Leigha Hanby Weaves Agility and Theater into Law

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Leigha Hanby has built her legal career around two major themes: subject matter agility and the dramatic art of storytelling.

As senior corporate counsel at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Hanby says that lawyers must flexible and be open to professional growth. When their accomplishments become their professional identities, they run the risk of self-limiting.

“(At Dick’s Sporting Goods) the business has developed in an area that, fortunately, has allowed me to expand my area of practice within this company and to use my strengths,” she says.

In a company that assigns sports metaphors to its associates, customers, and operational strategy, Hanby is the utility infielder of the legal department. Her litigation background has fostered an openness that’s become an asset to her career.

“The answer to the question, ‘Have you done this before?’ rarely needs to be ‘yes’,” Hanby says. “It needs to be something more along the lines of, ‘I can, and this is how I would approach it.’”

Starting at Dick’s with just three lawyers on her team, she quickly learned that adaptability is essential. “On a smaller team, you have to avoid staying stagnant in your career growth and development,” Hanby says.

The other overarching cornerstone of Hanby’s career is theater. As an undergraduate at Duquesne University, Hanby double majored in theater and psychology. She is as passionate about her transition from her theater and psychology background as she is about her accomplishments as an attorney.

“I think of trial as theater,” she says. “We develop the story through depositions and discovery, craft its components through pretrial practice, and highlight key elements with themes. The goal is to create a coherent narrative that can bring a dense or unfamiliar topic to life in a way that the jury and judge can relate to and understand.”  

Outside counsel have seen Hanby’s ability to roll with the punches and finesse compelling trial narratives firsthand. “Leigha is comfortable being uncomfortable,” says Brendan Ryan, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis. “She embraces the unknown and rolls up her sleeves to solve problems. Plus, she has great trial instincts. Whether writing a brief or examining a witness, she knows how to craft stories that resonate. She’s everything you’d want in an in-house partner, and then some.”

Originally hired as corporate counsel in Dick’s real estate group, dealing with lease administration, construction, and facilities, Hanby’s portfolio has expanded to include general litigation matters, including real estate, regulatory, and consumer complaints.

Her key focus is co-tenancy, a leasehold right negotiated between parties to ensure the quality of a real estate asset. “It’s a tiered rent structure by which tenants pay full rent if certain conditions are met,” Hanby says. At roughly 50,000 square feet, Dick’s stores are generally considered anchors at shopping centers and malls.

“The answer to the question, ‘Have you done this before?’ rarely needs to be ‘yes.’ It needs to be something more along the lines of, ‘I can, and this is how I would approach it.’”

Leigha Hanby

Hanby started her legal career at Goehring, Rutter and Boehm (GRB), a midsized regional law firm in Pittsburgh. While still a student at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, she clerked at GRB before joining the firm full-time. She supported several areas at the firm, honing her skills in litigation, real estate transactions, family law, estates and trusts, and municipal law.

“That was a great learning opportunity to cut my teeth in all these subject matter areas,” Hanby remembers. GRB’s smaller size allowed her to be an integral part of an “old-school law firm culture with a very collegial atmosphere.” In 2016, she transitioned to Dick’s.

Many lawyers mistakenly assume moving in-house limits their trial experience, Hanby says. That’s not true at Dick’s.

For instance, in October 2024, Hanby tried and resolved a twelve-year dispute in Florida’s Southern District in which the company claimed a mall owner tortiously interfered with a sublease between Dick’s and Sears, resulting in loss of revenue.

During COVID-19, Hanby engaged in constant negotiations with Dick’s landlords. Like other retailers, Dick’s was forced to shutter its stores.

“We had to organize around understanding where we could operate, when we could reopen, and when we were obligated to pay rent,” Hanby says. “We have great lease language, and much of our portfolio allowed us to exercise our co-tenancy rights. Unlike many other retailers, many of our leases have express abatement language, so in the majority of instances, we worked collaboratively with our landlords to come up with a negotiated resolution.”

Hanby embodies supportive leadership at Dick’s, where she supervises a legal analyst and interns. “People do their best work when they feel trusted to have agency over their area of responsibility, when they have influence to effect improvements to their work and when they are given grace to make mistakes as they grow,” Hanby says.

When working with legal interns, Hanby gives them uplifting messages and urges them to have faith in themselves. “I remind them that their core attributes and strengths brought them to this place,” she says, “there is no reason to do anything but to trust that those elements of their identity will serve them well in the future.”

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