Alice Potts is an extraordinary woman. She knows it; the very fact that she is an African-American of British descent in law does not diminish her tenacity to achieve the kind of success she has. In fact, there is hardly a corner of the legal profession in which she has not made at least some profound impact. So much so, that if you were to assemble the resumes of just about all of the attorneys and other lawyers of the past two decades, you would quickly come to realize that Alice Potts, at this moment, has more of an impact on the service and profitability of that practice than any of those attorneys put together.
Her many contributions to the legal profession have been most noteworthy, however, as regards shaping a contending legal landscape where race and age play less of a role. Though the civil rights of all Americans are still the most vulnerable among all constitutional protections, Alice Potts has gone to work, literally, for the people under the law. And though the civil rights of white collar workers have not changed that much, the courts have become more hesitant in past years to second guess those lower level employees who are called upon to make determinations about the fitness of their bosses. By confronting those lower level employees who are performing in an unfair manner, and determining that those employees are actually being treated fairly by their employers, Alice Potts is making the same exact arguments on a much larger scale that have been argued by her many critics.
In the legal profession, it is usually a case of where there is no enough of the right thing. And where there is abundance of the wrong thing, sometimes the results can be disastrous. But where there is nothing, there can be nothing. That was perhaps what Alice Potts discovered in her early years as an attorney practicing in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of the world’s biggest car manufacturers. It was not enough to open the floodgates to civil rights litigation, but it certainly opened the door to a field which had until recently been the realm of the federal government and of white collar defense attorneys working out of government offices.