Conversations with accomplished lawyers and the leaders who shape their field.
Episode 05
Baltimore’s Attorney,
Fighting for Her City.
A month ago, on a Saturday afternoon, I sat down with the Baltimore City Solicitor, Ebony Thompson. She is the first woman and first openly gay person to hold the role in the city’s nearly 300‑year history. We talked for about an hour. Cited Authorities episode five is out today.
If you only have five minutes, here is what stays with me.
She started in the same office she now runs. Through a Baltimore public-school program called Law Links, Thompson interned at the City Law Department as a teenager. Today she signs the department’s pleadings.
She studied economics at Brown and joined the Marine Corps Reserve. Boot camp first, on the enlisted side. Then Officer Candidate School, where she finished first in her class.
On September 11, 2001, she was working at UBS in Midtown Manhattan. She was good at wealth management. People kept telling her she was good at it. Watching the towers come down on that tragic day, she asked herself one question: is this something I would be willing to die for? She already knew the answer. She did not go back.
She went to law school in her thirties. After a successful real estate career, she was unsure whether law school in her early thirties was the right call. A friend at Harvard told her, “God willing, in three years you’ll be 33 anyway. But if you go to law school, you’ll have your law degree.” She took the LSAT right after hearing that advice, and followed her calling to be an attorney.
Eight years at Venable. Then Jim Shea called. Shea had just come out of retirement after 22 years as Venable’s chairman to serve as City Solicitor under Mayor Scott, a two-year term he had taken to build the next generation. He asked her to be his deputy. She told him she had three kids in private school and would need a year to plan. He gave her a year. When Shea’s term concluded, Mayor Scott named her his successor. The charter’s ten-year bar requirement left her about a year short, so she served as Acting Solicitor before her unanimous confirmation in January 2024.
She put more than 228,000 city properties on a blockchain. Not because blockchain was fashionable. Because Baltimore had been carrying as many as 16,000 vacant houses, now under 12,000, each one changing hands several times before it returned to use, with title searches reaching back fifty years. Recording each deed on a blockchain creates a permanent record that can be added to but not altered.
She fought her insurer over IVF. Her three daughters are the result of an eight-year process. The insurer denied coverage because she had not first tried to conceive with a male partner. She wrote the check, and now does pro bono work for those who cannot.
“God willing, in three years you’re gonna be 33 anyway. But if you go to law school, you’ll have your law degree.”
Thompson’s friend, when graduating from Harvard, prompting Thompson to follow her dream and go to law school.
Thanks for reading.
Alexander Powell, Host of Cited Authorities