Susan Briggs, Dickie McCamey & Chilcote

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Position: shareholder and managing partner,
Dickie McCamey & Chilcote

Lives in:
Providence Plantation

Family: husband, Kirk Zurosky; children, Abbey
Anne, 12, Aubrey, 10; stepdaughters, Sydney, 11, Jadeyn, 8

Susan Briggs is a successful workers’ compensation attorney and managing partner for the Charlotte/Raleigh office of Dickie McCamey & Chilcote.

But Briggs, 43, said she would never have reached this point if it weren’t for the promise she made to her dying mother. It was 1991, and Briggs had just begun law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when her mother learned she had brain cancer. She died six months later.

“I would go to classes during the day, then go to Duke (Medical Center) to be with my mother and study. It was really hard, really challenging,” Briggs said. “If I hadn’t promised her that I wouldn’t drop out of school, I would have quit.”

Briggs still has a note from her mother tacked to the door of her kitchen pantry that reads, “You will be OK.”

“I felt she was watching over me,” Briggs said. “Even now, when I receive an award or a recognition, I still hear my mother in the back of my brain telling me not to quit.”

Having a daughter in law school is a proud moment for many parents. But Briggs said it was especially true for her parents, Lumbee Indians who grew up outside of Pembroke during the years of strictly enforced segregation.

“When they were growing up, there would be three water fountains: for whites, blacks and Indians,” Briggs said. “Given that world they grew up in, they never thought their daughter would go to law school.”

Briggs said she was spared that kind of discrimination for most of her young life.  Her father was in the military, so they lived all over the country.

“It’s the beauty of the military – there are so many different kinds of folks – being a Lumbee was not that big a deal.”

But she discovered it made a difference when she returned to North Carolina.

“As a teenager, I was followed in stores,” Briggs said. “People would look at me and say, ‘Oh, she’s gonna cut me.’”

Today Briggs does pro bono legal work for Native Americans.

“I went to law school as a bright-eyed advocate for Native Americans,” she said. “But I
realized no one gives you a job
for that.”

She said she had majored in
industrial relations at UNC-Chapel Hill and found she
enjoyed it.

“It clicked in my brain. I
decided to know one thing and know it well.”

Briggs joined Dickie McCamey & Chilcote four years ago after working with York Williams
Barringer Lewis & Briggs in
Charlotte for a decade. She primarily represents corporate clients. In 2011, North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, a sister publication to The
Mecklenburg Times, named her one of its Leaders in the Law.

– BEA QUIRK