TLA – President’s Biography – Christopher M. Kelly – Steffan Kelly

Association Business

TLA President Biography: Christopher M. Kelly

Steffan Kelly

Chris and I went out to dinner recently and, as we sat down, an elderly couple next to us was getting up to leave. The man saw Chris and walked over to us. “You’re an attorney, aren’t you?” the man asked. Chris looked at him in surprise and said, “I am! How did you know?” It turns out the man was a 91-year-old psychiatrist who had worked for the FBI. He had profiled Chris in ten seconds! I wasn’t surprised that Chris apparently “looks” like an attorney. After all, when he was six years old, he and his friends stood at the end of a driveway and declared what they would do with their lives. Chris had confidently announced he would attend Notre Dame and then become a lawyer. He is a man who has always set goals and worked hard to achieve them.

Christopher Mark Kelly was born in January 1972 in Roswell, New Mexico—a town that wanted to be known for its ranching, oil and gas industries, but instead was famous for being the home of the 1947 UFO crash landing. The population of Roswell in 1970 was around 34,000 people, and has only grown to about 48,000 over the last fifty years. So, either people don’t want to move there, or the people who live there are getting abducted by aliens. Chris likes to joke that if the lights go out and you see him glowing, don’t worry. It’s perfectly normal for a Roswellian.

Chris is the fourth of five children born to Paul J. Kelly, Jr. and Ruth Ellen Dowling. He calls himself the “Forgotten Fourth” since he was often forgotten, misplaced or skipped over while growing up in his rambunctious family. He spent a lot of time trying to keep up with his older siblings. As a result, he tried harder, learned faster, took more risks and got in more trouble than the average kid. Chris was small, but he was scrappy and knew a lot of bad words. If he couldn’t fight his way out of something, he would use his colorful vocabulary to win his battles.

Chris lived in Roswell until he was 11 years old. Accordingly, Roswell in his mind will always be the place of his wonder years. A place where it was Saturday morning all day long and the play continued until after sunset. Where he rode bikes with his gang of friends, played baseball, soccer and basketball, fought imaginary battles with trashcan lids and bamboo swords, and terrorized the cadets at the New Mexico Military Institute by throwing clods of dirt at their cars as they drove by. The furious cadets were the only ones willing to chase Chris and his friends, which only made things more exciting. Chris’ family was tight-knit because all of their relatives were on the East Coast. Chris’s father had moved the family from Long Island to Roswell in 1967, before Chris was born; and although the family of seven did trek across the country in their RV to see the relatives occasionally, they created their own special memories together in Roswell. Chris will always remember his Roswell street address, and every sidewalk crack, tree, yard and house on his block.

In 1983, the Kelly family moved to the foothills of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Moving from Roswell to Santa Fe was only a fourhour drive (not long in the West), but culturally it was like moving from Dallas, Texas to Madrid, Spain. Chris was transplanted from the ranching southwest to a place of Spanish blue bloods and tri-cultural intersection. He went from organized city blocks and a fifth-grade class at Washington Avenue Elementary where kids looked like him, to a city of winding one-way roads, walled adobe compounds and a sixth-grade class at E.J. Martinez Elementary where he was only one of three blond, blue-eyed kids in a class of 100. He might not have noticed this but for the fact that his new classmates enjoyed regularly pointing out his differences. Despite this, Chris adapted to Santa Fe and dove right in. He made life-long best friends, grew to love the culture, the art, the mountains, the sunsets and most especially the spicy Santa Fe cuisine.

Chris attended St. Michael’s Catholic School for 7th and 8th grade and then attended Santa Fe Public High School. Although he played high school sports, specifically soccer and golf (basketball was not an option for the 5’1” freshman), he fell in love with band. He was selected for his high school’s elite Ambassador’s Concert Band, which allowed him to travel the world with his trombone. The band performed concerts in Beijing, Hong Kong, Sydney and Auckland. Chris paid his own way for the trips with summer job money, which his parents appreciated since they were paying for college and medical school tuition for his three older siblings.

