Winston College of Law graduate Virginia Pirkle (’25) developed an awareness of and interest in healthcare-related issues early in life, having grown up in a family of healthcare professionals. Her father is a doctor and her mother worked for many years as a pharmacist.
Pirkle majored in healthcare administration as an undergrad, expecting to pursue a career in that field. However, topics she explored during her coursework began to shift her attention from administration toward regulation and compliance.
“I realized that I really had an interest in the legal side of things in the healthcare world,” Pirkle says. “So I came to law school with the intention of hopefully practicing healthcare law.”
She entered Winston Law in the fall of 2022. The following year, she also enrolled in the Health Policy Graduate Certificate program, jointly offered through Winston Law, the College of Nursing, and the Department of Public Health in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. Two courses that aligned particularly well with Pirkle’s career path were Healthcare Fraud and Abuse, and Healthcare Finance and Organization.
“After already having a summer or two under my belt at the place where I’m going to be working, I was able to take these courses and see lots of overlap with the things we were learning and the things that I would actually be doing,” Pirkle says.
In addition to summer internships with Holland & Knight, Pirkle gained other valuable experience outside the classroom. She served as a 2L staff editor and 3L copy editor for Tennessee Law Review, and a 2L staff editor and 3L marketing and solicitations editor for Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law. She was also a member of several student organizations.
“Probably my favorite thing that I had the chance to do was to serve as the president of the Health Law Society,” she says. “I was really glad to serve in that role, because it gave me the chance to lead with like-minded people who also had a strong interest in healthcare law. We put on several great events in the past two years to bring in healthcare attorneys to come speak to us, and to learn from them what it’s like to practice in that field.”
Other highlights came during Pirkle’s final semester of law school. As part of her Health Policy Graduate Certificate, she completed a preceptorship at the UT Medical Center. Working with the compliance and legal department there, Pirkle helped revise the medical center’s internal conflicts of interest policy.
And in April, she and fellow 3L students Taylor Roswall and Alyssa Ward traveled to Chicago to participate in the 2025 L. Edward Bryant, Jr. National Health Law Transactional Competition at Loyola University School of Law. Pirkle enjoyed getting to apply her skills in a real-world scenario similar to what she would encounter in her work. The experience was especially positive since the team placed first out of 20 schools—a significant achievement.
Pirkle credits Zack Buck, associate dean for faculty development and professor of law, for readying the team for competition, and for all the ways his teaching helped her succeed in law school.
“Professor Buck is wonderful; he has by far been my favorite professor in law school,” she says. “He has taught me so much about the law in general, and has prepared me for future practice.”
With her JD from Winston Law, Pirkle leaves for Nashville, where she joins the firm of Holland & Knight as a healthcare regulatory and enforcement associate.