Lindsay Vance Smith

Lindsay Vance Smith has a strong personal commitment to education and the law. Before becoming a lawyer, Ms. Smith received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University and taught literature and writing at both the college and high school levels. She also spent several years working for an education law firm in South Carolina, where she assisted attorneys representing public school boards and school districts on a wide variety of legal matters, including most notably civil litigation and appeals, special education administrative processes, and charter school issues. These experiences instilled in her the importance of providing a quality public education to all students, and the critical use of the law as a tool to shape educational policy and improve educational outcomes across the state of North Carolina.

A native of Charlotte, and granddaughter of one of Iredell County’s longest-serving Clerks of Superior Court, Ms. Smith became the first lawyer in her extended family, receiving her law degree with High Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. While in law school, she served as a staff member and editor on the North Carolina Law Review, was President of UNC Women in Law, served as Co-Chair for the Conference on Race, Class, Gender & Ethnicity, and was inducted into the Order of the Coif.

After graduating from law school, Ms. Smith served as a judicial law clerk for the Honorable Albert Diaz at the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Before returning to Raleigh, Ms. Smith was an associate at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer in Washington, D.C., where her practice focused on civil and appellate litigation and government investigations. Ms. Smith represents public school boards across a broad range of matters, focusing on civil and administrative litigation and appeals.