Background Check

BACKGROUND CHECK Rachel Thomas | Bart Pickett

Once someone meets Rachel Thomas, they don’t usually forget her. Her magnetic personality has helped her be successful. Having grown up the daughter of an ordained Baptist preacher/lawyer, she comes by it pretty naturally. Her uncle, Kelly Thomas, served as a trial court judge in Blount County for 16 years before being appointed to the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2006. Family get-togethers always involved crazy courtroom stories that enthralled Thomas.

Thomas lived in Maryville until age 4 when the family moved to the D.C. area and stayed until she was in 6th grade. Her father both taught at Georgetown Law School and was a lobbyist for the Baptist Church. Thomas finished her secondary education in Maryville where her sister Sarah, 18 months her junior, described Thomas as a “math nerd.” Wanting to follow in the footsteps of her maternal grandmother who attended Vanderbilt Medical School, Thomas went off to UVA to study pre-med. During college, however, Thomas found herself drawn back to the family business of law and, after she graduated in 2003, took a couple of years off to work for then-speaker Jimmy Naifeh before law school.

In 2005, Thomas headed back to East Tennessee to start at UT College of Law. She went knowing that she wanted to be an assistant district attorney upon graduation. She loved her time at UT and made many lifetime friends there that she still regularly meets up with.

Graduating during the Great Recession in 2008, Thomas perhaps crazily decided to put all of her stock in the Nashville DA’s office where she had interned during her both summers during law school. Despite being told repeatedly that they were not hiring, Thomas held out hope that Torry Johnson would hire her at some point. Fortunately for her, that time came in October 2008.

Thomas spent 5 years as an ADA. That dream job provided an opportunity to learn like Baptism by fire. She was in the courtroom every day and even had a stash of her preferred makeup in a drawer in the courtroom.

After her stint in the DA’s office, Thomas joined Riley Warnock where she worked mostly under Steve Riley. During her two years at the firm, Thomas had a great crash course in civil law. Riley, who Thomas considers one of her mentors, instilled in her the notion to put her health and family first.

In order to craft a practice where she was in the courtroom as much as possible, Thomas decided to take a risk and hang her own shingle in 2015. Having spent time in multiple courts to observe, it was in the domestic realm that she noticed attorneys spent frequent time in the courtroom and still dealt with intellectually challenging legal issues. Thomas then shifted her focus to family law and started The Law Office of Rachel Thomas. In 2019, she and Larry Hayes (who she shamelessly believes is the best family law attorney in Tennessee and an all-around brilliant and hilarious person), decided to officially join forces and formed Hayes Thomas, PLC.

Hayes Thomas is currently located on 2nd Avenue, but is constructing a new commercial office building in Hillsboro Village where the firm will move in May 2022. They focus on divorce matters typically involving large estates and complex financial issues. Every week you can likely find Thomas in court in Davidson and Williamson Counties. She cannot imagine loving a job more than the one she has. She has found the absolute perfect fit for her.

Thomas and her 4.5 year old daughter, Eve, live in Green Hills. While Thomas says she’s best at (1) being a mom and (2) being a lawyer, she still tries to find time to pursue other outlets. She attends Calvary United Methodist Church. She also loves travelling. She “aspires to go broke travelling to crazy places.” Her next big trip is to the Maldives this fall to celebrate her 40th birthday. When she is at home, Thomas enjoys cooking, riding her bike in Percy Warner park, and tending to her flowers. n

BART PICKETT is an attorney at the Law Offices of Julie Bhattacharya Peak where he represents Liberty Mutual Group, Inc.’s insureds and customers of its affiliated groups in litigation throughout Middle Tennessee.

judgment motion. For those that never left the office, they found that office life never really changed. While emails and memos were sent about wearing masks in common areas, many attorneys never wore masks at all. Specifically, many associate attorneys found that their more experienced counterparts changed nothing about the way they worked, noting that healthy people under a certain age have less of a risk of contracting the virus and getting sick from it. They also stand by the principles that it is more efficient to work in person, and that office comradery is just as important as meeting benchmark. It is obvious that there is no “right way” to return to work at a law firm after a global pandemic. Firms, both large and small, have experienced a very challenging and unexpected event– and survived. However, one thing is true--this experience has changed the how, when, and where of our practice for the forseeable future. n

SUMMER MELTON is a civil litigation attorney at Meridian Law, PLLC. She graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Business Law and received her JD from the Belmont College of Law. After graduating, she was hired as an Adjunct Professor at Belmont University where she teaches Pre-Trial Procedure and coaches Belmont’s undergraduate mock trial teams.