Tracy’s Professional Experience

Sometimes, the simplest sentence can signal a crisis.

“Please call me when you have a moment.”

I was a young mother, married, working full-time and trying to keep my life together. My mother NEVER intruded. She never asked me to make time for her during the weeknights that were so intense for me at that time. She knew I was doing all I could to get home from work, feed my family, and make that exhausting sprint to my daughter’s bedtime. Her text message was terrifying. Something was really wrong. I called her at once.

“Please call me the minute you get this. This is an emergency. I have a big problem. I need help.”

This was my text to my boss the next morning. I was a good employee at the time and on the cusp of becoming a great lawyer. The two lawyers I worked for were great lawyers. And my family needed a great lawyer and fast. I knew that I could trust them and that they would take my problem and make it their own. They moved mountains for my family that day, dropped everything else they had planned, and focused all their attention on my family and our problem.

My family had a problem that rocked us to our very foundation. I hold back many of the details to respect others’ privacy and because the story does not belong entirely to me. But, I will share with you that this was the most significant time of my life, a time when I have felt truly attacked and frightened by what the future held for me. Fear has a way of helping you cut through the bullshit in your life and blindingly slapping you in the face with what you really care about.

This experience taught me the previously unknowable value of having a really good lawyer. Not just a lawyer with the right education and a shiny office, but a really good lawyer. A really good lawyer stands between you and what someone else is trying to do to you and finds a way to fight back.

I am a lawyer. The law is not an academic exercise for me or a mere means to make a decent living. It is a calling. Lots of lawyers are unhappy lawyers, but I am not one of them. If I ever doubted law was the profession for me, my terrifying, ground-shaking experience with my family showed me that this job is what lights a fire in me, what keeps me awake at night, and what allows me to share my passion with others.

Here’s what I do. I work with people – not companies or interest groups or pieces of paper – but people that have an ALLCAPS PROBLEM. A problem that is frightening, heart-breaking, infuriating, and all-consuming in their lives.

My clients are facing Problems coming from the people closest to them, people who have made that treacherous leap from trusted friend, lover, spouse, or sibling to vicious backstabber.

I meet my clients in the middle of their personal inferno. I don’t give them some pat solution or tell them it’s going to be easy. I find a way to make it work, a way through their personal hell to emerge on the other side maybe a little bruised, a little wiser, but otherwise whole.

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