Lauren Clemmons’s Path to Flight In A Public Service Career
Lauren Clemmons
Discovering how you can give back to the world, whether that is through your career or volunteer work or both, is a journey.
Your journey to discovering how you can use your gifts and talents might be quick, or it might take a long time. No matter how your path curves, two truths are universally acknowledged. Giving back to others matters, and your journey can begin with one step.
In nature, the butterfly finds its path to flight over a period of weeks. This journey takes a caterpillar from one form to the next, and from the ground to the air.
Perhaps applying to law school, signing up to do pro bono work or selecting an area of focus was your way of taking that first step. Serving the public is a worthy calling, one made even more special when you join in with other people around you who are working toward that same goal. In the process, you are changed, even as your actions have an impact on others.
For the small and lovely caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must spend time in its various forms before it can become a monarch. In other words, its ability to fly evinces how it has moved through phases in time and emerged in glory. In nature, caterpillars become butterflies through this process, but in life, to experience growth, you may have to stretch yourself beyond your limits.
By challenging yourself, you can find your wings for flight. In the process, you can soar to where you want to be.
Lauren Clemmons, who is a special deputy attorney general with the Department of Justice, is familiar with seeking new experiences in her career to exercise different skills, especially in the realm of public service. This value of professional growth is, in part, what has guided her career journey as a government attorney.
Clemmons has spent the past 31 years working for the good of the public. She has served as an attorney with the North Carolina Department of Justice since 1993. Clemmons began her career as a federal law clerk before joining a private practice firm, where she spent three years.
With the NCDOJ, she has primarily been a litigator but has twice served as an IT Procurement attorney for the State – once from 2007 to 2010, and again from October 2019 to the present.
When she is not working, she connects with others in her community as a member of the Triangle Association for Freelancers (TAF), a group of individuals who write creative fiction and nonfiction. Clemmons has had several pieces selected for publication in TAF anthologies, as well as other anthologies. Those pieces, among others, include an essay on Jane Austen and the Courthouse and a fairy story for children about a fairy princess and, spoiler alert, a frog who, to the reader’s delight, learns how to fly.
Clemmons’s pieces have been published in several anthologies, which include The TAF Omnibus, Volumes I, II and III; TAF Stays Home; The TAF Reader; Heartbeats; Cadence; and This House I live In: WAM Writers Collective.
Clemmons also serves with the Privacy & Data Security Section as the Communications Chair, where she looks forward to using her writing skills for the good of her NCBA community. Her experience as a litigator, her professional move to a focus on IT procurement law and her realization of her love for writing is a unique story, one in which those three strands of interest intertwine.
Why did Clemmons move from a private practice role to a government position?
While working as a private practitioner, she decided to seek a new challenge and applied to the N.C. Department of Justice. Her interest in public service began during law school at Wake Forest University School of Law when she interned with the U.S. Department of Justice. Since then, she has found a fulfilling career as a government attorney, gaining opportunities to fly from one field of law to another.
In her initial position with the DOJ, she focused on certificate of need law. At the time, she joined the NCBA Administrative Law Section and served as the editor of the newsletter and on the section council. After four years in health care law, a position came open she was especially intrigued by, one involving environmental law.
“I’d always wanted to do environmental law. I was selected for the role and stayed there for 10 years. During that time, I advocated for filing lawsuits for injunctive relief against environmental violators, rather than civil penalties, primarily to obtain court-ordered ‘clean ups,’ but also after realizing that some companies considered civil penalties the ‘cost of doing business.’ In one particular situation, a company continued illegal dumping operations despite two penalties. On behalf of my client, I filed a lawsuit for injunctive relief combined with a civil forfeiture of the company’s funds obtained through the illegal dumping. I had been the only attorney who had ever done civil forfeiture in this context.
“So essentially, I pushed myself to do something very new.”
At the ten-year mark as an environmental attorney, around 2007, she began to feel that it was time to venture into a different area of focus. One reason was her desire for professional growth and new challenges beyond her litigation experiences. A second reason was that, personally, she wanted an outlet in which she could express her creativity, and moving out of litigation as her primary area of focus might help to make that possible.
In 2007, she was selected for a role in IT contracts, a position she continued in for three years before the Great Recession, when funding for positions was pulled back. Then, she worked in condemnation law before being promoted to a role in special litigation, a position she held from 2013 to 2019.
As part of that role, she handled the Leandro public education lawsuit for five years, had a voter right lawsuit under a federal voting law, and defended the state in constitutional challenges to statutes. Then, she became the attorney-regulator for the state’s enforcement of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (“MSA”) and related statutes.
