McGuireWoods Baltimore office managing partner Ava Lias-Booker has been named The Daily Record’s 2016 list of Maryland’s Top 100 Women and inducted into the Circle of Excellence, an honor exclusive to three-time honorees. The Top 100 Women awards were presented at a reception on April 18.
More than 350 women were nominated for the statewide honor this year. Lias-Booker made the list in 1997 and in 2003 and is one of just 15 three-time winners to be inducted into the Circle this year. The Daily Record launched Maryland’s Top 100 Women in 1996 to recognize outstanding achievement through professional accomplishments, community leadership and mentoring.
Lias-Booker heads McGuireWoods’ Baltimore litigation practice group and is a member of the firm’s board of partners. She represents businesses in complex commercial and civil litigation and has served as lead counsel for Fortune 100 companies in numerous significant cases in Maryland. In 2013 she led a McGuireWoods team that won the largest-ever reversal of monetary damages handed down by a Maryland court — more than $1.5 billion in damages against an oil company — in two cases stemming from a 2006 underground gasoline leak at a service station.
Lias-Booker frequently speaks on litigation, leadership and diversity issues. She received the Trailblazer in Excellence and Diversity Award at the 2015 National Summit of Black Women Lawyers for her career accomplishments and for advancing diversity in the legal profession. She also received the Outstanding State Chair award from The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation last year.
Lias-Booker has served as a member of the Magistrate Judges’ Merit Selection Panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and as a gubernatorial appointee to the Maryland Appellate Judicial Nominating Committee.
Profiles of Lias-Booker and other Top 100 Women honorees have been published on The Daily Record’s website and in a special magazine that will be inserted into the Friday, April 22, edition of the newspaper.