One of the things I’ve learned, more so of late, is starting a conversation with a new client, ‘I’m sorry you’re in this circumstance.’ And I really think that sometimes, clients and potential clients talk to us for technical responses, and yes, the legal analysis and the legal work is certainly a big piece of it. But I think that people come to us as human beings, and not as law exam questions. And so sometimes, an easy thing that I’ve realized, and probably just through dumb luck, is to try to sympathize with the position that someone is in.

I think what that does is, one, I think people need that. And to hear that they’re not alone, and that there is someone to help them. Two, I think that provides credibility to the advice you’re going to give. Because a question that often comes to me is, ‘If you were in my shoes, what would you do?’ In answering, I’m trying to demonstrate to someone that I’m considering it from their perspective and not a purely legal answer, and more of a human perspective.

You have written about some of the benefits to being a member of the profession, and you have also written about some of the challenges. One of those challenges is a feeling of loneliness. How has your membership in the NCBA helped to strengthen your professional relationships and sense of connection to others?

I haven’t always been an active member of the NCBA. I think it’s kind of like going on to a university campus and being overwhelmed by the size and breadth of it. And then over the course of time, you focus your studies, your interests and your friend groups.

So for me, being a part of the employment section of the bar has been great because it’s people with common interests. It’s similar perspectives,  similar experiences. It helps to weed out some of that isolation that you may feel as an employment practitioner with your own firm when you realize that people in Eastern North Carolina or Western North Carolina are actually doing the same thing that you’re doing, or have similar experiences with judges or run into some of the same problems. That’s just a great source of support. It’s good to have those perspectives.

The piece on loneliness speaks to being an attorney and how it can be isolating. One of the things I’m trying to focus on in the piece is that when you do get in those moments, it’s easy to look inward. That becomes even more isolating. The more that you can do, not even dramatic things, but little things that help you to start looking outward – I think writing is part of that process by putting my expressions out there – it is me looking outward. Maybe it is that one connection with someone who read that article.

Another one is just going to lunch with people. For me, and I think people know that about me, my calendar books very far in advance to go to lunch with people. That is my social outlet. Oftentimes, when I’ve come back from lunch, I may have talked a little bit about the practice of law, but I am more just enthusiastic and fulfilled by the conversation that occurred during that lunch. Certainly, it’s great if work comes out of those lunches, but I think it’s probably as good for my soul as it is for my legal practice. The more that we can kind of look outward and share those experiences with other people, even if they’re short, or in a little burst, I still think that they’re really beneficial to us.

You have written about advances in technology, which include artificial intelligence. How do you see adaptability as a key value for the long-term practice of law?

It goes back to the ‘if you’re not growing, you’re dying’ perspective. Even among my law school classmates who I keep in touch with, we had a chat this morning about ChatGPT, and how one of our in-house counsel friend uses it on a regular basis within his business. Certainly, his perspective is that it’s an invaluable tool. It’s very easy to say it can never replace us, but that would be blind to the fact that there are parts of what we do that can be easily replaced. Going back to the counseling side of our profession, and the human side of our profession, I have no doubt that AI will probably replace some of the more routine parts of our profession at some point, but I don’t see it replacing the human touches.

But what we’re seeing, and I think I wrote this in the article, where we are at our best is when we are exchanging ideas with human beings and being as personable as we can. This isn’t a lesson from ChatGPT or AI. Being personable and being a human should always have been part of our practice, and that we ever got away from that is not a good thing.

When you have spoken about writing, you have said it is an outlet that you enjoy. How has it been meaningful for you to share your experiences as an attorney to an audience of attorneys?

There’s a little bit of a balance because you’re floating out your ideas, similar to a musician, or an artist floating what you think makes sense to the general public. The legal profession is probably a little bit more critical than most. There is always that slight anxiety, as I call it, of pushing the send button. It’s equally balanced and outweighed by this cathartic experience of, I had this thought swimming around inside my head and said what I needed to express it. I might not even care if anybody else does read it, because I took the risk to write it. It helped me to organize my thoughts, and it allowed me to express myself. Anything else that comes out of writing beyond that – it is just an added benefit.

It kind of gets back to your point of earlier, that people do read these things and people do respond to them. And it is certainly a topic of conversation. And it’s always funny when someone will reference one of my articles, and it may even be something I forgot I had even written. And someone will say, oh, well, that point about loneliness really stuck with me. Certainly, the emotions and the feeling from having someone relate to you on a human level is just incredibly valuable.

You have had people connect with you to talk about your pieces. Do you have any stories related to that that you’d like to share? 

That’s probably the neatest thing about it. You can’t predict where they will come from. It could be the 80-some-plus-year-old practitioner who you would assume knew everything about the practice of law, writing to tell you that they’ve learned something new. It could be someone who challenges the thought that’s in the article and requires you to go back and think about it a different way. One of our purposes to writing is, again, from my perspective, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s right, I think it’s an invitation to hear other perspectives.

One of the things that’s going on in society today is the lack of conversation. A little bit of my writing, while it is one-directional, is intended to invoke conversation with either a reader or amongst readers, so I find that part great, too.

Is there anything that we haven’t yet talked about related to your writing or your practice that you might like to add? 

As we’re talking through this, I think the development of this is, I write for a living. I’m writing right now. But the personal writing evolved out of that, and I started writing music reviews for The Charlotte Observer. And I’ve written an article about electric vehicles for a publication called The Charlotte Ledger. We’re lots of times, as lawyers, writers. I know plenty of lawyers who write books. I think we should be looking to express ourselves however and whenever we can. And sometimes, maybe in a little bit more of a fun format.

Stay tuned for Marc’s upcoming blog post, which will be published in early March on NCBarBlog.

---

Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.

---