As Senior Deputy Attorney General and Director for the North Carolina Department of Justice’s Consumer Protection Division, I lead the department’s consumer protection and antitrust work and oversee a division of about seventy-five people. The division includes an amazing group of specialists, attorneys, investigators, and phone staff working hard to protect North Carolinians and repair harm. I also lead our cross-division Civil Rights Unit, which Attorney General Josh Stein established to coordinate the various civil rights enforcement and policy matters in which the department is engaged.
I stepped into my current role in 2023 after six years of leading the office’s Public Protection Section, which works closely with the Consumer Protection Division, doing policy and outreach on public protection issues, including consumer protection and criminal justice. In my prior role, I served as lead counsel for the North Carolina Governor’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, which Attorney General Stein co-chaired for two years. We also worked on the sexual assault kit backlog (which we just ended in NC!) and developed North Carolina’s participation in the Lethality Assessment Protocol to reduce domestic violence homicides. In 2022, I had the opportunity to participate in the Eisenhower Fellowships USA Justice Program. As a part of this fellowship, I traveled to Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Ghana to study justice system equity issues. It was a really life-changing experience that you can read more about that here!
Taking on the CP Chief role was a return to my professional roots as a government investigations and litigation lawyer. Prior to joining the AG’s office, I worked as a white-collar investigations and litigation lawyer in two large law firms, WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. and K&L Gates in Raleigh. I worked on all sorts of matters during my time in private practice, with a particular focus on antitrust and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act matters. Prior to working in private practice, I clerked for Judge Andre M. Davis, then on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Baltimore. I feel really privileged to be able to take the skills I have learned over my career and use them to protect the most vulnerable among us in my home state of North Carolina (where I returned in 2015 after 12 years away).
I’m a proud Tar Heel and obtained my law degree from Columbia (which also has Carolina Blue colors). I’m entirely overcommitted and exhausted, as a mom of two girls (9 & 13.99) and personally active in civic organizations. My husband of 17 years is a clinical psychologist, so that comes in handy. I serve as the Social Action Chair for my chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. I am also involved with the North Carolina Bar Association and chair my High School Class. I believe deeply in community-building, and I try to live that value in my management role and in my personal life.
I went to law school to help people, to try to make the world a little fairer. It has not always been easy to work on such high-stakes work, but every day of my time at NCDOJ, I go to work knowing my job is to try to make things better. And I feel very fortunate to get to do that alongside an amazing team at the Attorney General’s Office.
