Brick by Brick

“Regina Lewis is the Doogie Howser of law,” says her friend and former colleague Susan McWilliams, referring to the ’90s sitcom about a teenage doctor. “She won’t tell you that, but if you do the math, you figure it out.”

The math shows that Lewis graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1984, at just 19 years old. Sixteen years earlier, after she eagerly joined her older brother’s vocabulary lessons taught by their mom, Lewis began to read the printed words aloud. Amazed, her mom quickly taught her to read phrases and sentences. 

“One day we were in the grocery store and I was reading from a newspaper out loud, and a woman in line asked my mother, ‘How old is she?’” Lewis recalls. “My mom proudly said, ‘She’s 3.’”

The woman, who worked for the Richland County’s school district, suggested that Lewis get tested for early placement. The test results prompted the district to recommend she start second grade at 4 years old. “My mom said, ‘No, 4 is too early,’” and instead enrolled Lewis in first grade. “I ended up finishing high school in three years,” she says. “I went to college at 15.”

Today, Regina Hollins Lewis’ intellectual prowess continues to shine as the owner of Lewis Law & Mediation, and as of counsel with Collins & Lacy, both based in Columbia. Her career story is rooted in the traits her parents modeled.

“There probably aren’t enough superlatives to describe her,” McWilliams says. “She is so capable in so many respects.”

Lewis’ parents, Robert and Mamie Hollins, raised her and her brother in Columbia until moving to Blythewood, a small suburb just north of the city. 

“Blythewood is where my father’s family had been sent to in slavery after they were purchased in Baltimore,” Lewis says. “He was born and raised there.” 

When Lewis was 8 years old, her father, a brick mason, drove his two children and wife to his family’s land. Standing by a trench he had dug, he declared, “This is going to be our new house. We’re going to build a house.” For the next five years, Lewis’ father would alternate between working construction jobs and building the home, brick by brick, alongside other family members.

The completed structure: a 3,300 square-foot brick house with oak floors—and no mortgage. Lewis says this was the foundation on which she was raised: “Work hard, try not to owe anybody if you can help it, and you can make things happen if you put the work in.”

Around the same time, she watched her mother go back to school, earn a degree in early childhood education, and eventually open her own day care center. Lewis mimicked her mother’s work, lining up her dolls as students in her imaginary classroom. She dreamed of becoming a teacher, but her mom encouraged her to consider other options as well: “Teaching is what my generation could do to get to be successful. You can do something else.”

That “something else” emerged in college when Lewis decided to take the LSAT alongside her best friend. After Lewis passed, her parents insisted she live on her own out of state while in law school at the University of Maryland. To their chagrin, she wouldn’t move back to South Carolina for 15 years.

During her third year of law school, Lewis joined the clinical program, where she practiced law under a licensed attorney. Although litigation initially made her nervous, Lewis recalls that after giving it a try, she was pulled aside by her professor, who said, “You have to be a litigator. You were born to be in the courtroom.” 

She heeded his advice. After graduation, Lewis clerked for Orphans’ Court for Baltimore City, a probate court, before joining a large law firm. It wasn’t a good fit, so Lewis left to work at a public-interest domestic violence legal clinic, where she continued to litigate. 

During her time with the clinic—first as a staff attorney and then as director—she advocated for legislation and clemency on behalf of battered women. “We did a big clemency project where we petitioned the governor, and several women were released from prison who had not been able to present evidence of their battering during their trials,” she remembers.

She soon became an assistant attorney general for the state of Maryland. She started in the civil litigation division, which represented state agencies and their employees, including police and correctional officers. Then she moved to the criminal appeals division. This allowed her to spend more time traveling to South Carolina, where her father had recently received a cancer diagnosis.

Robert Hollins passed away in 1997. Not long after, Lewis’ mom called and asked her to return home. She did so two years later, with husband and two young daughters in tow.

