Noble Calling

One day, in the midst of prosecuting rapes and aggravated assaults as a young lawyer in the high-pressure Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, Laura Noble found herself antsy to wrap up a conversation with two tourists who’d been jabbed at by a man wielding a boxcutter. “I had a million cases on my desk,” she recalls.

Losing her patience with what would no doubt end up as a misdemeanor, she curtly told them, “You’re fine. Gotta go.”

“And the way they both looked at me, horrified,” she says, “I thought, ‘I am becoming a person I don’t recognize.’”

Today, 17 years after launching The Noble Law in the Research Triangle, 58-year-old Noble is the person she always wanted to be: a fierce advocate for her clients, including victims of workplace sexual assault and sexual harassment in a state with no anti-harassment law of its own.

She has also made a name for herself as a vocal trailblazer in a woman-owned firm. “We’re graduating more women from law school. We have more female lawyers than ever before. And we still haven’t broken the barrier to law firm leadership,” she says. “It’s not just about women having babies. I think it is because many of these traditional, hierarchical, inflexible workplaces don’t work well for women in their leadership styles. We really need to adjust that mindset.”

Extroverted, high-energy and known around the office for her keen fashion sense, Noble is tough when it comes to fighting for her clients, says Cicero Love, a senior litigation paralegal who joined the firm in 2014. “[Without] billing the client, she’ll talk to a client because she knows this particular client’s son is graduating next week, and we have to let her know that [her case] is going to be OK.” She stays in communication with former clients, inviting them to holiday parties and other celebrations. “It’s a community,” he says. “She gets to know her clients to where now, ‘You’re a part of the Noble family.’”

His boss is surprisingly competitive, and not just when practicing law, Love adds. “You can tell Laura, ‘Hey, I did 10 pushups.’ She’s like, ‘I can beat you.’ And Laura will jump on the ground with her dress on and do 10 pushups. She’s the coolest.”

A self-described tomboy and theater kid who enjoyed pastimes like snowmobiling and ice fishing near her childhood home in Portage, Michigan, Noble developed a habit of stating her case so often, and in such a way, that her parents dubbed her “Laura the Laura-yer.” “I was always interested in right and wrong, and arguing with people, and I had a strong opinion,” she says.

Moving to Connecticut in middle school was tough at first. Her new classmates, who seemed far more sophisticated than those she’d left behind, bullied her as an outsider with “a funny accent and weird clothes. I think that really influenced my desire to do what I do. I’ve been a prosecutor and now a plaintiff’s employment lawyer, and I’ve been quickly triggered by bullies and feel very inclined to fight that with every core of my being.”

That fighting spirit never subsided. By high school, she’d made a name for herself as a feminist and political activist and, at the University of Vermont, worked as a student advocate for classmates accused of violating the school’s honor code. “Winning and being able to have someone collapse in tears and say, ‘Thank you, you saved me from getting kicked out of school,’ was so addictive. I could make a difference in somebody’s life.”

At the University of Maryland School of Law, Noble fell in love with Baltimore. Influenced by the anti-death penalty, criminal defense and other social justice work she’d done at the legal clinic, upon finishing law school in 1993, Noble sought work as a public defender or legal aid attorney. “I had no interest in private practice whatsoever,” she says. “I wanted to be in a job where I could help as many people as I could, and I wanted to help people who didn’t necessarily have easy access to lawyers.”

But a citywide hiring freeze meant that she wound up at the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, one of New York’s roughest. “I was terrified,” she admits. “And my mentor … sat down with me and said, ‘Look, you are in a position of incredible power in this role. You’re the one person who can decide in that courtroom whether this case goes forward.’”

Assigned to primarily prosecute crimes in low-income neighborhoods, she recalls her first trial, which involved bootleg media. “I remember I was holding up these DVDs that said ‘Forrest Grump’ instead of Forrest Gump,” she says, laughing. “Of course, we won.”

Most of the cases were far more serious. Worse, the domestic violence and sex crimes were sometimes difficult to prove. While trying to persuade one client to testify against her partner after his latest attack, Noble strained to hear the woman, whose jaw was wired shut from the blow. “What I ultimately understood her to say was, ‘I can’t. I love him.’ … There was so much violence, I started to get unnerved.”

Resigning after the incident with the tourist couple, in the fall of 1997 Noble began a short-lived stint at a Manhattan litigation firm, defending big corporations in cases ranging from insurance and personal injury to employment and sexual harassment. “I think I made close to triple what I was making at the D.A.’s,” she says. “And I absolutely hated the work. I did not fit in. … I had been driving around in police cars, walking into crime scenes, picking bullets out of walls, and then a couple months later, I was in a windowless room with stacks and stacks of documents to look over what amount of asbestos particles were found in a wall or not. And I thought, ‘This is not why I became a lawyer.’”

