Mi Belvin sees herself standing in an open field. Grass surrounds her, and mountains are visible behind and ahead of her. She can choose to either stand in place and enjoy the view or walk where she desires. There’s no need for her to go in a certain direction, and nowhere to be by a certain time. There’s just the calm of the moment and a future as open as the ground on which she stands.
Belvin has stood in this field of her own making before. Born on Mainland China, her parents moved to the U.S. when she was four and settled in Birmingham, Ala. As she walked through the field after graduating from high school, she came to a door: Vanderbilt University and a pre-med degree. She opened the door and stepped through, but soon discovered a career in medicine would not be to her liking, so she stepped back out and chose another door: psychology.
Upon graduation, Belvin intended to pursue a career in child psychology. However, after working for a couple of years as a project coordinator and a research assistant in the clinical psychology department at Vanderbilt, she decided child psychology also was not to her liking.
“Working with the children was hard. Plus, getting to the point where I could make money was going to take eight years,” Belvin says.
So she stepped back outside.
As Belvin stood in her field again, she wrestled with the future. She was smart, driven and competitive, but she didn’t know how to parlay her intellectual skills into a career. Then she remembered the law, which she’d grown up loving.
Belvin’s dad had suffered a couple of heart attacks while she was in Nashville, so she returned to Birmingham to be closer to her immediate family and attend Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. On her first day of class, Belvin already had an end game in mind: litigation. During her third year of law school, she found a firm that fit her goals: Leitner, Williams, Dooley & Napolitan.
“May 2009 was not a good time to graduate from law school. The economy had bottomed out and everyone was panicking. But I went to a job fair in Atlanta and found Leitner Williams, and they offered me a job,” Belvin says.
Leitner Williams told Belvin she could practice in any of the several cities in which the firm has offices. She chose Chattanooga, even though she’d only driven through the city while traveling.
“I had lived in Nashville, and the traffic was awful. I wanted to live in a smaller city where I wouldn’t have to fight to get somewhere, where the cost of living was reasonable, and where I could drive 45 minutes and be canoeing and enjoying the mountains,” she says.
Like many of the attorneys at Leitner Williams, Belvin practiced insurance defense. “I defended people who were being sued,” Belvin says, summing up her work at the firm with clarity.
Belvin liked practicing law. She enjoyed solving her clients’ problems and thrived on the challenges involved. She also appreciated how the people there took her under their wings and taught her how to apply what she’d learned in school.
“Leitner has great partners with a lot of litigation experience. Law school told me what the law is; at Leitner Williams, I learned how to use the law to the benefit of my clients,” she says.
This month, however, Belvin chose to leave Leitner. She’d been sensing the time for change was approaching, and chose to return to the peaceful clarity of her field.
Unlike in the past, Belvin is not alone. Rather, she’s married to her law school sweetheart, Lew Belvin, who practices civil litigation at McMahan Law Firm. This, after she swore she’d never marry, let alone date, an attorney.
“I had an image in my head of what a male attorney would be like: arrogant, pompous and full of himself. You have to have a bit of those things in you to practice law. While I can handle that professionally, I didn’t want to deal with it at home,” Belvin says.
She admits she was wrong.
“Lew was none of those things. He was confident and he commanded respect without being loud or insisting on being the center of attention. He was also smart and everyone admired and respected him,” Belvin says.
Lew is also an all around great guy. When Belvin told her husband she was leaving Leitner to think, he was behind her decision 100 percent. “He’s excited for me. He wants me to be happy,” she says.
Making Belvin happy is easy because she enjoys simple pleasures like gardening and cooking. She especially enjoys preparing southern food, which she says is the ultimate comfort food, and Chinese cuisine. “I try to re-create the dishes my parents prepared when I was growing up because I miss them,” she says.
Belvin and her husband also like to fish together.
At 31, Belvin faces an undefined future. But instead of feeling anxious, she’s at ease and enjoying a quiet moment in her field. As she closes her eyes and imagines standing there, there are no doors, only unbounded space.
“I don’t like doors. They suggest being closed in. I like the idea of walking across an open field. It feels like an adventure.”