As Clemmons explains, in this agreement, the state receives approximately 130 million every year from a tobacco settlement that was created with the major tobacco companies.
“The enforcement work was a combination of ensuring the participating tobacco companies’ compliance with their obligations under the MSA, as well as administering state statutes applicable to the non-participating manufacturers, which were the tobacco companies that did not sign the MSA. The MSA enforcement was mostly transactional work,” said Clemmons.
“There were a lot of really interesting issues in this position, many of which related to the nonparticipating manufacturers. A contractual obligation of the signatory states under the MSA included the passage and enforcement of escrow statutes against the nonparticipating manufacturers. The state’s annual receipt of the MSA payment is conditioned, in part, on the state’s enforcement of these statutes. My time as the attorney-regulator included navigating the complexities of a lawsuit filed by a non-participating manufacturer challenging the escrow statutes.”
A monarch butterfly in Clemmons’s backyard.
While she liked the position, Clemmons missed the interactions that came with working with state employees when representing state agencies, such as her environmental client. She began to realize that once again, she wanted to do something different.
Turning to information technology law in 2019 gave her opportunities to resume her focus on information technology and gain the interaction with clients that she missed.
“In IT procurement, I advise my clients and purchasing agencies on compliance with government procurement laws for the state’s purchase of information technology goods and services. That’s one component.
“Then, the other component is actually reviewing vendor license or software-as-a-service agreements and assorted complementary agreements, such as privacy policies, data processing agreements, and security policies, and analyzing them and incorporating them into the state’s contracts as appropriate and in conformance with state law. This process includes advising clients on risk assessment and risk mitigation.”
A developing component of her role is assessing to what extent IT technology may be using generative artificial intelligence.
“What I’ve had to start working on is reading these license and service agreements and picking up on language that indicates that there’s Generative AI being used, which is not always clear. The purchasing agency may not realize there is Generative AI in a particular technology. It’s not until reading the vendor’s agreement that it’s, ‘wait a minute; you might have some Generative AI here.’
Generative AI creates new and different risks for the state since the law associated with this technology is still developing, and from this perspective, it’s essentially a ‘new frontier.’”
She enjoys her role because it is an opportunity to protect the state’s interests, which have included legal work and negotiations to secure the people in the state by safeguarding their information.
What advice would she give to law students who are thinking about pursuing a role as a government attorney?
One reason she would suggest becoming an attorney for the government is to build expertise. The second involves working for the greater good.
“In my experience as a government attorney, I have operated very independently and exercised a lot of decision making. I had solid core foundational skills from my time as a law clerk and in private practice, but once in my government role, my independence in handling a caseload, including developing strategies, doing discovery, writing briefs and arguing cases, sharpened my skills.
“The other reason, and the primary one for being a government attorney, though, is to provide public service. When you are a government attorney you represent a state agency that is carrying out government functions. Those government functions are there to help citizens. For example, they’re there to protect the environment. They’re there to provide the infrastructure, such as roads, water, and health services. It is an incredibly important job,” said Clemmons.
“If you like feeling like you’re part of something bigger, that you are making a difference for your immediate clients and also for the state, and if that’s the kind of thing that motivates you and brings you value, self-satisfaction or contentment, then government work may be your calling.”
In Clemmons’s own journey, it was her professional shift in 2007 from litigation to IT contracts that allowed her more mental space to think about things other than the law. This space for creativity gave her freedom to make writing her hobby. Because it had been an interest of hers ever since elementary school, it was only natural that she turned to writing when her area of focus shifted, once in 2007, and again in 2019.
When she is not working, she enjoys writing creative pieces. She recalls her early experiences with writing, and in doing so, a memory that reflects a fundamental quality of writing itself.
“At one point, probably I was in third grade, I wrote something, and my mom read it, and she said, you can make that better. And I thought, well, I don’t really feel like it. But I did because she basically said to. And I went back to my room and sat on the floor, and I revised it. It was better. My mom pushed me. You have to have somebody push you. Because writing is a process,” said Clemmons.
Although Clemmons wrote throughout her childhood and high school years, she says that law school “zapped her creativity for writing poems and fiction,” probably because legal thinking was analytical thinking and not free-form thinking and feeling.
“The next time that I really wrote was beginning in 2007, when I changed from the environmental litigation job to the IT contract job. Surprisingly, I find that doing transactional work frees up my creativity for fiction writing. Doing litigation does not. Even though the things I do in litigation are and can be creative, it’s not the same kind of creativity – it’s grounded in the application of knowledge and critical thinking rather than in the free-flowing creativity that comes from emotions, experiences and imagination.”
