When Michele Coleman Mayes was 11 years old, she stood up in front of her family and made a declaration: “I’m going to be a lawyer!” She admits that even though Perry Mason was 100 percent the driving force behind this decision, she never wavered.

Thanks to an aunt who had friends in law, Mayes got an early taste of the legal world. During undergraduate school at the University of Michigan, she worked part-time at Legal Aid, a non-profit dedicated to providing legal services to low-income individuals, and spent a summer working at a law firm as a gopher. By the time she entered law school, Mayes thought she had a good idea of what law was all about.