OUR TEAM

Carter makes businesses hum.

As senior vice president and innovation leader for MWAccel and innovation counsel for McGuireWoods LLP, Carter helps clients get a grip on their legal operations. She has 20-plus years of know-how ensuring companies, legal departments and law firms succeed, leading and managing essential projects to quick, efficient, under-budget completion. Carter works with in-house legal departments, as well as client teams within McGuireWoods, to create collaborative approaches to managing their relationships in the delivery of legal services.

For example, Carter helps legal departments realign their internal teams. She assesses resources, workloads, skill gaps and duplicative work to identify capacity issues within in-house legal teams and recommends and executes solutions for right-sourcing work. She advises legal departments on strategy and identifies ways to shift from an ops-focused approach to one that integrates into legal departments’ broader business strategies, pinpointing areas on which to focus and adding value to the business decision-making process. Carter also assists legal department leaders in identifying when work is appropriate to delegate internally and/or to outside counsel, preparing business cases for changes to organizational structures and strategizing on how and when to grow legal departments.

Carter previously was a McGuireWoods debt finance partner who represented some of the world’s largest financial institutions in structuring, negotiating and documenting syndicated, club and single-lender senior credit facilities. Her decadelong experience running deal teams to close complex transactions prepared her for the evolution of her career with MWAccel.

Carter also led the firm’s ClientSync team. ClientSync is a proprietary legal project management program used to advance and tailor the firm’s services to clients’ specific business needs. Yellow Belt-certified in Legal Lean Sigma and Project Management, her skills add value by ensuring accurate and transparent budgeting, right-sized staffing and targeted technology use.

Carter is a member of McGuireWoods’ Practice Innovation Office, a team of lawyers and administrative professionals that evaluates, recommends and pilots novel approaches to serving clients related to the practice of law and examines new approaches regarding the firm’s operations around the business of law.

She serves as the pro bono co-coordinator for McGuireWoods’ Charlotte office and sits on the board of Supportive Housing Communities Inc. She also serves on the board of the Charlotte Legal Initiative to Mobilize Businesses (CLIMB), a newly formed nonprofit legal services provider. Carter’s honors include the Distinguished Pro Bono Service Award from the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, the Council for Children’s Rights and Legal Aid of North Carolina.

Carter earned her B.A., with honors and distinction, from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she was a Phi Beta Kappa member. She graduated, with honors, from the University of North Carolina School of Law, serving as managing editor of the North Carolina Law Review.