Grida uses special skills for community work

Law Talk profile for The Memphis Daily News

Feb. 14, 2013

Nicole Grida, associate with Leitner, Williams, Dooley & Napolitan PLLC, learned the value of extracurricular activities while in high school in Hellertown, Pa.

Working hard at soccer, National Honor Society and student government association helped the oldest of four siblings win a full scholarship to Temple University, where she studied English and political science.

Grida knew all along that her interests and goals lay with the legal profession.

“My favorite show when I was a kid, strangely enough, was ‘Matlock,’” she said. “I just always knew I wanted to be an attorney, probably since the sixth grade.”

She attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for her law degree and was recruited from there to work with the Memphis firm.

Grida had talked to other recent law school graduates who were spending their days behind a desk or solely doing research, but she had a different plan.

“I wanted to be somewhere where I was doing something,” she said. “I wanted to end up at a firm that I knew would allow me to get out and be in court fairly quickly.”

Having never been to Memphis, Grida moved here in the fall of 2006 and from the first day she was working on workers’ compensation cases, nursing home and medical negligence defense, car wrecks and general liabilities … (read more)