Elliott, Snyder and the Women in the Profession Committee Blaze a Trail in the Law
Women supporting and working with each other can make great things happen. It’s not just about getting the job done. It’s about lifting each other up, sharing strengths, and creating real change together. – Allyn Elliott
I think it’s important for women to promote each other and support each other. I think we are incredibly efficient and compassionate, and I think we can accomplish a lot together. – Lauren Snyder
The Women in the Profession Committee celebrated three achievements this year. They established the inaugural Trailblazer Award for Women in Law and planned the first Trailblazer Award for Women in Law dinner to honor the recipient of the award. They created a presence on NCBarBlog by publishing posts to cultivate awareness for women in the legal profession and relevant topics of interest.
In October 2024, they launched their first blog post, and since then, they have published nine more. Their recent post topics include one series on practicing law while being a caregiver, and a second series on questions frequently asked by women, a series called “Dear NCBA WIP.” The committee has also published member spotlight posts to champion women in the profession and the motivational piece Find Your Gold Star Moment.
These achievements have been the result of amazing leadership and teamwork. Allyn Elliott serves as the 2024-2025 chair of the committee, and Lauren Snyder serves as vice chair.
Allyn Elliott
Allyn Elliott is a patent law attorney with NK Patent Law in Raleigh and has been a member of the committee since 2015. Elliott, who studied chemical engineering at Mississippi State University, worked as a chemical engineer with Shell Oil Company in New Orleans and Houston for two years. After deciding to become an attorney, she attended Tulane Law School. Elliott’s career as an attorney began in Charlotte, where she practiced for five years before relocating to Raleigh to join a national boutique patent law firm. In 2018, she joined NK Patent Law. Elliott, who has known some of her clients for 15 years, says she especially enjoys building relationships with them, helping them solve problems and working through issues with them.
Lauren Snyder
Lauren Snyder is an attorney with SAS in Cary and joined the committee several years ago. Before college, Snyder considered becoming a doctor. While studying political science at Vanderbilt University, Snyder served as an intern with the North Carolina Speaker of the House. Through this experience, she became interested in the law. After meeting an attorney who became her mentor, she began to think about a legal career. Following college, she served with Teach for America. She studied law at the George Washington University Law School, and after graduating, she worked in big law before joining a small firm. In 2024, she became in-house counsel at SAS, where she says she has learned new skill sets and enjoys the opportunity to represent her client.
We applaud Allyn’s and Lauren’s efforts in providing opportunities for women to connect, continue to hone their skills, recognize their accomplishments and join together for the good of the profession. In the interview below, hear from Allyn and Lauren, who give insight into the committee’s accomplishments this year, the value of mentorship, how they define success, and more. Editor’s note: we spoke with Allyn and Lauren in March, before the recipient of the Trailblazer Award, Janet Ward Black [link to story], was announced.
This year, the committee spearheaded the new Trailblazer Award and the inaugural Women in the Profession awards dinner. What does it mean to you to have a hand in making both of these come to fruition?
Lauren: When we met back before the bar year started, you said, “I really want us to step up this year. I want this year to be different.” We are in a post-pandemic world. I think a lot of people have leaned out of the organization as opposed to leaning in. You were very clear that you wanted to do some different things this year and make it come to life more. And I think you’ve executed that really well.
Allyn: I echo everything that Lauren said. For our committee, what I really wanted was to increase engagement by committee members and awareness of WIP outside of the committee. It can take a lot of effort to get people reengaged, but I do think that, hopefully, the committee has been significantly more active this year. And I am hoping that will continue going forward. Sometimes the hardest part is getting started.
We had three subcommittees, and we essentially forced people to be on one of them. Then, we pushed the subcommittee co-chairs to pick what they wanted their focus for the year to be and we pushed them to move forward with the focus they chose. And I’ve been really pleased. The subcommittees have worked so hard and have done really great things. It’s been really fun and exciting to see that.
We’re thrilled to have this new award. The committee as a whole has really stepped up and embraced the fun challenge of creating an award, including the nomination and selection process that goes along with it, and planning an award banquet, and has done all of this work in a short amount of time. As Lauren mentioned, a group of women can do really great things in a short amount of time if we focus our efforts. This award helps to raise awareness of the WIP committee and to increase recognition of women attorneys in the state.
