Lauri E Cleary

Personal

Lauri Cleary is a trial lawyer who helps businesses, employers, and individuals navigate difficult issues and resolve disputes in and out of the courtroom throughout Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Lauri negotiates and litigates employment, commercial, real estate, professional responsibility and white-collar criminal defense cases in the trial and appellate courts.

Clients interviewed by leading legal directory Chambers USA call her “a great litigator who isn’t afraid to fight—she can be charming or forceful depending on what the situation calls for,” and noting that her “ability to see the entire battlefield has been a tremendous asset. She sees how pieces on the board will be moving.” Lauri’s three decades of commercial litigation and white collar criminal defense experience allow her to envision multiple paths to achieving her clients’ goals. Her common sense and intellectual curiosity drive her desire to understand and advocate for her clients’ interests.

She helps businesses and their owners assert and defend claims related to contracts, real estate and eminent domain, corporate and joint venture issues, non-competes, and other commercial matters. She also advises and defends management in all manner of employment matters, including litigation, such as discrimination and wage-hour claims. Religious organizations rely on Lauri to handle a wide range of matters related to their religious and educational operations, real estate holdings, and tax-exempt status, including cases involving First Amendment religious freedoms. Lauri represents individuals who are witnesses, subjects, or targets of white-collar criminal investigations and defends prosecutions in state and federal courts. Lauri also represents lawyers and others facing professional responsibility complaints.

As one client said, Lauri is “100% committed to [my] best interests.” She listens intently, probing so she really gets to know each person and problem. In difficult times, her clients appreciate Lauri’s gentle wit and the feeling that she will take care of them.

A past president of Maryland’s largest local bar association, the 2,500-member Bar Association of Montgomery County, and past president of the Montgomery County Bar Foundation, Lauri is well-known to lawyers and judges across the state. She has successfully litigated trial and appellate cases before state and federal courts and administrative agencies throughout Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. She is a founding member of the Cole-Davidson Appellate Inn of Court, and a permanent member of the Judicial Conference of the Fourth Circuit, a sustaining Fellow of the Maryland Bar Foundation, and serves on the Alumni Board of the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law.

Lauri is a lifelong resident of Montgomery County who tries to make time to become a more proficient pianist, horseback rider, and golfer. She is a parishioner at Our Lady of Mercy in Potomac.