When she was young, her mother used to joke that she’d grow up to be a lawyer because she liked to argue. But that wasn’t quite right.

“I didn’t want to argue,” she says now. “I wanted to understand the rules. I wanted to be in the room when decisions were made.”

After attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, that curiosity led her to law school at the University of Louisville, where she found herself drawn not to courtroom drama, but to the quiet, consequential work of estate planning. “My favorite classes were Real Property and Decedent’s Estates—dead people’s property,” she says with a laugh. “That’s when I knew.”

After graduating, she returned to her hometown of Arlington, Virginia, with three young children and opened her own law practice. Her very first case? Her own divorce. “I won,” she says plainly. But the experience would shape more than just her career—it would change how she viewed the legal system, and what clients truly needed from it.

Like many estate planning attorneys, she began her career billing by the hour. “I was a transactional attorney,” she explains. “My days were spent drafting documents and tracking time in six-minute increments.”

As her expertise grew, so did her rate—eventually reaching $625 an hour. “At that point, clients didn’t want a relationship,” she says. “They wanted me to work as fast as possible and interact with them as little as possible.”

The problem? Life doesn’t work that way.

Clients hesitated to call when something changed—a new baby, a divorce, a business venture—because they were afraid of the bill. “They’d think, ‘Is this worth a $300 phone call?’” she says. “So they stayed quiet.”

That silence had consequences. “An estate plan is only as good as how current it is,” she explains. “And many of those plans were outdated almost as soon as they were signed.”

Even when clients did reach out, service was slow. As a solo practitioner—and later, the only estate expert at a larger firm—she was also the paralegal, secretary, and file clerk. “I learned a lot,” she says, “but it wasn’t a model that served clients well.”

The consequences of that system became painfully personal when her grandmother developed dementia.

“She had spent about $3,000 on an estate plan and truly believed she’d protected her family,” she says. “But when her health declined, everything unraveled.”

Without the right documents properly implemented—or updated—the family ended up in court. A guardian and conservator were appointed. “A stranger was making decisions about her care,” she says. “It was expensive, emotionally draining, and devastating for our family.”

At first, she assumed malpractice. Then she realized the truth. “This wasn’t an exception,” she says. “It was standard operating procedure.”

Clients signed documents they didn’t fully understand, filed them away, and never looked at them again. “That was the estate planning experience,” she says. “Transactional. Detached. And almost guaranteed to fail.”

So she did something rare: she walked away from it.

She reopened her firm with a clear mission—to revive the Personal Family Lawyer model, where estate planning is not a one-time transaction, but an ongoing relationship.

The first change was eliminating hourly billing entirely for estate planning. “Nothing we do is billed by the hour,” she says. “Everything is flat fee, agreed to in advance—and clients even choose their fee.” However, she adds that they still do hourly billing for interventions and probate because the courts are involved, and they cannot anticipate how much time the courts will require.

Initial planning typically ranges from $2,000 to $8,000, depending on family circumstances. “There are no surprises,” she says. “And after that, clients can opt into membership plans to keep everything up to date.”

The second difference is staffing. “We have a team,” she explains. “So if you’re standing at the bank and need to know how to title an account, someone answers the phone.”

And if a question requires her direct input? “We schedule a call,” she says. “Prepared on both sides. No phone tag.”

Perhaps the most meaningful shift is philosophical.

“Estate planning isn’t just about money,” she says. “It’s about family wealth—and that includes memories, values, and stories.”

After her father died, she realized what had been lost. “He didn’t leave money, but more importantly, he didn’t leave a record of himself,” she says. “I don’t remember his voice. I can’t recover those memories.”

Now, every client is guided through a process to pass on intellectual, spiritual, and human assets alongside financial ones. “Families love it,” she says. “It becomes a keepsake, not just a legal file.”

As a mother, she brings a deeply personal perspective to her work. “You won’t be the one who benefits from your estate plan,” she says. “The people you love will.”

That belief defines her firm’s ideal client—someone who wants more than documents. “This is for people who want to leave behind clarity, care, and peace,” she says. “And to keep their families out of court and out of conflict.”

In an industry slow to change, she’s proving that estate planning can be human again—rooted not in billable hours, but in relationships that last a lifetime.

And as for her own children, they are in many ways following in their mother’s footsteps: “Our eldest daughter attended the University of Pittsburgh on a full scholarship; our youngest daughter and our son attended the United States Military Academy. Both are now active duty Army officers in the Corps of Engineers.