Meet Mark Griffin, Cleveland’s law director - cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Late last year, Mark Griffin found himself on the shortlist for two prestigious jobs: inspector general for the city of Chicago, and law director for the city of Cleveland.

Griffin chose Cleveland.

He’s now serving as Mayor Justin Bibb’s chief legal counsel and law director, advising him on legal aspects of policy and managing a 100-person staff that functions as the city’s in-house law firm.

The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com is profiling Griffin and others in Bibb’s cabinet so readers can get to know Cleveland’s new class of top decision-makers.

Part of what sold Griffin on the job was Bibb’s vision for change.

“I had no interest in working for a mayor who wants to manage the decline of a great American city,” Griffin said, recalling his one-on-one interview with Bibb. “So I said to him: ‘If you are not going to be ambitious, I don’t want to work for you.’ And he said: ‘No problem there.’”

Griffin, up until last year, was Cuyahoga County’s inspector general and chief ethics officer, serving as an independent watchdog against waste, fraud and abuse.

But he was well acquainted with local government decades before that.

His grandfather, Burt Wylie Griffin, was made Cleveland city prosecutor in 1925 – a position that, nearly 100 years later, is a key post under Mark Griffin’s domain as law director. His grandfather later became chief judge on the Cleveland Municipal Court and a Cuyahoga Common Pleas judge.

Mark Griffin’s father, Burt W. Griffin, served on the common pleas bench for many years and was appointed in 1963 as one of 15 lawyers on the Warren Commission, tasked with investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Griffin grew up in a political household, going to ward meetings with his father, shaking hands with council members and even running his father’s 1986 re-election bid when he was a young man.

But Griffin described how he found his own path into public service -- a path less rooted in a family legacy than in the two years he served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, working on community development in Cameroon.

“Peace Corps was a really formative experience for me. It was two years in villages with no running water and nothing but trying to be helpful, trying to serve,” Griffin said.

After that, “I knew that I wanted to combine my law degree with service of some kind,” Griffin said.

Griffin, 58, has three grown children. He intends to move from his suburban home into Cleveland --potentially the Shaker Square area -- within the next few months.

He earned his law degree from Case Western Reserve University and his master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where Griffin was co-chair of the school’s student government and had a brief meet-and-greet on a rainy Boston sidewalk with a young Barack Obama, also a student at the time.

Prior to Harvard, Griffin served as a research assistant in British Parliament’s House of Commons, and he fenced competitively, earning a silver medal at the 1986 National Fencing Championships and a spot on the U.S. team at the 1983 World Junior Fencing Championships.

After Griffin returned home to Cleveland from school, he worked on various campaigns, including John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, Ted Strickland’s 2006 gubernatorial bid, and Obama’s 2008 presidential bid.

In between campaigns, he was an attorney from 1994 to 2015, including 10 years at Hahn Loeser & Parks.

Corporate law didn’t turn out to be his passion.

He took the county inspector general job in 2015 and served there through the end of 2021, providing independent oversight during a tumultuous time in which he helped investigate contract-steering and mismanagement in the jail.

Griffin said he moved to the city job because it’s an opportunity to make more of an impact, whether through something relatively small, like revoking a liquor license for a bar that’s causing problems for neighbors, or something major, like implementing police reform on behalf of voters who supported Issue 24.

“It’s just one thing after another and every issue makes a difference in people’s lives. Everything we do here matters to people,” Griffin said. “When I was in my 20s, I hoped that my career would end up in a place like this.”

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source: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/02/meet-mark-griffin-clevelands-law-director.html

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