It has been a lot of work, but it’s really been an honor. I am so excited for the banquet and to see who the inaugural recipient is going to be. We had an astounding number of nominations, which is such a testament to all the wonderful women attorneys in the state. I think this is going to be the start of a really important and influential award, and I’m really pleased to be a part of it.
In the fall of 2024, you launched the Women in the Profession Committee blog. Thank you both for your work in leading this effort. Since then, you have published ten posts, including new member spotlights, a series on caregiving and a series on “Dear NCBA WIP.” What interested you in developing the committee’s blog?
Allyn: We wanted to raise awareness of the committee, and this seemed like a relatively easy way to do it. It also addresses concerns of women in the profession. I’ve been on this committee for many years, and consistently throughout, the concerns that have been raised in the committee are work-life balance, parenting, and caregiving. These have been constant challenges for women in the profession, and we felt like the blog would be an easy and impactful way to address those issues.
Lauren: I also think it was a way to start small. I think in the past, there have been efforts to do really big things, sometimes in terms of like, let’s try to compile all the leave policies, an issue that typically affects women more than men. We tried to think of ways to share information, but we often looked to really large ways to do that, and there can be a lot of challenges to doing something big. This felt like a way to start small, but like Allyn said, still a way to have an impact. Sharing wisdom among members is much easier than trying to compile a whole bunch of documents.
In 2007, the Women in the Profession Committee presented “Changing Face of Justice: A View from the Bench,” which featured Justice Ginsburg. Here, Christine Walczyk, who served in 2007 as chair of the Women in the Profession Committee, is pictured with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
You are serving as chair and vice chair of the committee in addition to serving as communications co-chairs for the blog. What are some of the goals you wanted to accomplish this year? Allyn, you spoke to this earlier.
Allyn: I did speak to that, and Lauren, you might have more to add.
Lauren: The real goal was to increase engagement and spread the word. I do think that we’ve accomplished both of those, which is fantastic. I felt people really stepped up and maybe having this award energized people more– everyone seems really excited about it. The subcommittees we’ve formed have helped with the award banquet planning, and people are showing up by helping, providing input and sharing their experiences. That’s pretty great, and I hope that that will continue in the future. It’s given us something to rally around. That’s really what the goal was – let’s not just talk about getting things done and do our best. But this was giving us something to work towards. And it will continue in the future. It’s not just a one-time thing.
Both of you have given us a snapshot of where you are right now through your member spotlight posts. Two ideas that you mention are mentorship and professional success. Lauren, in your spotlight, you mention that you have had women mentors who have made a lasting impact on your career. Could you describe one or two of those mentors and how they encouraged and inspired you?
Lauren: I think everybody needs a good mentor when you step into the legal profession. There’s so much that’s learned through just watching other people. And you know, I’ve had amazing male mentors and female mentors. In particular, when you find a female mentor, I think that’s a sort of special circumstance because you can identify so much more with another woman.
In my old firm, I have a dear close friend who’s a mentor of mine. She, from day one, supported me. And we had similar interests, which is helpful. I was interested in the type of work she was doing. She was in North Carolina, but I was in a D.C. firm, and I ended up following her down here and working down here. My family’s down here, so in part that is why we moved, but she and I opened the Raleigh office of our small firm.
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I learned so incredibly much from her, and I think I am the lawyer I am because she took the time to really invest in me and teach me how to be a great lawyer. You can learn from men too, but really, it’s a special bond when you have another woman to emulate. I was fortunate to have my mentor, and then through all the organizations I’ve been involved with, I’ve met women outside of my own work environment, and I’ve found it really valuable to have people outside my work environment to support me. Especially when I was thinking about leaving my firm, I could speak with them more openly. I think it’s really important to have a community of lawyers, not just within your own work environment, but outside as well. We all go through things in life. We’re all people too. It’s so nice to have folks around you who can support you.
Allyn: Piggybacking on what Lauren was saying, so much of the practice of law is not what you learn in law school. It’s not the law itself, but it’s how to work with clients, be an attorney to those clients, and work through issues in a professional way. The best way to learn these things is by seeing someone else do it and trying to emulate what they do. Or by doing the opposite of what you see others do, depending on what you think about what you’re seeing. It really is a practice of law – you are figuring out parts of it as you go. That’s one of the reasons that mentorship is so valuable, because they don’t teach the types of personal skills needed to be a successful lawyer in school.
