When Amy Harris learned in 2014 that UMB was hiring an in-house litigator, she leapt at the chance to work at the bank.
An associate at a law firm in Kansas City, Missouri, Harris enjoyed the courtroom. But she wanted a change from law-firm life. Plus, she added, "Those in-house litigation positions are kind of few and far between."
She continued to bring cases to court after joining UMB, but the bank's general counsel asked her to take on special projects alongside her litigation work. It culminated in a request to oversee how the bank's legal team could incorporate new technologies.
"I really loved it," she said. But she also realized she could not maintain her litigation practice alongside the operations work.
The general counsel invited Harris to research and pitch a new role: legal operations manager. A few months later, she outlined the idea directly to bank CEO Mariner Kemper, who agreed on the spot. She started the new position in January 2020.
A year later, as the general counsel was nearing retirement, she was asked if she was interested in becoming chief legal officer, the job she holds today.
Harris still contributes legal work for UMB. She played a critical role, for example, in the bank's ability to close on its acquisition this year of Denver-based Heartland Financial USA. But for her, the most rewarding aspect of her job is managing people, a skill she honed with the help of mentors at the bank.
"I really tried to spend a lot of time with people that I respected as managers outside of the legal field," Harris said. They included UMB's chief HR officer and chief credit officer.
Harris originally went to college to study musical theater. After realizing she was unlikely to achieve fame and was uninterested in teaching, she switched to political science and minored in music.
After graduating, she worked on political campaigns. "I really loved it, but the lifestyle was super hard," she said.
She turned to law school and moved to Kansas City to work as a law clerk, a common first step for aspiring litigators.
In addition to her role at the bank, Harris chairs the board for the Children's Services Fund of Jackson County, an organization that allocates funding to child-focused nonprofits.
She and her husband, Nate, also volunteer for a nonprofit called Lazarus Ministries, which she discovered while working at a homeless kitchen with other women lawyers. Lazarus had a shoe and clothing room, but Harris noticed that no one was taking the shoes.
"So, I asked the executive director one day, what's going on with the shoes?" Harris said. She learned other volunteers were unwilling to help homeless people put them on.
It did not bother her or her husband, who trained as a nurse and an architect. "We sort of became the unofficial shoe couple and we started filling the room up with shoes," Harris said. "It became this really fun thing that we love doing, and we felt like we added special value because not everybody was willing to do it."