So Noble made another abrupt change, joining Covenant House New York, a shelter for homeless youth and runaways, as deputy director of advocacy and legal services. Among other accomplishments, she started the pro bono legal department to help clients navigate immigration, housing and other issues. She loved it.

Then she got pregnant, and everything changed again. “Nights, weekends, holidays were required. If the police would come with a subpoena, I would have to go and deal with them, and you couldn’t do that at home with a baby. And even though I had a full-time nanny at home and I lived in Midtown, not far from the shelter, they would not give me any time at all to work at home. There was no remote work available back in those days.”

So when her then-husband was offered a job in Germany, the family moved with him and Noble became a stay-at-home mom. Returning to the U.S. in 2005, they landed in the Triangle partly through compromise—she wanted to move back to Connecticut, he out West—and because Chapel Hill seemed like a welcoming place to raise their three kids.

But reentering the workforce was far more difficult than she’d expected. “No one would hire me because my resume made no sense. I had been out of work for so long, I couldn’t even send a calendar invite.”
Noble considered her options. She nixed criminal law—“It broke my heart too much”—and family law for the same reason, and crossed tax and real estate off her list because neither would allow her to interact enough with clients.

Employment law resonated the most. “Some parts of the law that I liked—an element of antidiscrimination, antiharassment—spoke to my own experiences of being a woman. There were instances of me being sexually harassed in my experience as a lawyer. So being an advocate for people in the workplace felt like it was the right fit for me.”

Still, she says, “I never in a million years thought I would start a law firm.”

After numerous meetings with employment lawyers ended in polite “no’s,” Durham attorney Lynn Fontana handed off some tasks to Noble. Before long, she was securing her own cases and referrals. “When I started hiring people, I thought, ‘Well, it looks like I’m creating a law firm here. Holy moly. Now what am I going to do?’ Then I pivoted to thinking about the places that I worked and how much I disliked them, and how I wanted to do it differently.”

The Noble Law opened in Chapel Hill in 2009. “I wanted women, working mothers, to stop dropping out of the law. So many people think that working in the law sucks. I want it not to suck. Part of the way you do that is to make a different kind of law firm that isn’t hierarchical, that isn’t oppressive, that isn’t the model of ‘I say jump and you say how high.’ I didn’t do well in those kinds of environments, and I wasn’t going to re-create that.”
Technology, formerly a weakness, was key, she says. “I needed to be able to sit in my car during soccer practice and still be able to get my files. They had to be in the cloud. I had to figure out how to do that.”
To compete with larger law firms without breaking the bank, she taught herself the basic business of law, from understanding conversion rates to using financial dashboards. As the firm grew, she added contractors to the payroll. Noble now employs eight attorneys in a fully-remote operation in several states, with headquarters in Raleigh.

Along the way, she says, “I made eight million mistakes.” One of the most egregious, she says, was focusing on making money before developing a mission statement.

Another was not learning good management skills. “Not every lawyer or paralegal who’s worked for me has left with glowing love of me and my firm,” she says. “They were probably right. I am certain I am a much better boss now than I was 10 years ago. I think I’m much less reactive. I don’t fly off the handle. I’m not a yeller. I’m just more patient with myself and with others.”

“Laura’s a true team player,” Love says. “She understands that her name’s on the wall, but you never feel like she’s the boss. She’s compassionate and just a real person.”

By the time the #MeToo movement swept the nation in 2017, Noble had already been asked to help give input to create and design the vetting process for attorneys seeking funds through the Washington, D.C.-based Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which helps low-income victims. Making herself available as an expert for publications like O, The Oprah Magazine and The New York Times seemed like the next logical step. “The thing about media is they are a constant content gobbler, and they need people to talk about things. There’s a hesitancy among lawyers to talk to the media; I was happy to talk.”

Except in one respect: Protective of her clients, Noble is reticent to discuss the details of most of her cases. One she can talk about is 2017’s Carter v. St. Augustine’s University, in which Noble and her team represented two women—the school’s human resource director and its CFO—who accused St. Augustine’s of wrongfully firing them after they advocated for increased pay for employees. “They were treated horrendously,” Noble says, “kicked out with a box of their stuff, escorted out [by security].”

Noble watched the jury come back with a verdict in favor of her clients. “Then it was appealed, and the verdict in our favor was upheld,” she says. “That was particularly satisfying, and took a lot of work for our small firm.”

Sometimes the greatest payoff, even more than the win, is when clients thank her for believing in them. Sometimes they simply cry. Sometimes they tell her, “You’re the first person who’s told me I’m not crazy, and that this is wrong.”

The battle, Noble says, “feels very David-and-Goliath oftentimes, and they’re terrified. Many clients who come to us are really scared that their futures are going to be ruined, their professional reputation will be ruined, they’re never going to get a job again, their ability to support their family is destroyed. We want to be the lawyers that are unafraid to step into that realm facing those odds and saying, ‘We are here as your advocate and we’re in the fight together. We’re not bringing a knife to a gunfight.’”