Chris Douglas on Leadership, Innovation and Embracing Change

This article is part of a series celebrating Womble Bond Dickinson’s 150^th anniversary and reflecting on the firm’s enduring legacy of service to the law, its clients and the communities it serves.

For Womble Bond Dickinson Partner Chris Douglas, a career in law has been as much about the journey as the destination. New challenges become new opportunities. Adaptability and innovation are just part of doing business.

Currently, Chris leads Womble Bond Dickinson’s Case Management Facility (CMF) and Medical & Scientific Solutions (MedSci) practices. These proprietary WBD offerings merge advanced technology with business and scientific know-how to help clients find more effective and efficient solutions to their legal needs. 

She left her legal career in Nashville practicing at a small litigation boutique focused on insurance defense because her husband landed a new job in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1997.

“When I told the managing partner of the litigation boutique that I was moving to Winston, he said, ‘Well, that's great, but you can’t move until the end of April because we have two more cases we're trying.’”

So, her husband moved to North Carolina in January and Chris stayed in Tennessee until April. She didn’t have a job lined up, but she landed interviews at one of the state’s largest law firms as well as for an in-house position. Her supervising partner in Nashville knew (now retired) WBD Partner Mike Gunter, and he suggested she interview at his firm. 

Chris took him up on the offer, not knowing it would change the course of her career. “I loved Womble so much and knew immediately if they offered me a job, that was the one I was going to accept.”

She soon found a home in the firm’s product liability litigation practice. Although she jokes that her fondness for litigation stems from her disliking a tax law class in law school, she relishes the opportunity to dig into the science behind cases.

“Every time I get a new product, I learn all about it—everything from how it's manufactured, where it's manufactured, who owns the patent, and more. I want to know how it came about and how it is used,” she said.

That intellectual curiosity, and her deep experience in product liability litigation, led her to the CMF and MedSci teams.

She describes the CMF as “an adjunct to a corporate in-house team. They’ve got great lawyers, but they aren’t set up for mass volume litigation; they don’t have the infrastructure. That’s where we come in.”

The CMF’s technology-based case management services offer clarity, efficiency, scalability, and consistency, proven over three decades of working with 90 percent of the AmLaw200 firms and companies in about every business sector imaginable. But Chris says the real secret is something more intangible: “We give clients control by putting all the data in one place. Once you get everything in one place, you can run analytics. You can tell the client, ‘Your budget for the third quarter will go up because the statute of limitations in these 17 states expires,’ for example.” 

The result is that the CMF gives clients control by gathering complete information and presenting it in an organized, usable format.

While technology is a big part of the CMF advantage, the true secret is the talent behind the tech. The CMF team of more than thirty attorneys and professionals have been together for years and have made this work the focus of their professional careers.

As with the CMF, the WBD MedSci practice was born out of a client’s needs. In the 1990s, a long-standing firm client needed help with medical records analysis, medical records collection, and expert witness services. The firm put together a comprehensive team to provide those services in one location.

“The MedSci team has lawyers and legal professionals, but more importantly, we have Ph.D. scientists, nurses, medical librarians, and research analysts,” Chris said.

She said MedSci’s practice has evolved with client needs. While it started with an exclusive focus on mass torts and product liability litigation, it has grown to encompass regulatory compliance. Technology has been a key factor in helping the MedSci team bring even more value to clients.

“We’re doing something very exciting for clients called horizon scanning using AI tools,” Chris said. “You can use that to look at what’s going on in the plaintiff’s bar, for example, or what’s going on in the EU that may be coming here.” 

Using this analysis, clients can identify and hopefully avoid potentially costly litigation before problems arise.

When she first became a partner in the firm, Chris said she envisioned herself as a career litigator. “I’d tried fifty cases and I loved it. Now, there were things about it I didn’t like—I didn’t like that I couldn’t plan vacations, for example.” 

Her work expanded into leadership when she became Mass Torts Practice Group Leader. Around 15 years ago, the practice group leader at the time began inviting her to his meetings. She didn’t think much about it at first, “but he told me, ‘I’m not going be here in five to ten to twenty years—you are.’”

She credits Womble’s leadership training program for helping prepare her for this role. “I’ve also been very privileged here to have strong female leaders—Marilyn Forbes, Hada Haulsee, Ellen Gregg, and Betty Temple, just to name a few.”

That experience leading the Mass Torts Practice Group taught Chris lessons in leadership style and the need to form relationships within a team. 

“You have to know what's going to motivate somebody to get them to do what you actually want them to do,” she said. Such knowledge is built on in-person connections, active listening, and honest interpersonal conversations.

Those lessons continue to inform her leadership style today. When the opportunity arose to become a leader in the firm’s WBD Advance services, Chris wasn’t sure, but she thought she could at least try it. 

“Then when you get into it, you learn that you love it and you love the people that you work with and the opportunities that it affords,” she said.

Recent years have seen the CMF and MedSci teams—and Womble in general—adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid rise of AI. Chris believes that, now more than ever, an innovation mindset is crucial to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing legal and business environment.

“We are doing everything we can to adapt to change because change is a coming at a pace that I don't think we've had. Maybe some would argue the industrial revolution, but this is faster.”