While Lewis studied for the bar and settled her family into her childhood home, her mother reveled in being a live-in grandmother to her two granddaughters. Lewis then accepted a position as special counsel at Nexsen Pruet and, during her first week, life took an unexpected turn when her mother passed away suddenly. 

“She made breakfast for my girls that morning, said ‘Have a great day,’ and the next thing I knew, I was getting a call that they thought she had had a heart attack,” recalls Lewis.

The grieving period was gutting, she remembers. Yet returning to her family’s property enabled her to reconnect with her family’s roots and build on her parents’ legacy through her young family and law career.

“When I started practicing, there were no desegregated law firms in Columbia. There were only 14 Black lawyers in South Carolina,” says I.S. Leevy Johnson, the first Black president of the South Carolina Bar. Johnson, 83, who started practicing law in 1968, has served as Lewis’ mentor through the years.

“When she was with Nexsen Pruet, back in those days, for an African-American female to be a member of a large law firm in South Carolina, that in and of itself was quite an achievement,” says Johnson. “It demonstrated that she was extremely competent, and it also demonstrated that there was a lot of respect for her credentials and her ability.”

McWilliams confirms Johnson’s assessment. “When Regina interviewed, I walked right down to the senior partner and said, ‘If we don’t hire this woman, we are making the biggest mistake of the law firm.’” 

To no one’s surprise, Lewis excelled at the corporate defense firm and made partner after three years. Then she decided it was time to bet on herself.

In 2007, she launched Gaffney Lewis & Edwards alongside Susan Edwards, an associate from her old firm, and Amy Gaffney, an attorney Lewis had opposed in a few cases. “We all got together and decided that a women-owned, ethnically diverse firm would be our best marketing to do the same kind of corporate defense work that we were doing at the big firm,” says Lewis. “We could give them the same product for a lower rate.”

At a 2008 meeting hosted by the National Bar Association, the trio connected with a representative from Walmart who was seeking counsel. The partners travelled to the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and were offered a case. That first one was small, a test, but “that one case turned into numerous cases over the years,” says Lewis. 

Their firm’s corporate roster grew to include several other national retailers and restaurants. “Yes, we were a women-owned, ethnically diverse firm,” says Lewis, “but that wasn’t why it became successful. It became successful because of the product that we delivered,” she adds. “We were given a chance and we produced.” 

The year after she co-founded the firm, Lewis became certified in mediation. It offered something corporate defense didn’t, and it became her passion. “I think my knack has always been to be more of a facilitator than an adversary,” she says. “I was pretty effective at being an adversary, but the opportunity to be a neutral and a facilitator was appealing to me. It fit more with my personality.”

As the years went on, the firm grew. “We had other associates that then became our partners, and I began focusing more on the mediation practice while still supervising the litigation,” Lewis says. 

In 2020, she was welcomed into the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals. Lewis credits her success as a neutral with being able to “develop a rapport with both sides” and being able to “develop trust—particularly with the plaintiff.” 

“Some people are popular with judges, but they’re not with their co-workers or other lawyers,” says Johnson. “But Regina is popular and well respected by both. … Regina could be on the bench right now.”

In fact, in 2021, Lewis was on the path to a potential judgeship until the process was halted by a breast cancer diagnosis. She withdrew her candidacy in order to focus on her health. 

The cancer treatment, which included six months of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and 30 rounds of radiation, shifted Lewis’ perspective on her career and life. “I had already been planning to transition toward mediation, but that really confirmed my decision … rather than pursuing a judgeship again” she says. “I was comfortable with that.”

In 2022, she founded what would become Lewis Law & Mediation. Being a mediator allows her to act as a neutral, while owning her own business allows the scheduling flexibility of an entrepreneur. She works with clients part-time and spends the rest of her time with her family.

One of her daughters, Erin, followed in her grandmother’s footsteps and became a teacher who “ultimately got her Ph.D. in urban education, with a focus on curriculum instruction,” says Lewis.

“My daughter Morgan is a lawyer, AMA,” Lewis says with a laugh, “Against Mother’s Advice!”