Anne Marie Seibel Featured in Law360 Pulse Q&A on Her Guiding Leadership Principles

Bradley attorney Anne Marie Seibel, chair of the firm’s Litigation Practice Group and past chair of the ABA’s Litigation Section, was featured in a Law360 Pulse article on her guiding philosophy for her new leadership role and the many other previous leadership positions she's held.

“It is very important to me that I leave the places that I've been better than I've found them,” Seibel told Law360 Pulse in a recent interview. She told Law360 Pulse that with the help of a few colleagues, she has interviewed every partner in the litigation group to hear from them one-on-one about what their interests are in terms of practicing law and to build connections within the group based on those interests. The next step, Seibel said, will be expanding that outreach to the group's associates.

Seibel explained the approach is a way of building on the mentorship and guidance she received when she first started at the firm. "I've been at the firm my entire career, so I've benefited from mentors ahead of me and sponsors who helped me build my own litigation practice," said Seibel, who is based in Birmingham, Alabama. "[Being litigation head] really gives me a chance to do that for our next generation.”

Seibel joined Law360 Pulse for a conversation about her plans for developing Bradley’s litigation practice and her history of leadership positions leading to this one.

Law360 Pulse: What are your priorities for the litigation practice group?

Seibel: Externally, being sure that the marketplace of clients and referral network realizes we really are a national litigation group that is playing out of our footprint in the Southeast, everywhere from D.C. to Florida and Texas.

At any given time, we have teams that are out in litigation nationally, across the country, and are practicing well beyond our footprint, often in virtual law firms or as part of teams, and sometimes as lead trial counsel.

As many people know about us, we hire very top caliber lawyers, have great national experience, and so externally I want to be sure that we are known as that, and that we are playing in a market that sometimes has your big New York firms, but doesn't have the New York rates because of where we're based.

Internally, we've had significant growth as a firm. And one of the things I've been doing, with some of my colleagues who are helping me, is spending a lot of time interviewing all of our partners to be sure that we internally are paying attention to the synergies we have. That we know where our talents are, what people like to do and finding matches across our footprints.

There may be someone sitting in Nashville who likes the same type of work with someone in Dallas, and I can help them make those connections and that way serve our clients better.

We've interviewed all of our partners primary to the group in the first quarter of this year as our first step.

As I've been visiting different offices, I've been taking time not just to meet with our partners but with our associates — because they're our future — to find out, what are they interested in? Where can we match them up, what kind of opportunities, if they come across my desk, should I be thinking of for a particular associate?

Law360 Pulse: What does your practice look like? What kinds of cases do you focus on?

Seibel: My practice, just about my entire career, I've described as any kind of case: that is, putting together multiple puzzle pieces. I have had, across the years, cases, for example, that have an arbitration, a state court action, the federal court action all happening at the same time.

I like being able to think not just one case or one brief at a time, but how what I say somewhere else affects the rest, and so that's really what all of my practice has been.

It has been in different forms: everything from a large accounting malpractice case, to hotel occupancy tax litigation, to pharmaceutical litigation.

The theme throughout has been, you need to have someone who likes to think strategically about how different pieces play together, often on fairly large teams — not always, but a lot of the time it's working with other teammates or the co-defendants where you have to think strategically together.

Law360 Pulse: What made you want to take previous leadership positions within Bradley Arant and elsewhere? How do they relate to your new position?

Seibel: One of the things I really like about the firm is that it's really smart people who care about the other people they're working with.

While I was on the associate committee, and chairing it for a lot of the same reasons that I was willing to take this on, is that I like the ability to take our first-year associates and watch them develop, and become partners, and be able to help them grow. I found that fulfilling.

Both with the ABA and what I'm doing now, I'm trying to find things that give me energy on top of my client work. What's been most fun for me thus far is meeting new partners and associates whom I don't know.

We just opened an Atlanta office, so all those folks are new to us. I went over there and spent time with them, and I came back energized by seeing how much they were enjoying practicing with each other, and how much they were already practicing with people in all of our other offices.

Trying to build upon that and share that energy and enthusiasm for the practice that we're so lucky to have is really motivating to me.

The original article, “Bradley Arant's New Litigation Head Shares Guiding Principle,” first appeared in Law360 Pulse on May 19, 2025.