You currently serve on The Associated’s Lawyer’s Committee. What other leadership roles have you held within The Associated system? Why is being involved important to you?  

After completing the YLC program, I held a variety of roles on various young leadership committees.  Soon after completing YLC, I co-chaired the Young Business Roundtable Committee and helped to coordinate networking events for 60-100 Baltimore Jewish professionals. More recently, in addition to my involvement with the Lawyer’s Committee, I am a member of the Jewish Professional Women’s Committee. I am also on the Board of Directors for Pearlstone and have served in that role since 2016.     Being an active participant and giving back to our community has always been very important to me.  My family is committed to active participation in the community.  My parents instilled those values in my sister and me, and I certainly hope to raise my children with the same values.  I have met so many wonderful people through my involvement in The Associated and have had the opportunity to engage in both personally and professionally rewarding events and activities.  We are very lucky to have such a vibrant, active Jewish community and I have enjoyed being involved in The Associated in a variety of different ways over the years.     

Your primary area of practice is Employment Law at Miles & Stockbridge. Please tell us how COVID-19 is affecting the clients you work with.   

COVID has had a profound impact on nearly all of my clients in some form or another, requiring them to modify the way that they do business and, in many cases, how they interact with their employees, customers and vendors. Initially, like the rest of the world, many of my clients were scrambling to understand the new laws passed to respond to COVID and to figure out how to accommodate employees’ working from home. Over time, many clients have had to deal with issues of furloughs and even layoffs.  I have been advising clients how to respond when an employee or visitor reports a positive COVID diagnosis and what their obligations are to other employees and individuals who may have been on their worksite. Some clients are still primarily working remotely but starting to look ahead and plan for a return to the office. I have been working with them to establish return to work guidelines and training for employees. There are federal, state and local laws to consider and many of them are changing on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis, which is very complicated for business owners.    

You Co-Founded the Tribe@Miles, Miles & Stockbridge’s Jewish Affinity Group. How did you come up with this idea and what is your proudest accomplishment related to this group?  

We founded the Tribe@Miles approximately five years ago, initially in response to the need for our Jewish lawyers to have Kosher for Passover food during the holiday. Because there was no kosher food downtown, we coordinated and brought in a catered lunch and met to eat together and kibbutz about our Seders. After a couple years of doing this, we decided to form a more organized group and get together more regularly, and the Tribe@Miles was born. Our goal was to provide internal networking opportunities for our Jewish lawyers and to raise the firm’s profile in the Jewish community overall. Over the years, we have had several external events bringing together members of the Jewish community and many of our lawyers, including many who are non-Jewish, but extremely supportive of the group. We also have organized a yearly campaign to send Rosh Hashanah gifts to the firm’s Jewish clients, which have been very well received. We have held all-firm Hannukah parties and this year, just before the pandemic shut everything down, we delivered Hamantaschen to all of our offices on Purim and explained the holiday to our colleagues. Miles & Stockbridge has been extremely supportive of the group and we have grown over the years to include both lawyers and staff, and a much larger group than when we first started eating together for Passover many years ago.  

When you aren’t working, what is something you’ve done during this pandemic? 

Our family COVID project was to adopt five chickens! We got them as chicks just a few days old and initially kept them under a heat lamp in our garage. They now live in a homemade chicken coup in our backyard and we are anxiously awaiting the day we come out and find fresh eggs! They are each a different color and we have named them, and all enjoy sitting out in the yard and watching them “free range” and run around. It really has been very fun and entertaining! 

Stephanie also advises management on traditional labor issues, including those related to plant closures and related requirements under existing collective bargaining agreements. She aids clients in contract interpretation for ongoing disciplinary and grievance issues.

Before joining Miles & Stockbridge as an associate, she served as a law clerk for the Honorable James R. Eyler, Court of Special Appeals of Maryland. Prior to attending law school, Stephanie worked as an auditor for Arthur Andersen and obtained her Certified Public Accountant license. 

Stephanie was recently named in The Daily Record Maryland’s Top 100 Women Issue