Picture dumping a puzzle out of a box. As the pieces hit the table, they slide across its surface and scatter, leaving the person who opened the box to assemble them. This is an accurate picture of how life can be.
Now imagine dumping the pieces, but as they fall, they snap together and form a complete picture. While that might sound impossible, it’s not far from how Cassie Rieder’s life in Chattanooga came together.
Rieder is an associate at Spears, Moore, Rebman & Williams, a firm of about 30 attorneys ensconced on the sixth floor of the Pioneer Building on Broad Street. On September 1, 2012, she will have worked at Spears Moore for three years, having spent most of that time doing probate work. Rieder is married, too, although she and her husband do not yet have children. Finally, as a board member of The Parks Foundation, Rieder is an active participant in her community.
At 28, Rieder has laid down the path her life will take and is walking confidently along it. But there was a time when only one of those puzzle pieces was in place: becoming an attorney.
“When I was five, my dad said I should be an attorney because I could argue with a fence post. That stuck with me,” Rieder says. Although she worked in a pharmacy while in high school and majored in accounting in college, Rieder never developed a keen interest in anything besides the law.
But there was a problem: Her job prospects in her hometown of Humboldt, Tenn., were limited. With only one exit and 8,400 residents, the small Gibson County community wasn’t exactly clamoring for lawyers. So Rieder set her eyes on the Scenic City and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She’d already fallen in love with the area during visits to see her sisters, and she thought the culture shock would be less severe than if she moved to Knoxville to attend UT.
Rieder was right. The town was a perfect fit for her, allowing one of the pieces of her life puzzle to snap into place. “I can’t put my finger on why, but Chattanooga has always felt like home,” she says.
Rieder did leave town to attend law school at UT Knoxville, but when the time came for her to clerk, she applied at Spears Moore.
“I have a brother-in-law who’s a shareholder with the firm. I didn’t want to ask him about clerking here, but a friend encouraged me to send in my resume, so I did,” she says.
Spears Moore brought Rieder on and gave her six weeks to make an impression. She made an especially strong impression on one particular shareholder: Bill Rieder.
“While I was there for my interview, I was invited to lunch. Bill went, too. I thought he was cute, but that was it. I was there for the interview and to get to know people,” she says.
The two of them hit it off, though, and by the end of Rieder’s six-week clerkship, they were quietly dating. “We had the six-month conversation early in our relationship. I wondered what would happen if Spears Moore offered me a job but wouldn’t let us work together. I didn’t want to sacrifice working here over a guy I’d just met,” she says, laughing.
After Rieder had returned to school, Spears Moore did offer her a job, and upon learning she and Bill were dating, the firm expressed no concerns. A year later, when Rieder was ready to begin working, the couple was engaged.
Snap and snap.
Rieder had no designs to work in a particular area of the law but would do whatever someone dropped on her desk. The firm had hundreds of probate cases to resolve, however, so she gladly stepped in to help full-time. She’s enjoyed the work.
“I like being able to interact with a client at a time when he or she has suffered a loss and is emotional and attached to sentimental things. To be able to help someone through that is satisfying,” she says.
Rieder also enjoys being at Spears Moore. She loves the people with whom she works and says the mentoring the firm’s attorneys have provided has been invaluable. Although she’s currently focused on probate work, Rieder has worked on others kinds of matters – something Spears Moore encourages associates to do – and says she likes the variety. Her immediate plan for the future is to “keep progressing and learning new things.”
Rieder also plans to take advantage of the time she and her husband are able to spend together. Although Spears Moore is a family oriented firm, the legal profession requires attorneys to put in long hours. Sometimes, this means spouses don’t see each other as often as they would like. While Rieder and her husband frequently eat lunch together, the work either one of them has to do on any given day can prevent that. When that happens, Rieder takes it in stride.
“Even when I don’t see him all day, I don’t feel like I never get to see him. I might feel like that if he worked at a different firm,” she says.
Before Rieder met Bill, she had no intention of marrying a lawyer due to the time issue and because she wanted to talk about something different at the end of each day. But now she appreciates being with someone who shares her mindset about work and can relate to what she does.
Because of the focus at Spears Moore on family and maintaining a healthy balance between work and home, Rieder is able to spend time watching television, reading and hanging out with friends. She also likes to bowl, but her husband rarely plays with her because of her superior skills.
“When we were dating, we made plans to go bowling. And he started bragging about how good he was and was smack talking about how he was going to beat me. Then I had one of those nights when I could have rolled it backwards between my legs and knocked down all of the pins. I scored a 247; he scored a 103,” she says, laughing again.
Rieder says her husband gets his revenge during football season. “He bleeds orange. The Vols start playing soon, so I’m going to have to plan my life around football,” she says – without laughing.
If Rieder gets bored with the gridiron, she could engage her husband in one of their friendly debates. “We hardly ever get mad at each other. Instead, we argue about trivial things like whether or not Shaq is overrated. I think he is but Bill doesn’t. People laugh at us,” she says.
At 28, Rieder has a lot of the big pieces of her life puzzle in place. Many of them are there not as result of a master plan, but because she took advantage of the opportunities which were in front of her. If Rieder continues to do this, she can look forward to a long and lucrative career in her chosen profession as well as a life filled with good things.