Lawyer Bio : R. Michael Leonard

Since joining Womble Carlyle in 1986, Mike Leonard has played a major role in creating and managing the Firm's litigation support system and assisting major national clients in managing, tracking and controlling document productions and privilege logs in a large number of cases in numerous jurisdictions. Mike has also worked in utilizing voluntary conservation easements and sales or voluntary donations of land for conservation purposes to assist developers, or other landowners, in meeting financial and other goals for the use of their land.

In the litigation area, Mike has managed complex document production in over 100 cases and assisted in the preparation for numerous trials and depositions in multiple jurisdictions across the country. He has particular depth of experience in organizing, instructing and supervising teams of paralegals and contract attorneys in database preparation, the location and dissemination of information and tracking and managing productions in litigation where documents have been produced in numerous cases and various jurisdictions over time spans as long as ten years or more. The projects on which he has worked have involved managing teams as small as three to six paralegals and lawyers, to highly complex cases in which he has been responsible for supervising over 150 paralegals and contract lawyers.

In each of these projects, Mike's primary goal in establishing a litigation support system is never the system itself, but the ability to serve the client's best interests by producing key information at the key time with the greatest cost-efficiency.

In the area of conservation-oriented land use development, Mike has negotiated or facilitated transactions with businesses and individuals involving numerous tracts ranging form twelve to twelve thousand acres in Alabama, North Carolina and other Southeastern states. All of this work has been done with owners on a voluntary basis utilizing either donations or sales of land, and Mike has been retained by several landowners to assist them in negotiating land transactions which balance development and conservation. He has been nationally recognized by the Chevron Corporation, the Conservation Fund and the Nature Conservancy for his conservation initiatives, and he works with landowners, developers and land organizations to achieve mutually beneficial results.