Reprinted from Briefings: News From and About the People of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP

Atlanta partner Sara Turnipseed has been honored with the 2010 Randolph Thrower Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women & Minorities in the Profession Committee of the State Bar of Georgia. The organization recognized her efforts to foster a more diverse legal profession for women and minorities in the state of Georgia.

Ms. Turnipseed practices in complex, multi-state product liability, commercial, and toxic tort litigation. She sits on the Firm’s Executive Committee, the governing body that oversees business and financial activities. For some clients, she serves as national counsel, directing their defense in jurisdictions throughout the United States. In that capacity, she is responsible for implementing their national litigation strategy. Ms. Turnipseed also serves as regional or local counsel for a number of other clients.

As one of Georgia’s best known and most successful female litigation attorneys, she could easily sit back and concentrate on her own practice. But, remembering the obstacles she encountered as a female attorney, she continues as a consistent and effective advocate for other women lawyers and all female staff.

Ms. Turnipseed is among a generation of women who broke into the male dominated legal profession and made sure the door stayed open behind them. When her father encouraged her to attend law school, his intent was to simply make his daughter a well-educated stay-at-home mom, for he opposed women working outside of the home. But his daughter’s life took her down the road less traveled for women with law degrees in 1974. While rising through the ranks at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and at Georgia-Pacific, she attained positions few women had achieved and made the hiring of women and women of color a priority. That philosophy continues today in her partnership and litigation practice at Nelson Mullins. Along the way, even her father became an ardent feminist.

Ms. Turnipseed actively recruits women and women of color into her litigation practice. She hires project assistants interested in the law and encourages them to attend law school as well. She was the driving force behind five female project assistants on her team going to law school. She was not only instrumental in encouraging them to apply and attend law school, but she was also instrumental in navigating and encouraging them through law school. Upon their completion of law school, Ms. Turnipseed actively recruited the return of one of the five former project assistants, a minority woman, to be a first-year associate on her team.

Early in her career, at 31, Ms. Turnipseed was named Chief Legal Officer over 25 other lawyers at Region IV, U.S. EPA. In this timeframe there were few women reaching the top ranks in law departments with authority to hire. From that first management position until the present, Ms. Turnipseed has consistently worked to ensure that women lawyers were hired, promoted, and tasked appropriately. Later, Ms. Turnipseed served as associate general counsel of Georgia-Pacific Corporation where she spearheaded the company’s litigation and environmental practice. Colleagues there note her unique gift of genuine inclusiveness of other women in the legal profession as one of her strengths.

Ms. Turnipseed actively pushes for the advancement of her attorneys to be not just partners, but equity partners. She helps women lawyers develop business by placing them in business situations that enable relationships to be formed that will produce business in the future. She speaks regularly on panels and seminars discussing ways to become and to achieve professional excellence as a woman attorney. Additionally, she was a founding member of the Atlanta chapter of the ABA Rainmakers group. The group sponsored marketing seminars for women lawyers in the Atlanta area and was widely viewed as the only group providing that particular focus in the Atlanta legal community.

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