She was attending the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law in Montgomery, Alabama, when her husband's death forced her to discontinue her legal education.

Early in her council career, she led the opposition to a proposed facility for burning petroleum-contaminated oil near downtown Mobile.

[10] In the Alabama Senate, Figures serves as the chairwoman of the Education and Mobile County Local Legislation Committees.

[1] In the legislature, Figures may be best known as the perennial sponsor of a bill to ban smoking in indoor, public places statewide in Alabama.

[11] Figures was also instrumental in the passage of economic incentives that were critical in the location of a Thyssen-Krupp steel plant near Mobile.

[19] She proposed an amendment outlawing vasectomies, arguing that "there’s no law on the books anywhere in this country that mandate[s] what a man can and can’t do with his body, yet for us there are a number of them.

Why would you put all those lives at risk for something that can wait?”[21] In 2021, Davis Figures' house in Toulminville, Alabama, was attacked by an unknown assailant.