Amber Yerkey James

Growing up, Amber James had an inkling that she might want to be a lawyer someday — Perry Mason and Matlock were two of her heroes.

But she also loved music. So after graduating from high school and enrolling at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she pursued that interest, majoring in music.

Amber excelled in her studies, being named as the school’s Most Outstanding Music Student. After receiving her B.A. in 1998, she began working as a private-school music teacher and later as a high school band director.

During her time as a teacher, Amber continued her own education, earning her MBA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2000.

Her longstanding interest in the law beckoned, however, and she decided to pursue that goal by enrolling at Birmingham School of Law in 2003.

In law school, Amber took classes at night while working a full-time job by day in a firm that concentrated on personal injury and Social Security Disability cases.

She realized that those areas of law were not for her, though, and experienced a life-changing turn of fortune when Judge Ralph Alton Ferguson Jr. offered her a job in the Jefferson County Domestic Relations Court.