Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Kristin lives in a hundred-year-old house in the city’s Northside. If she’s not working, she’s running, fighting weeds in her garden, trying to figure out how to cope with an empty nest (her two stepchildren are now in college), or coaching championship high school mock trial teams, cheering for the Virginia Cavaliers.

She is a former member of The Sedona Conference Working Group 1 and was selected to draft The Sedona Conference Commentary on ESI Evidence & Admissibility. Her ghostwritten work has appeared in numerous leading legal journals and periodicals, including Forbes, Corporate Counsel, Law360, and the New York Law Journal, among others. She also served as a Contributing Editor for a recent edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.

Legal background

Kristin is a recovering lawyer who served as in-house employment law counsel to a Fortune 200 corporation and as an associate at an AmLaw 100 law firm. She has managed employment litigation and arbitration relating to harassment, discrimination, and wage and hour law in venues across the country; drafted executive compensation contracts; oversaw eDiscovery projects; and supervised restructuring
and immigration programs. Her work also included handling covenants not to compete and matters before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Education

Kristin earned her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Labor and Employment Law and taught legal writing. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and history, with a concentration in American Studies, from the University of Virginia. She is a former adjunct faculty of the University of Richmond School of Law, where she taught legal writing courses for seven years.

Community service and awards

In 2004, Kristin was named to Style Weekly’s “Top 40 Under 40,” and in 2007, she received the Washington Metropolitan Association of Corporate Counsel’s Community Service Award. She previously chaired the Podium Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the writing and communication skills of inner-city youth. Today, she runs the Virginia Law-Related Education Institute, a nonprofit that
teaches high school students about the rule of law and runs a mock trial program. She coaches six teams of students from Henrico High School, one of the top-ranking mock trial programs in the country.

Our team

Our approach and mission

Leadership team

Kristin Walinski

Steve Guarnieri

Sandy Hausrath

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