Erica Wilson

Erica Wilson says she always knew she wanted to be a lawyer, and the seed was planted at age 6, when she argued her church pastor into baptizing her a year early and he told her, “You should be a lawyer.” Seeing Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show reinforced it. Law was a second career: she taught special education while in law school, observed courtrooms on days off and spent one summer building a book of clients before resigning to practice full time.

Erica Wilson describes herself as a litigator who is not afraid to fight. She says many personal injury attorneys lean toward settlement as a preemptive response, while she welcomes opposing counsel who want to take a matter to litigation. Settlement has its place when it meets a client’s needs, but she enjoys the “gamesmanship” of trial — telling a story and creating a visual for a jury or judge. “I like to fight. I love to be in court,” she says.

Wilson points to the case of Hector Madera and Damon Whitfield, two Black truck drivers who walked into a Denny’s near a truck stop in August 2023 asking for service and were instead escorted out by police. The case hit home because her father drove long-haul trucks and her grandfather hauled logs; as a child she rode along and lived out of the truck at stops like that one. She notes Denny’s has a long history of similar discrimination allegations and has not meaningfully addressed it.

When potential clients ask whether she always wins, Wilson answers with a question: “How do you measure a win?” In her first year as a solo practitioner, with a part-time secretary, she faced one of Georgia’s leading family law attorneys in a child support case. The ex-wife sought to impute her client’s income at $500,000; the court set it at $60,000. On paper she lost, but her client got what mattered. If the client’s ultimate objective is met, she says, they won.

Erica Wilson earned her J.D. from Charlotte School of Law in 2013, graduating with Pro Bono Honors and receiving the CALI Award for Appellate Advocacy. She was admitted to the Georgia State Bar in 2014 and is a registered mediator with the Supreme Court of Georgia’s Office of Dispute Resolution. Her undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of South Carolina Aiken, and she holds a Child Protection and Safety certification from Harvard University and completed Yale University’s Women’s Leadership Program.

Wilson is the managing attorney of The Fairness Firm, based in Washington, District of Columbia; the firm’s website is fairnessfirm.com. She founded the Law Office of Erica Wilson, LLC in 2015. Beyond her practice, she serves as a national legal correspondent on Court TV and speaks at conferences, public policy symposia and university events. She is a past president of the DeKalb Lawyers Association, became president of its Community and Education Fund in 2023 and sits on the board of the Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys’ foundation.