Meet Shelley Smith, a City Solicitor With 200 Pairs of Shoes
It’s not easy being in the shoes of Shelley Smith, who has served as Philadelphia’s city solicitor for the past eight months.
For one thing, they’re size 11, and she’s got 200 pairs—50 of them ready for action in a closet in her municipal office. For another, she’s got a tough job to do: “Smith, 43, a Villanova Law School graduate with a penchant for quoting Fred Flintstone, commands a $60 million-a-year department that includes 152 lawyers and 173 support staff,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports in a lengthy column. Although Smith is new to the city solicitor position, she has worked in the office for 13 years and, immediately prior to taking the helm, was an in-house lawyer at Peco Energy.
At one point, the city solicitor’s office had some 30,000 open cases. Among them, Smith’s oversight responsibility includes, to name just one high-profile case, a grand jury report finding that the city’s Department of Human Services isn’t doing enough to protect the city’s 28,000 or so at-risk children. Its investigation was sparked by the controversial case of two parents who are accused of killing their disabled teenage daughter, Danieal Kelly, through neglect.
Meanwhile, she also earns her $175,000 annual salary by hiring the right attorneys—they start at $49,000, so finding them can be a challenge—overseeing labor contracts and avoiding unnecessary political battles.
So to make life a bit simpler, she comes into the office in flats and, once she carries a pair of dress shoes to match her outfit into work, leaves it there at the end of the day.
A large part of her role is being a cheerleader, she says, and, while she loves her job, she needs to use her time efficiently to be effective.
“I feel passionate about what I do,” she tells the newspaper, which notes that she didn’t make the squad back in the day when she was a high school student. “This is an easy cheerleading assignment, even for someone like me, who wasn’t peppy enough to put on a short skirt, wave pom-poms in the air, and do splits.”
Updated at 12:26 p.m. to clarify that the profile of Smith appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
