Hannah Risser’s Roles in the Law and on the Stage

February 5, 2026

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” writes Shakespeare in “As You Like It.”

These famous words remind us of how often we take on roles throughout our lives. While many of those roles differ from each other and may be separate in theory, one part can shape or inform other roles. Many possible roles are available to us, both professionally and personally. Playing various roles can spark new knowledge, energy and joy.

Since her early years, Hannah Risser, paralegal with Conrad Trosch & Kemmy, P.A., has played many roles in musical theater performances. She has performed in plays in her home city, Charlotte, and in Scotland, where she attended college. After developing her skills in musical theater and in backstage management, she has discovered that the stage she most enjoys professionally is the legal field. Along the way, she has realized how her love for the arts parallels her passion for her role as a paralegal.

In what ways does her community involvement energize and empower her career?

In reflecting on this idea, Risser finds it especially meaningful to be involved in communities where she thrives. A graduate of the University of St Andrews in Scotland and Central Piedmont Community College’s Paralegal Technology Program in Charlotte, she has grown in her career and in her life through two specific avenues: her North Carolina Bar Association involvement and her community theater volunteer work in the Queen City.

By serving with her NCBA community, Risser has built relationships with others in the profession and continues to discover more about the legal field. As a stage manager for local theater production companies such as Shepherd Shakespeare, she has supported the arts in her city and honed her organizational and teamwork abilities.

Risser, who has worked as a paralegal since 2019, is a member of the NCBA Paralegal Division and Minorities in the Profession Committee. When she became an NCBA member two years ago, she was eager to connect with and make a difference to others in the profession. Risser serves as the Communications Co-Chair and is on the Pro Bono and Service Projects section for the Minorities in the Profession Committee. She is active with the Paralegal Division’s Ethics Committee.

How does Risser leverage her talents to foster engagement with the paralegal community as well as the local arts community? In this interview, she provides insight into how her stages, both literal and metaphorical, have influenced her career and her life.

How have your experiences with the theater prepared you for your paralegal career?

Once per year, I work with Shepherd Shakespeare. It’s a Shakespeare company that two of my friends started, and they do a Shakespeare in the park event every year that’s free. It’s for families and kids, and they make it very accessible. They always do a comedy with a lot of physical jokes and things that the kids absolutely enjoy.

With that, what I do is help facilitate the rehearsals. I’m making sure that the actors are there on time. I primarily keep track of what the blocking is. Blocking is where the director tells the actors to enter, exit and move. It also covers who’s bringing on what props and who’s using specific set pieces. I keep track of all of that. And then if we get to a rehearsal and an actor says, “I forgot where I need to enter in the scene,” I have that information available.

A lot of what I do takes the administrative workload off the director so they can focus on just the creative side of it and decide what they want the actors to do. And it’s very similar to working as a paralegal because we’re trying to take as much as we can off of the attorney’s plate so they can focus on the substantive legal work that the paralegals can’t do. That allows attorneys to get more done.

As paralegals, we’re also saving clients’ money because we’re getting billed at a lower rate than many attorneys but can complete many tasks necessary for our clients’ cases. I definitely see paralegals and stage managers as similar because they’re both focused on organizational tasks and working to make sure that everything is running smoothly. When you’re a director or an attorney, you’re thinking about the big picture of the project, whether it’s a case getting ready for trial, or whether it’s a show that you’re trying to put on. It’s much easier to get that work done when you don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty, and that’s what I end up doing.

You studied musical theater in high school at Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte and graduated in 2012. How were these early experiences significant to your life and to your interests?

I have always been a theater kid. My family is big into the arts. Once I moved to Charlotte, I found out there was an art school, and I said, OK, I have to go there. I majored in musical theater but also took classes in technical theatre, ballet, and costuming. The way that our classes were structured is that you had your core classes, of course, and then you had a certain number of arts classes that you took.

Through that, I discovered that I didn’t want that to be my career. I love it, but I decided this is going to be a hobby for me. When I left, I ended up going to school out of the country. I had always wanted to live somewhere else and move abroad. It just so happened that one of my friends in high school had applied to and gotten into the University of St Andrews. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could apply to a college outside of the U.S. And I did, and I got in, and I said, OK, I’m going to go. (Can you see a theme here?)

I studied psychology there and spent a lot of time doing theater outside of my classes and was also involved in community outreach. I had a radio show, and I was doing dance class and archery. I’ve always been someone who wanted to be involved in a lot of different places.

After moving back to Charlotte, I began my coursework at CPCC and eventually gained employment at my first law firm. I became heavily involved in the local theatre community for many years, balancing work and rehearsals. Now that my workload has grown, I have less time to commit outside of work. I still do some theater in the community here. I’ve kind of cut down on the performing, but now I’m doing more backstage work, stage managing, that sort of thing. I always feel that stage managing is very similar to being a paralegal. It’s just a different field and venue. So those skills kind of transfer over to my hobbies as well as my work.

In 2012, you moved to Scotland to attend graduate school for psychology at the University of St Andrews. What was it like to earn your college degree in Scotland? 

The American college system is based on the Scottish college system, because in England, you receive your undergrad degree in three years. In Scotland, it’s a four-year program, but you graduate with a Master of Arts. You have to declare your major on your application. You start off working on whatever you are majoring in your first year. You have very limited credits outside of that to take other things. I took Russian and statistics, and I took a couple of history classes, but for the most part, all four years were spent on psychology.

Then, your final year is when you do your dissertation. You’re coming up with an experiment, you’re running it, and you are figuring out what statistical analysis you’re supposed to use to evaluate your information. Then, you write your 10,000-word dissertation. You have to orally defend it, and you also have to present it to a group of your peers.

That was a very involved project in my final year. I decided to do something along the lines of evolutionary psychology. I was looking at specific tests that we use to measure anxiety in rats. People would use this test to measure anxiety levels, especially with different stimuli. I was critiquing that test to show that it didn’t accurately measure anxiety and to show that it might not be as useful as they might think it could be. The work was pretty niche, but I think the best part was actually getting to play with rats for a month!

It was definitely hard and challenging to study there, especially because it’s such an international school, and you have people coming from all over, and everybody that’s going there has been the best at their schools. There’s a little bit of competition there.

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