Monica Webb-Shackelford, former chair of the Women in the Profession Committee, pictured in 2019 at the 25th anniversary event.
Allyn, in your spotlight post, you share that one challenge you’ve encountered is defining what professional success means to you. What would you say are some of the ways you have redefined what it means to be successful?
Allyn: Probably my best example of that is becoming a partner at a law firm. I came out of law school and got a job at a law firm with the goal of becoming a partner. Making partner is the next goal to check off the list to show you are successful. So I worked for many years and became a partner at a national IP boutique. When you achieve the thing that you’ve been aiming for the entirety of your career, you expect to have some sort of feeling of accomplishment, achievement, or happiness from achieving this goal. But for me, I didn’t feel those things . . . there was just sort of emptiness on the other side of making partner. Because your job doesn’t change. You just go back to work and do the same thing every day.
There is no recognition outside of the firm to mark the achievement. Your existing clients don’t necessarily care because you still do the same things for them. Financially, it wasn’t more rewarding for me, and for a lot of people, you actually make less money because you’re having to buy into the firm. It’s hard to achieve a goal and then find out it wasn’t what you thought it was going to be. I had to sit with that feeling for a while and think, OK, what now? What do I do now that I have achieved this thing, and it’s unfulfilling?
I stayed at the firm for several more years, but I also changed the way I thought and worked so that I could pay more attention to other parts of my life that I had been neglecting. Maybe I didn’t stay at work for ridiculous hours every day. Maybe every once in a while, I took a Friday afternoon off and picked up my kids from school, and we went to do something fun. Or maybe I didn’t work over the weekend. I had to think about ways to shift my thinking and figure out other things that were important to me.
Eventually, I moved to a smaller firm where I don’t have a billable hour requirement. I can direct my own work and work with clients I have long-standing relationships with. Of course, I care about how much money I make. But I feel like I’m chasing my priorities rather than chasing achievements. I think that’s been more fulfilling for me.
Lauren: A lot of women feel that. A lot of people, not even just women, male colleagues have felt that way. The other thing about being a lawyer at a law firm is that you often only ever get one promotion. You’re an associate, you may move to of counsel, depending on your firm, but most the time, the only promotion you get is to partner. You may work for years and years, and you get one promotion. It’s sort of like the gold star. A lot of people feel let down after that. It’s maybe more common than we talk about. I appreciate you talking about it because it’s important to talk about.
What do you find most rewarding about your service with the Women in the Profession Committee?
Lauren: I just really like getting to work with other women across the state. It’s a really cool opportunity that we have. It is why I’ve always been in the committee, I think it’s fun to meet other women lawyers across the state and to come together around something and work together. That’s really powerful and, also, a lot of fun. But this year in particular, it’s been meaningful for obvious reasons. Because we’re hopefully starting something that’s going to continue. And we’re going to be honoring women who are so deserving. I’m really excited about being a part of that and energized by it. It’s very meaningful to me. And women more than deserve it, especially the women we are nominating. They’re incredibly accomplished. They faced a lot of obstacles and overcome them, and I think we can all learn a lot from them. And I want that to continue – all of us learning from each other in the years ahead. It’s nice to form connections with women lawyers across the state.
Allyn: I agree and echo everything you said. I don’t work with a lot of women. I never have worked with many women because of my technical background. This continued when I became a patent attorney. I work with the engineers who are now lawyers. For me, it’s been a really good way to interact with and meet other women attorneys and hear their challenges and understand that I’m not alone. Because many of the challenges are the same, being in a group with other women attorneys has given me the chance to see different ways of approaching those challenges.
It has also been fascinating and rewarding to get to work with and learn from senior attorneys in the profession. WIP has members who are actively involved and have practiced for 30, 40, and 50 years. They are amazing. Seeing how engaged they still are gives me a lot of energy to keep doing it. That’s what I would add to what Lauren said.
Is there anything else that you would like to add?
Allyn: I would say that the committee has been really rewarding for me because I have been active in it. I think this year we’ve seen an increase in engagement and action. I would encourage members to continue being engaged and active because it benefits everyone, including me. The more I put in, the more I get out. And I think that would be true for everyone.
Lauren: I hope our banquet is a success and will continue for years to come. I am excited to serve as Chair of WIP next year and hope women lawyers across the state will consider joining our committee and/or attending the banquet in future years!
Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.