AGE: 35
POSITION: Partner, Nixon Peabody LLP
RESIDENCE: Cranston
LIFELONG AMBITION: To write and publish a novel
FAVORITE BOOK: “The Lovely Bones,” by Alice Sebold
GUILTY PLEASURE: To lie on Westerly beach and read People magazine
Early on in her career, Stacie Collier learned to empathize with those in less fortunate circumstances than her own, when she worked summers during college assisting applicants for unemployment benefits for the R.I. Department of Labor and Training. Those experiences inform her work today, as a partner with Nixon Peabody LLP in the firm’s labor and employment practice.
She had that summer job because her father worked within the labor movement for most of his professional life. “While I went on to become a management-side labor lawyer,” she said in her 40 Under Forty application, “I believe he laid a foundation for me to be interested in the topic. … My work with the state … gave me an insight into the inner workings of a governmental agency, and again an appropriate sensitivity for its constituency.”
She uses that perspective when providing preventative counseling to her clients, to help them avoid litigation in the first place, while improving their employee morale and increasing worker retention. Along those lines, she has conducted hundreds of harassment prevention and training seminars throughout the country.
And as with so many of the 40 Under Forty honorees, she takes giving back to the community seriously. She is the chair of the Capital City Community Centers Board of Directors; the organization operates multiple facilities in Providence neighborhoods to serve the city’s disadvantaged with family- and community-centered programs.
She takes on a pro bono load that has included an individual who believed she was being sexually harassed while volunteering at a nonprofit.
And she was a part of the “re-founding” effort of the Rhode Island Business Group on Health (it first came into being in the mid-1980s). It is an organization that is dedicated to creating a shared vision on health care in the state, while nurturing a dialog between the business community and state government on the topic, with an eye to enhancing the health of the state’s citizens and helping the competitive standing of its businesses.
And she proud of the fact that at the moment she was elected to partnership at Nixon Peabody in February of last year, she was eight months pregnant with her first child.
