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High Achiever Gets Her Start at The Summit

By Tanya Bricking Leach

Having traveled and lived all over the world, attorney Alicia Bond-Lewis ’97 finds that her ties to Cincinnati keep tugging her back to the places that shaped her — including right here.

The Summit lifer came back to campus in 2011 to marry Dr. Christopher Lewis in the chapel. Sometimes, her professional ties have brought her back to The Summit, including when she won an alumni award in 2012. And her memory brings her back to campus every time she finishes a book. She thinks of Pat Kelly, an English teacher who kept a list of every book he ever read.

“He would update it every year and hand it out to the students,” she recalls. “I just have this passion for reading. Even now, I look back each year to figure out, ‘How many books did I read?’ I’m never going to get to where he was. But that was very formidable for me. It prepared me for my career.”

From Pupil to Partner

Bond-Lewis’s journey to becoming a partner at Cincinnati’s Dinsmore & Shohl law firm is a path she can trace back to Grandin Road and The Summit’s mission of educating leaders of character.

From here, she went on to Missouri, where she double majored in political science and Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis (2001). Then, for two years, she served in Washington, D.C., as an adviser for women in the U.S. Congress as part of an organization then known as Women’s Policy, Inc., before she went on to law school at the University of Denver (2006).

She started her legal career in New York, working as a legal intern at the United Nations Secretariat and later lived abroad where she was able to use her Spanish vocabulary in Spain, Chile and Argentina. Her love of language started with seventhgrade Spanish class at The Summit.

“You never know when your language skills are going to come back in, when you’re going to need them,” she says. “Part of my work with Dinsmore was working as a prosecutor for the city of Blue Ash, one of the municipalities that we represent. If we had Spanish-speaking defendants who needed assistance before we could give them a translator, I was able to communicate with them and explain their rights.”

A Passion for Children

Everything Bond-Lewis ever really needed to know doesn’t fall far from her formative years here, either. She still remembers the values community service taught her in high school.

“I worked at Beech Acres Parenting Center,” she recalls of one summer in the 1990s. “It helped spark my passion for children. That’s been a continual theme throughout my life and with my community involvement.”

She’s been on the board of March of Dimes and is a trustee at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. She’s on the board of United Way. She’s helping to run a community initiative geared toward making children in Cincinnati the most

thriving in the nation. A few years ago, she was named one of Cincinnati’s “Forty under 40.” She’s a wife and mother of two girls. She’s been part of several leadership programs, and she was part of Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley’s economic development reform panel.

“I’m continuing to fulfill my purpose and continuing to evolve just as a person to have an impact on the people around me and the community I live in,” she says.

A Cincinnatian at Heart

Today, Bond-Lewis, 42, is part of her firm’s commercial litigation practice. She regularly represents banks and other financial institutions in federal and state courts. While at Dinsmore, she has served as the prosecutor for the City of Blue Ash and the Village of Silverton. She is cochair of her firm’s recruiting committee and is dedicated to creating an inclusive community.

“No matter what I’m doing, I try to make sure there’s that touch of inclusivity,” she says. “Whether it’s within Dinsmore, where I’ve helped to create a pro-bono partnership with our African American Chamber of Commerce, or just making sure others have opportunity. I think that just goes back to the values that come from Summit.”

She’s also a foodie who loves cooking, yoga, hiking, exploring and learning more about the Queen City that keeps her grounded.

“I enjoyed living in a variety of big cities,” she says. “It was great for where I was in life. But now I enjoy being back in Cincinnati with the family, and just the quality of life that you can have here. We have so much going on here — our thriving arts community, our foodie town, just that urban feel that’s been cultivated. You’ve got the best of both worlds.”

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