Dara Albright / Dara Albright Media

Brian Dally / Groundfloor

Jim Jones / IRA Services

Roger Quillen / Fisher Phillips   

Roger Quillen is the full-time Chairman and Managing Partner of Fisher Phillips. He is effectively the CEO of an organization with 350 attorneys and an additional support staff of more than 300 people. Roger has continuously led the firm for 15 years. The firm has tripled in size under Roger’s leadership and is consistently recognized as one of the country’s elite labor and employment law firms. Fisher Phillips has been recognized by U.S. News and World Report – Best Lawyers as the “Law Firm of the Year” for Labor and Employment Litigation in 2015 and as the “Law Firm of the Year” for Labor Law – Management for 2016.

The firm has implemented many innovations, including the development of the award-winning Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Leave Calculator App that has been widely praised in the media. Roger has emphasized client service and personally visits 15 clients a year, to hear first-hand about how the firm is performing and to learn if the clients need anything. Roger also helped to develop internal programs to ensure that attorneys and staff across the firm deliver first-rate services to all of the firm’s clients.

Roger has been named one of “The Nation’s 100 Most Powerful Employment Attorneys” by Human Resources Executive Magazine every year since 2009.

Cleaven Stargill / United Tax and Business

Michelle Thompson / Thompson Legacy Law  

My desire to work with individuals and families seeking estate planning and asset protection comes from a very personal place. In my last year of law school, my mom passed away unexpectedly. Losing her was the most disorienting experience of my life.

While experiencing an enormous amount of grief and loss, I was also faced with resolving the complicated legal mess created by the person she trusted with her goals and wishes – her estate lawyer. Even though my Mom had taken steps to get an estate plan in place to ensure her wishes would be fulfilled, the lawyer she had trusted hadn’t taken the time, or perhaps didn’t care enough, to create a plan that would accomplish her goals.

Barry Etra / The RAISE Forum  

Barry Etra came out of the manufacturing world after 25+ years, the last 15 as a senior executive there and got involved in the consulting and funding world. From the debt funding side he got involved in equity; realizing that that world was chaos, he endeavored to create a structure that would help order it, and the RAISE Forum was born. Barry has a BA and an MBA from Columbia and lives in Atlanta.

Darshun Kendrick / Kendrick Law   

Attorney Dar’shun N. Kendrick was born in Atlanta, Georgia to 2 parents that were Georgia entrepreneurs and small business owners. She was raised in South DeKalb, Georgia and graduated from DeKalb County public schools. She received 2 bachelors’ degrees from Oglethorpe University and her law degree from the University of Georgia. While in law school, she was on a Member and Editor of the International and Comparative Law Journal and started the law school’s first ever Business Law Society which prepares law students to practice transactional business law as opposed to business litigation. In August of 2011, she received her Master’s in Business Administration from Kennesaw State University. She is now the owner of Kendrick Law Practice, a private securities law firm that handles legal compliance and investor agreements and negotiations for private placement offerings. She is also certified FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) non-public arbitrator, arbitrator contact disputes between investors and non-public companies.

Jenny Levison / Souper Jenny 

Jennifer Levison is an actress and entrepreneur who is also known in Atlanta as the original “Soup Diva.”

A native of Atlanta, she opened her first restaurant 17 years ago with only two employees and today has four restaurants and a juice bar/vegan lunch spot and employs a staff of 48.

Jenny spends most of her time re-enforcing her mission of hospitality one bowl of soup at a time. She daily strives to be part of the Atlanta community and for each guest to be treated like friends and family.

When she is not slinging soup, Jenny is still an actress and enjoys performing in local theaters. Most recently she was one of two leads in “Calendar Girls” at Georgia Ensemble Theatre.

Jenny’s next goal is to work on her “Tom’s” One for one model of philanthropy and feed hungry families for every meal sold at Souper Jenny.

Kunbi Tinuoye / UrbanGeekz   

Kunbi Tinuoye is an award-winning British-born journalist and broadcaster based in the United States. She is the Founder and CEO of UrbanGeekz.com, a groundbreaking digital news platform focused on technology, science and business.

Tinuoye is a sought after on-air contributor, speaker, panelist, and moderator at conferences across the country. More recently she has appeared on MSNBC & Arise News and facilitated a panel discussion at the Spelman College Leadership and Women of Color Conference.

Tinuoye is a former News Correspondent for NBC’s African American digital news platform theGrio.com. In 2013, she provided commentary as an investigative reporter on the Investigation Discovery hit television series ‘Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall’.

Prior to relocating stateside, Tinuoye was a senior broadcast journalist for the BBC in London. She is an international writer whose work has been published in The Daily Mail, London’s Evening Standard, Ebony.com and The Voice newspaper

For a number of years, Tinuoye served on the Editorial Advisory Board of Cambridge Alumni Magazine (CAM), which is distributed to approximately 150,000 readers globally per edition.

She is one of the original founders of Aspire, a support network for ethnic minority journalists in the United Kingdom. The organization has partnered with and attracted sponsorship from mainstream media outlets, including the BBC, Channel 4, Trinity-Mirror, the Guardian and the Financial Times

Tinuoye graduated from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Social & Political Sciences. She studied a post-graduate in print journalism and is an NCTJ qualified UK professional journalist, with credits in media law and 100 wpm shorthand.

Ovation International Magazine has named Tinuoye one of the 50 most influential Nigerians in the diaspora. She is currently on the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists (AABJ) Development Committee.