In 1990, Chris enrolled at the University of Notre Dame. Two hours after moving into his dorm, he was stepping off with the “Band of the Fighting Irish.” Chris’s trombone continued to take him places while he worked toward a double major in Economics and Russian. He enjoyed all-expense-paid trips to Miami (1990 Orange Bowl), New Orleans (1991 Sugar Bowl) and Dallas (1992 Cotton Bowl). In his senior year, Chris gave up band so that he could be a Resident Assistant and prepare for law school.

In 1994, Chris enrolled at Wake Forest University School of Law. After his first year, he spent the summer in Wake’s study abroad

program studying the “History of the Common Law” in London, and “Comparative Business Organizations” in Venice. After his second year of law school, Chris worked in the Brooklyn, New York, District Attorney’s Office’s criminal court division for six weeks and then in the organized crime division for six weeks. He was also on Wake Forest’s Law Review and a member of Wake’s Trial Clinic Program, where he worked for the Forsyth County Legal Aid Office, and the U.S. Public Defender’s Office in Greensboro, NC. The defining experience in law school for Chris, however, was meeting me (of course!) when he was a 2L and I was a 3L.

Chris and I struck up a conversation at a Student Bar Association pool tournament. I mentioned that my friends and I were planning to get something to eat afterward and invited him to come along. After the tournament I asked him if he was ready to go eat. In the parking lot he asked if we should wait for my friends and I said, “Nope.” He still tells people I asked him out first, but in reality, I was just hungry. A year and one month later, after Mass on Thanksgiving morning, he asked me to marry him.

Chris graduated from law school in 1997 and received Wake Forest’s prestigious E. MacGruder Faris Memorial Award for Character, Leadership and Scholarship. That summer was busy—he took two bar exams (one in Raleigh, North Carolina and one in Columbia, South Carolina), moved to South Carolina, started his new job as an associate attorney at Gallivan, White & Boyd, P.A. in Greenville, South Carolina, and got married! We lived in Greenville, and welcomed our son Jack in 2001, and our daughter Elizabeth in 2003.

Chris has practiced 25 years with Gallivan, White & Boyd, a litigation firm with 65 lawyers in four offices located in Charlotte, North Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina. In his first year, Chris earned the nickname “Doogie” after a deposition in which he deposed a woman who afterward loudly announced “I think I was just deposed by Doogie Howser!” Chris worked to overcome his youthful appearance by always being prepared and putting in long hours. Having children also helped age him overnight. After making partner he served as the firm’s Commercial Transportation Team Leader, chaired the Associate Committee, and is currently a member of its four-person Executive Committee. Chris has been blessed to practice with partners who are fantastic trial lawyers and who have given him the opportunity to handle large, interesting, complex cases over his career.

In 2011, the firm asked Chris to open the office’s litigation practice in Charlotte, North Carolina. In July, 2011 the South Carolina Kellys became the North Carolina Kellys. It wasn’t long before Chris had enough work to hire a paralegal, then an associate in November, and then in December to ask another partner to move up from Greenville to help with the workload. The Charlotte office was off and running. Currently, the office has 10 attorneys and 9 staff members, and continues to grow.

Chris’ family has also grown, or I should say “grown up.” Jack is currently a rising senior at the University of Notre Dame, and Elizabeth is a rising sophomore at Furman University. In the last year, Chris and I have become empty nesters, hit the big “5-0” together, and will celebrate 25 years of marriage this August.

Chris has always been active in the community—coaching his children in church league basketball and YMCA soccer, judging high school debates on weekends, serving as the President of Kiwanis and as President of his local Notre Dame Club. He is also a graduate of both Leadership Greenville and Leadership Charlotte, and he has been active in Catholic Education serving as Chair of the Mecklenburg Area Catholic Schools Foundation for many years. For a good portion of his career, the TLA has been a fixture for Chris, and his professional life has been marked by the annual events of the TLI meeting, the Chicago meeting and the Annual Meeting. Chris was welcomed warmly by more senior members of the TLA who took him under their wing, introduced him to other great attorneys, and helped make his experience in TLA meaningful and worthwhile.

The FBI psychiatrist who quickly profiled Chris at dinner might have been interested to know the results of a personality test Chris took at a Leadership Greenville retreat a few years ago. His greatest strengths were loyalty, responsibility and accountability. I know he is committed to using his strengths in his role as President this year, and will encourage others to share their talents and strengths so that valuable TLA traditions will be preserved, and the organization will continue to grow and succeed.