The POWER List: Vincent Reese

Mickes O’Toole

Growth has been a trend throughout the career of Mickes O’Toole Managing Partner Vincent Reese.

He rose to his current role in 2017, just a year after joining the firm, and by 2019 had increased its staff while managing his own practice.

By 2019, the firm also became minority-owned, and Missouri Lawyers Media recognized Reese in the Diversity & Inclusion Awards for his role in diversifying the firm’s staff. That year, women and people of color made up 70 percent of the firm’s attorneys, 70 percent of its partners and 78 percent of the overall staff.

In 2018, Reese represented the St. Louis Public School District’s Special Administrative Board in a $30,000 settlement against claims that a student was denied his right to alternative education when he was suspended. Plaintiff attorney Luz Maria Henriquez from Legal Services of Eastern Missouri estimated at the time that it was one of the first state law interpretations on disciplined students’ rights to alternative education.

He represented the same board in 2015. A teacher who challenged his employment termination was excluded from the administrative hearing during a child’s testimony of the underlying incident. The Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District reversed and remanded a decision to affirm the termination decision, because the board erred when it excluded the teacher from the room.

Reese graduated from Washington University School of Law in 1999. He began his initial practice in labor and employment law at Lewis Rice, where he rose from associate, then non-equity partner and equity partner as the third Black attorney to do so at the firm. In 2007, his practice evolved into education and school law, the same year he is recorded accepting the St. Louis Public School District as a client for the first time.