About Jen Pilla Taylor
Articles written by Jen Pilla Taylor
The Connector
Jim Phillips is the most plugged-in attorney in North CarolinaFew people understand inside baseball in North Carolina like Jim Phillips Jr. An avid St. Louis Cardinals fan since childhood, he helped lead the (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to win a major league baseball franchise for the Triad in 1998 and today owns a minority interest in the Grasshoppers, Greensboro’s popular minor league team. For the past two decades, he has also been a major player in state politics and education, serving as a key adviser to former Gov. Jim Hunt and as chairman of …
The Soloist
Felicia Washington Mauney blazes her own trailFelicia Washington Mauney has never been afraid to go it alone. As a teenager, she decided she wanted to leave her eastern North Carolina hometown of Kenansville to attend the prestigious North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics in Durham. But, even though she was at the top of her class, she was passed over for her school’s nomination in favor of two boys. “I thought they had made a mistake,” says Washington Mauney, 43, matter-of-factly, from her 45th-floor office in downtown …
Handling the Curve Balls
After Lori D. Thompson graduated from Radford University in 1992, she headed back home to Staunton, with the hope of landing a job as a high school history and government teacher. What she got were long-term substitute assignments and a position helping troubled kids earn their high school diplomas. Nothing permanent. However, her work with at-risk students—many of whom already had run-ins with the law—got her thinking about the legal profession. So when her sister-in-law signed …
He’s With the Band
Relationships are what business law is all about, says Philip Goodpasture, and in his legal career none has been more important than his relationship with Coran Capshaw. Now a music, Internet and real estate mogul, Capshaw met Goodpasture about 15 years ago, when Goodpasture was a young associate at the Richmond firm of Christian & Barton, doing mostly mergers and acquisition work for a newspaper conglomerate. Capshaw wanted Goodpasture’s advice on a lease agreement for a new nightclub he …
Dead Man Walking Free
Alan Gell was wrongfully convicted and sat on death row for nine years; Jim Cooney set him freeJames P. Cooney III did not have time for Alan Gell’s case. It was September 2000 and the Charlotte litigator was transitioning to a new law firm, Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, with four death penalty cases already on his plate; so when a young associate named Mary Pollard asked him to help her win an appeal for a Bertie County man on death row, the best Cooney could offer was encouragement and advice. “I told her, ‘I’m really glad you’re working on this case. Now …
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