Nancy Norelli, Norelli Law

Charlotte

Law school: Northeastern University School of Law

Undergraduate: B.A. in political science, Wellesley College

Nancy Norelli has had a long view of the law from both sides of the bench. A former judge, she brings 35 years of experience as an attorney and a mediator to her clients. Much of her job satisfaction comes from her volunteer service and pro bono work.

You are involved in the North Carolina Bar Association and other lawyers’ groups. Why is this important to you?

After 35 years, the list is embarrassingly long, but there is a theme – celebrating and protecting the profession and rule of law, and helping lawyers meet our ethical obligation to provide legal services to the poor. I enjoyed chairing Law Day events as a young lawyer, and then helped launch Mecklenburg’s Volunteer Lawyer Program. That eventually led to chairing NCBA’s Legal Services Planning Committee. Today I serve on the Board of Legal Services of the Southern Piedmont and the NC Access to Justice Commission. My favorite involvement was as President of the Mecklenburg County Bar where all my interests and love of the profession came together.

How have you contributed to the quality of justice in your community?

Without a doubt, my most important contribution to justice in our state is my ongoing work on North Carolina’s Judicial Performance Evaluation Program. Our task was to develop an evaluation that was fair to judges, produced meaningful results, and provided anonymity to lawyer respondents. Designing and managing a grassroots effort, I enabled our committee to obtain huge participation from across the state. The result was 27,700 individual evaluations of the District and Superior Court judges on the ballot in November. Our next challenge was to assist a separate NCBA committee with a comparable evaluation of the challengers to judges.

How did your tenure as a judge affect your approach to the law and your current career?

My tenure as judge affected my whole life, as I witnessed the extreme difficulties faced by so many in our society. My life-long philosophy — always try to do the right thing — took on much more intensity. Doing the right thing in court meant listening intently and actively, assessing the credibility of witnesses and attorneys, and stretching one’s mind to both understand the facts and apply the law. It meant living with the consequences of an acquittal or a conviction. It meant sorting through differing expert opinions and crafting meaningful sentences.

When you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up?

“Ballerina” gave way to “missionary” in Mrs. Campbell’s 1st grade Sunday school, which gave way to “lawyer” in 5th grade when I participated in a Kennedy-Nixon classroom debate and won. Visions of serving in Congress or Raleigh replaced the sugar plum fairies and jungles of Africa. Doing the right thing in court meant listening intently and actively.