Grace Grimes - Philadelphia, PA

Grace C. Grimes was a top student – she won “best performance” in six of her law school courses — and became the first-ever president of her nationally recognized trial team at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University.

But she has done much more: a mock trial coach, a law school teaching assistant, an instructor of constitutional law to high school students, a classroom assistant for blind students in Ghana, an intern with a criminal defense organization, a singer, an actor and a pianist.

Grimes, who worked at Kline & Specter for more than a year and a half providing litigation support as a law clerk before becoming an attorney with the firm, focuses her current practice on medical malpractice and catastrophic injury litigation.

As a student at Kline Law, Grimes won the CALI Excellence for the Future Award for Best Student Performance for coursework in Evidence; Advanced Trial Advocacy: Law and Medicine; Advanced Trial Advocacy: Trials of the Century; Education Law; Legal Methods II; and Introduction to Trial Advocacy. She was also given the award for the top student in the Civil Litigation & Dispute Resolution concentration.

Grimes won the Kline & Specter Award for Exceptional Advocacy given to the graduating student who demonstrates outstanding performance as a member of the Kline Law Trial Team. As competitor and inaugural president of the trial team, Grimes won the prestigious Texas Young Lawyers Association’s regional trial competition in 2021 and 2022 and the Best Advocate award in 2021. Her team also was a quarterfinalist in the national competition in 2021.

As an individual, Grimes competed in 2022 in the Top Gun competition, an invitation-only contest for the nation’s 16 best individual mock trial advocates. She currently serves as a coach of the trial team at Kline Law and works with students in trial advocacy and evidence to prepare them for national mock trial competitions.

As a law student, Grimes was an assistant to two law school professors teaching Trial Advocacy, and she was a Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project Fellow instructing a course in constitutional law to high school students at the Philadelphia Military Academy, where she also coached students for the annual moot court competition.

Grimes earned her bachelor’s degree at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University. While there, she also studied abroad at the University of Ghana, where she held an internship at The Ghana Blind Union, helping blind and visually impaired students improve computer literacy and presentation skills.

While in law school, Grimes was an intern for Philadelphia VIP, a group that helps find lawyers to provide free legal services to low-income residents who face legal threats to their housing, family and income. She also interned with the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which provides legal services to 70 percent of people arrested on criminal charges in the city.

As an undergraduate, Grimes worked with the ASU Foundation raising funding for scholarships, student clubs and organizations, faculty programs, research and athletics, while she also had acting roles in training videos used to help organizations at Arizona State raise charitable funds.

Grimes was in the Honors Choir, singing first soprano, at ASU. She has also performed in the theater and has played piano since a child, an endeavor about which she says: “It is my passion, second only to trial advocacy.”