Chattanooga attorney Donna Mikel credits her father with teaching her that there are fewer boundaries in this world than there appears to be. He also taught her she could become whatever she wanted to be. “He convinced me I’d be the world’s first professional female baseball player. Obviously, that didn’t work out, and being a lawyer was my fallback plan,” she says.
Growing up within the vastness of Montana helped Mikel to understand what her father meant about the lack of boundaries in the world. Plus, the notion of being able to do whatever she wanted to do dovetailed nicely with her desire to make a difference. So when it was time for her to choose a path through life, she picked just law.
“I wish I could say there was a specific reason why I went to law school, but there wasn’t. I wanted to help people who couldn’t help themselves, but beyond that, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Mikel says.
A pattern of blind trust started to emerge in Mikel’s life when she decided to attend the University of Georgia in Athens. She didn’t know anyone at the school, let alone in the state, but she thought the South would be pretty, so she packed everything she owned in her car and drove sight unseen to Georgia. Some people might call what Mikel did naïve or risky, but she says she was learning to have faith that she would end up where she was meant to be. “Someone was guiding me,” she says, hinting at her belief that a higher power has ordered her steps.
The uncanny circumstances through which Mikel wound up in Chattanooga appear to support her conviction. During her second year at the University of Georgia, Mikel started giving her resume to the many law firms that came to the school to recruit associates. She relied on the law of averages to attract an offer, doing several interviews a day and speaking with any practice in which she had an iota of interest. She focused primary on firms from Atlanta and Washington D.C., as she wanted to work in a large city.
During one interview, the attorney with whom she was talking said, “So, what about Chattanooga interests you?”
“I thought, ‘Chattanooga? Where’s that?’ I’d accidentally dropped off my resume with a Chattanooga firm,” she says. When Mikel drove to the Scenic City for her follow-up interview, she fell in love. “I liked the atmosphere. It’s laid back compared to bigger cities, where the practice of law is more cutthroat and less civil. Chattanooga is a great place to be a lawyer,” she says. Mikel started her career at Witt, Gaither & Whitaker in 2000. While there, she learned how to defend employment cases. In 2002, the firm merged with another practice and became Shumacker, Witt, Gaither & Whitaker. When Shumacker closed in 2006, Mikel was seven months pregnant and the primary breadwinner in her family.
She says it was an interesting time that allowed her to put the trust she’d developed into practice. “When you’re seven months pregnant and an attorney, you don’t want to go on interviews. So I didn’t do much in the way of actively looking for work, and the right opportunity came to me,” she says. Attorney Frank Pinchak of Burnette, Dobson & Pinchak had worked with Mikel before, and suggested she join him at his new firm. She did, and she remains there today, representing primarily plaintiffs. Mikel says the nature of some of the cases on which she works surprises her.
“When I get a new case in which someone has really suffered from discrimination, I wonder how such a thing can happen in this day and age. People should be past that, but unfortunately, they’re not.” Although Mikel is sometimes distressed by what she encounters, the environment in which she works has tested her skills and pushed her development as an attorney. This in turn has led to positive outcomes in her cases.
“I had one case that meant a lot to me because my client had been really harmed. It was a pregnancy discrimination suit. She was put in a terrible situation at work and ended up having a lot of challenges in her pregnancy. Her doctors said her child was going to die and advised her to have an abortion, but she had more faith than they did and said no, and she delivered a healthy baby. She was an inspiring client, and her case had a good outcome. She was the kind of person I became a lawyer to help,” Mikel says.
Mikel’s trust in providence is grounded in Christianity. She’s says faith has been an important part of her life, and has taken her places she otherwise never would have gone.
“I had some crazy years as a teenager, but I found my way out through faith. Since then, it hasn’t always been me deciding what to do. Moving to the South and ending up in Chattanooga wasn’t a plan of mine, but of God’s,” she says. Smaller entities than God also have a hand in determining what Mikel does on a daily basis. As a mother of two biological children and three stepchildren, her steps are ordered from early in the morning until the time she puts her son and daughter in bed. Between family and work, Mikel has about 30 minutes a day to herself.
A comparison of the leisure time activities Mikel enjoyed before and after she met her husband reveals one way in which having a family has impacted her life. Growing up, Mikel did a lot of trout fishing, camping and skiing. She also taught dance. When she moved to Chattanooga, she played competitive billiards. Now, Mikel likes to scrapbook, walk, and play with her kids. Life is different, she says, but in a good way. Some people might criticize Mikel’s lack of a detailed plan up to this point, but her life serves as a strong argument in favor of simply having faith that things will turn out they way they should. She set out with nothing more than a desire to help people, and without charting a precise course, ended up doing precisely that.
Even when challenges rose up against her, she simply trusted that opportunities would come her way. Given the results, one would be hard pressed to argue her strategy was poorly conceived. It comes as no surprise, then, that Mikel gives little thought to the future. She calls the firm at which she’s working “great,” and says she loves her work. While Mikel remembers her father’s lesson that there are fewer boundaries in this world than there appears to be, she also believes the opportunities that have been established for her will present themselves, so she doesn’t go looking for them. As fallback plans go, it’s airtight.