Kate attended Kenyon College in Ohio and earned a degree in Philosophy, but in the process learned that she liked history enough to go on and earn a Masters’ degree in History from UNC Chapel Hill. After that, she returned to Knoxville, where her grandparents still lived, to teach high school history for four years.

But Kate wasn’t done yet—she went back to school once more. She graduated from the University of Tennessee College of law and went on to practice law for 35 years, all in Nashville. Her legal career started in estate planning, moved through commercial litigation, and eventually settled in employment law. She worked at three firms over 22 years, then spent four years in-house with a Nashville-based company (which she quickly realized wasn’t for her), and eventually transitioned to working independently as a contract attorney for Vanderbilt University and her former law firm, and a contract employment investigator for the company she had just left. That phase of her career came at a time when she appreciated the flexibility and variety of contract work that she could tackle on her own terms.