Meet the Founder
Leigh Haas is a seventh generation Mississippian and the Founder and CEO of Mockingbird Land Services.
Her career began in Mississippi politics before moving into energy and infrastructure, where she spent more than fifteen years across land and right of way, workforce strategy and deployment, stakeholder engagement, and project execution. Her work has supported more than 200 companies across more than 40 states, spanning natural gas pipelines, electric transmission, renewable energy, utilities, broadband, and large scale industrial development.
That experience gave Haas a practical understanding of what happens between an infrastructure plan and actual execution. Land rights, stakeholder pressure, regulatory requirements, and field conditions rarely stay in separate lanes for long.
Her training in Human Performance shapes how she evaluates decision making, communication, operating conditions, accountability, and the systems that influence project outcomes.
Through Mockingbird, Haas brings those disciplines together around one question: what has to happen for the work to actually move?
She also writes and speaks about the forces reshaping American energy and infrastructure, including data center growth, workforce capacity, critical minerals, rising energy demand, and the execution gap between capital commitment and construction.
Haas’s family roots on the Mississippi Gulf Coast reach back to 1719, nearly a century before Mississippi became a state. Generations of her family worked in public service, utilities, land development, construction, transportation, and industry.
She grew up around dirt, heavy machinery, and the consequences of whether work was done correctly.
After building a national energy career, Haas built Mockingbird on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and named the company after the state bird.
The name carries more than a Mississippi reference. The mockingbird is claimed by several states and owned by none of them. It recognizes individual threats, defends its territory year round, and sings from a visible perch.
Haas knew those instincts long before she had a company.
Mississippi talks often about brain drain, workforce development, and the need to bring experienced people home while pursuing major energy and infrastructure investment. Haas built a national career across the same industries Mississippi was working to attract and expand.
Mississippi says it wants that experience.
Haas has spent her career watching what happens when plans reach private land, local government, field conditions, and the people who have to live with the result. Mississippi shaped that understanding long before it became part of her professional work.
Mississippi made her before any company, position, or client did.