Ashley Brodie has built a successful law practice in Jones County and Middle Georgia, and she attributes that in large part to one habit: hard work.
Brodie, 43, currently has two offices but is working toward adding others, and she is also the county attorney for the Jones County Board of Commissioners.
“I started working when I was 12 in Gray,” Brodie said last week. “I was a hostess up at the old restaurant called Partners. Granddaddy would take me and drop me off. I was a hostess there for probably two years, and then there was this little wing place that opened up.”
She worked there until it closed. At age 16, Brodie went to work at Steak and Shake in Macon, and a year later the manager of Logan’s was eating there and offered a job.
“Then,” Brodie continued, due to her age, “He told me he’d get other people to run my alcohol for me so I could go ahead and start. So, I mean I’ve always been a worker.”
Brodie said there is one person who has influenced her since her early years.
“My mama worked a ton. She’s the hardest working woman I’ve ever known in my life.”
Even today, Brodie noted, Diane Wade, at age 69, is very involved as the owner of Middle Georgia Outdoor Lighting.
“She’s really a force to be reckoned with,” the attorney said. “She started years ago in such a male-dominated industry. She does stadium lighting. She’s built up probably the biggest company in Georgia that does it,” Brodie declared. “She’s such a hard worker that she’s created such a good reputation that people from all over Georgia call.”
Wade’s work ethic led to the beginning of a relationship that few youngsters are able to enjoy.
“She worked two fulltime jobs my whole time growing up,” Brodie recalled. “And so I was with granddaddy all the time. That’s why I was like his little shadow.”
Brodie vividly remembers the times she spent with her grandfather, Weyman Roberts.
“He took me to school every morning. He’d pick me up every day. Then we’d go to Tastee Freeze. Then in the summers, every morning he’d pick me up, and then we’d go to Tastee Freeze or then Hardee’s.
“We’d get a biscuit, and he’d sit in his group with the little old men talking about everything going on in the county. And, you know, it’d be me with this group. And I loved it. I loved every second of it.”
Roberts was a two-term county commissioner, and his granddaughter recalls that well.
“He called me his campaign manager when he ran,” Brodie said with a smile. “I put out signs, and I was only like 9 or 10, but I wrote articles to go in the paper talking about my granddaddy. And what was so cute is when he passed away, we went through his wallet, and one of those articles that I had written in the paper was in his wallet.”
Despite — or perhaps because of — her work habits, Brodie found time to take part in high school athletics.
“I played basketball, softball, and golf,” she shared. “I was the first female golfer on the golf team. We didn’t have a female golf team until I started playing, so that was fun.”
When the 2000 JCHS graduate went to the University of Georgia, nothing changed.
“I did a little bit of everything in college,” she said. “I was a wedding DJ. I was a karaoke DJ on Wednesday night at Wild Wings. I waited tables at the Logan’s in Athens.”
She continued her athletic endeavors there as well. “I played rugby for the University of Georgia,” Brodie confided. “So every year before Georgia plays Florida [in football], my team went down to Jacksonville, and we played their rugby team the day before.”
She said the college sport has a dubious tradition.
“If you score, you’re supposed to shoot the boot. Which means,” she explained, “they pour beer in somebody’s dirty cleat, and you drink it. And everybody cheers and screams ‘cause you scored and you’re shooting the boot. My team did that. I scored a lot, but I never partook in that tradition.”
Brodie graduated after just three years at UGA, going to summer school annually to earn her degree early. She went to law school at Georgia State University and found another way to earn money part-time.
“I wasn’t in Athens anymore to DJ. So that’s when one of my summers, I took a course with Dale Washburn to get my real estate license. So I sold real estate in law school.”
The student did that for almost two years until she passed the bar exam.
Brodie’s first job was with Macon attorney Hale Almand. She said at first she was “his chauffeur more than anything, a brand new attorney.” She recalled one Sunday morning receiving a call from Almand at 6, directing her to drive him to Florida to meet with co-counsel in a pending case.
She noted that her granddaddy was diagnosed with a brain tumor about nine months after she started working with Almand. She accompanied him to the doctor one morning, away from work about two hours. Almand called her in his office and told her she would have to make up those two billing hours.
That upset her. “So I stood up and I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna have my desk cleaned out by this afternoon.’ You didn’t mess with me when it came to my granddaddy,” Brodie declared. “And I went and packed up my stuff and left.”
She said she called veteran attorney and friend Frank Childs and told him what happened.
“I told him I didn’t know what to do now. He said, ‘well, just hang out a shingle.’ So that’s what I did. I opened up an office in Gray in January of ‘08.”
While Brodie was selling real estate, one of her sales was a house to new Jones County Administrator Mike Underwood and his wife, Priscilla. When she first opened her office and had no legal secretary, the Chamber of Commerce sent over a volunteer: Priscilla Underwood. It was a match made in heaven.
“So I ended up hiring Priscilla, and she was with me forever. Forever. She’s like a second mama. I love Priscilla Underwood,” Brodie exclaimed.
About three years after opening her Gray office, Brodie noticed a man in the hall outside the courtroom in Jones County.
“I thought, that guy must be from Atlanta. He’s not an attorney from around her, because he was dressed too good to fit in with us Jones Countians.”
That attorney was Sean Brodie, and the rest is history. Except, there is more.
After dating for about six months, the couple took a trip to New York. A photographer and videographer followed them around the city one day, including a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge Oct. 6, 2011. Sean had a background in video editing, Brodie said.
“They sent him like five hours of just unedited video footage,” Brodie recalled. “And he cut it down into like 15 minutes. And we planned an engagement party.”
That special event was in mid-November, and the invitees arrived in casual attire, Brodie said.
The DJ set up the screen and encouraged everyone to watch, since the couple had gotten engaged.
“And then,” Brodie smiled, “up popped this video of us getting married on the Brooklyn Bridge and going around New York.
“It was cool. It was neat. Everybody was shocked,” she reminisced.
Fourteen years later, the Brodies have two daughters, Beau and Monroe, who will be 10 and 6 this fall. Their maternal great-grandfather, Weyman, passed away before their birth, and they only had a few years with their great-grandmother, Myrtice Roberts, before her death in 2021. Brodie remembers her grandmother as one who loved to dance.
“You could not hold grandma back from a dance floor,” Brodie shared. “She was a dance queen. She would go to the Wagon House and the Old Clinton Opry, and she would close it down. I mean she’d be the last one still out there dancing away when they turned off the music.”
Brodie said she has aspirations to open offices in Savannah and south Atlanta, which will add to her plate that includes county attorney. She replaced Childs, who held that position for decades, in 2019.
“I would not have gotten that job but for Frank’s endorsement,” she stressed. “I mean, I really owe that to him.”
Brodie traces her love for the law in part to her grandfather, who would take her during court week to watch the trials.
“I loved the courtroom,” she acknowledged. “And it was like a game, like, to me, a chess match. ‘All right, how are you going to respond to that?’ What was this one going to do? So, that’s probably when I fell in love.
“I always knew I wanted to be in the courtroom.”