In 2007, the same year that she began her IT procurement role, Clemmons began writing a young adult novel. Although the novel has not yet been published, the act of writing it was an experience that gave her some room to breathe. It helped her to reconnect with her love for anthropology, which she studied and earned a bachelor’s degree in at the University of North Carolina. Through the process, she also grew closer with her daughter.
The story is a young adult novel about the Occaneechi tribe, and, specifically, about a young girl in the tribe.
The Occaneechi Village Replica Site is located on the banks of the Eno River in present day Hillsborough.
“Their world is collapsing because of the settlers who are coming in,” said Clemmons.
Clemmons’s interest in the tribe originated when she was an undergrad at UNC. As part of her coursework in anthropology, she had the opportunity to work on an archaeological dig in Hillsborough, where there is an Occaneechi site. She and other students took part in excavating the town, which included some of the burials. Seeing the artifacts up close, and the burial sites, inspired her to create characters based on what she observed.
Clemmons, who wrote the book in diary form, was also inspired by the books she was reading to her daughter, who was ten at the time. Together, they were reading the scholastic series of books titled Dear America, which are written in diary style. Because her daughter liked reading them, Clemmons wanted to try writing a novel in a similar vein but one that told a story related to the Occaneechi tribe.
“Being inspired to write that young adult novel was probably more about the relationship with my daughter at that point in her life, and the fact that I wasn’t taking home with me in my mind my work every night,” said Clemmons.
“When I’m a litigator, I’m just constantly churning on issues all the time. It doesn’t matter where I am – I’m thinking about them. ‘All the time’ is an exaggeration, but I did work a lot of weekends.”
The act of writing the novel helped her to realize her interest in writing for young adults. She hopes to self-publish it in the future.
An interior view of one of the traditional huts on the Occaneechi Village Replica Site.
While her writing is a hobby outside her work, her experience as an attorney has found its way into her writing. In “Jane Austen at the Courthouse,” an essay, Clemmons identifies four published cases that incorporated quotations from Jane Austen.
In the piece, Clemmons imagines what it might have been like if Austen herself had spoken in court.
“I thought, well, wouldn’t it be interesting if Jane Austen’s quotes were in those court decisions because Jane Austen herself was the one arguing the cases, quoting her own novels to make her points and inspiring those courts to include those quotes in their decisions?” she said.
Given that Austen’s words have made their way into published opinions, it is fascinating to think about what it might have been like if Austen had been an attorney, and what it might have been like to hear her argue in the courtroom.
There is no doubt that she would have rendered some in her presence speechless.
Throughout Clemmons’s various interests, at the heart of her story is an attorney who has found a home at the NCBA, where she can use her skills in administrative law, IT contracts, law and writing to connect with and help others in her community.
With her dual interests in both the law and writing, it is no surprise that she is serving once again on a communications committee for an NCBA section. She has found that her group of TAF writers has fueled her passion for writing both fiction and nonfiction. In a similar way, getting to know others in the NCBA has encouraged her to continue growing in the profession, and in her specific role.
Serving on the NCBA’s Privacy & Data Security Section’s communications committee is her way of giving back to her NCBA community and connecting to others in the profession. This is important to her as an IT procurement attorney.
“I enjoy meeting other attorneys because mostly my experience as a state government attorney is that I don’t get to interact with other lawyers – local lawyers. I interact with vendor attorneys, but it’s on Teams or Zoom, and they’re in other states. It’s not the same kind of relationship as those you might try to build with attorneys more locally,” she said.
As she thinks about her goals for this year, she describes that she would also like to continue sharpening her skillset and learning from others.
“I’m also hoping to learn from other attorneys and from what the section has to offer to help me better serve my clients,” said Clemmons.
“I think that there are some common issues, even when attorneys represent different interests for their clients. It’s good to find people with different perspectives and knowledge that you can talk to about those common issues.”
Clemmons has a variety of skillsets to bring to the section – and in her career and in her writing, she has continued to hone her strengths.
One piece by Clemmons I alluded to earlier is a short story called “Harry the Frog, A Children’s Story.” With a princess, a frog, and an adventure, the story has everything in it a child, and those who are young at heart, will enjoy. Fairy stories have the amazing ability to help your imagination take flight. And I, for one, look forward to reading the next installment in Clemmons’s works of art, both outside and inside the profession.
Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.