Her Story
About Katherine
I've been practicing law for 8 years now, and my career has been deeply rooted in serving the skilled nursing and post-acute care industry. I started at the law firm Haldus Smith, where I ran the Medicaid reimbursement program for North Carolina and South Carolina. That practice included working with long-term care facilities to secure reimbursement by making sure their residents could become eligible for long-term care Medicaid benefits. When residents lacked capacity to meaningfully assist with the application process, I would file petitions for guardianship to get them adjudicated incompetent and get a guardian in place to assist on their behalf. Any sort of legal issues that would arise out of complex Medicaid applications was what I would do. Alliance Health Group was previously my client, and they brought me in-house to continue the Medicaid reimbursement program but also to grow into a role where I did more than just enable revenue for them. Now as General Counsel, I lead the regulatory and risk management strategy across the portfolio. I do everything from full contract management and strategic oversight of outside counsel to high-risk employment matters. My main goal is to identify risk and figure out strategic ways to lower that risk and lower our exposure. A big part of what I do now is education - instead of just taking cases on a case-by-case basis and fixing them, I see what the risk is and then figure out how to educate the staff in whatever department the risk is identified in, educating them to see it next time and fix it so it doesn't happen again. I educate employees on everything from workers' comp to hiring best practices to how to interact with third-party agencies when it comes to investigations like law enforcement agencies and adult protective services. I still educate on Medicaid for the business personnel we have, and I educate the directors of nursing on documentation best practices. I'm turning what I live and know into educational tools for people, so that instead of just constantly being reactive, I'm giving them tools to be preventative and proactive.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Katherine
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would probably say my parents. They taught me hard work and dedication. My dad's a physician, and he spent his whole life caring for others, and my mom has spent her whole life caring for us, like me and my siblings. Having watched my parents give to others - my dad to his patients, and my mom to the family - allowed me to develop hard work and dedication and determination within myself. So that now I can be both dedicated to work and to my family at the same time as a working mother.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I'm going to take a sideways approach to this answer. I feel like the best advice I got actually came from the worst advice I got, which was that I can only practice law one way. What I've learned over the course of my career is that it doesn't have to look any particular way when it comes to what older attorneys tell you. They say, well, this is how we've always done it, and so this is how it's supposed to be, like being a lawyer looks like this, this is how you treat other people, and this is how you move about your life. And that just doesn't - you can do it whatever way is authentic to you. Some people lead with kindness and professionalism that other people don't, and you have to be authentic to who you are. So the advice that there's only one way to practice ended up being the best advice I got, because I realized that it's the opposite. The best way to practice is by being authentically you. Because I feel like if you just try and be what everybody else is telling you to be, because that's how they've done it, or that's how it's always been, then it will be inauthentic.
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