Attorney Spotlight: Mary Pool

Mary Pool started her career on the other side of the desk.

Her first job in the financial world was as a debt collector — back when collectors still made house calls. From there she moved into banking in Montgomery, working her way up from commercial lending assistant to marketing manager and loan product manager for a national bank. For nearly twenty years, her job was understanding how people borrow, how they fall behind, and how creditors go about getting paid.

Then her husband, an attorney, asked her to help organize a case file. Going through it, she noticed the charge didn’t match the evidence — and said so. He looked again and told her she was right. She remembers thinking that if he could do this work, so could she.

She went to law school with one condition for herself: whatever she practiced had to involve finances. In 2008 she interviewed with Gail Donaldson, our managing partner in Montgomery. Gail took a chance on her. Today Mary is a shareholder with Bond & Botes, and she’ll tell you she much prefers this side of the financial world.

The clients who stay with her are the ones who waited — people on fixed incomes trying to keep a car and a house, someone who lost a spouse and one of two incomes with it, families facing a medical crisis while collectors call at night. What she hears most often is that people feel like they’ve failed. What she tells them is that they haven’t, and that most of her clients struggled for years before picking up the phone. When they tell her afterward how much lighter they feel, her honest reply is usually some version of “You should have come earlier.”

She’s also blunt about one thing, and she’d know: don’t take financial advice from the debt collector trying to collect from you. She used to be one. She was paid on what she collected.