A legal champion for people at their lowest moments
When people ask how I became a family lawyer, I usually start with my parents. I was raised mostly by my mother and grandmother. My mother was an immigrant who knew nothing about the United States legal system and was terrified, which is why I never took education for granted. I learned very early what it looked like when someone believed they had no options and what parental conflict looks like from a child’s perspective, even how it manifests itself in inconspicuous ways. From a young age, life required me to be a defender. Even as a child, I learned to speak up for people, argue on their behalf, and protect them. Long before I understood what a lawyer was, I was forced into advocacy.
I did not take a straight line into this work. I began my career in commercial litigation at Blank Rome LLP. But family law kept pulling at me, because it was the one area that felt personal. I understood, from the inside, what was at stake for the people sitting across from me. I had the emotional intelligence to support clients through the worst moments of their lives, and the lawyering skills to learn the intricacy of the rules and represent them strategically. The combination felt very familiar.
Becoming a parent changed my practice again. Until then, I understood these cases through the eyes of a child. Afterward, I understood them as a parent too, and that dual perspective reshaped how I advocate. I am a trial lawyer, and I am comfortable fighting hard for my clients. But since becoming a mother, my work has become far more child focused because children do not choose their parents’ conflicts and should never become the casualties of them, which is why I often push for out-of-court settlements.
Today my work spans matrimonial litigation in state court and international child abduction cases in federal court, where I represent parents seeking the return of children who have been wrongfully taken across borders. Those cases sit at the extreme end of what parental conflict can become, and the stakes for the child are impossible to look away from. Whether I am handling a custody trial, division of assets, a Hague Convention petition, or even a prenuptial agreement, the work asks for the same two things at once: the emotional steadiness to guide people through the worst moments of their lives, and the discipline to make sound judgment calls that ultimately shape the future of the case. I am grateful to be trusted as an advocate during one of the hardest times in most people’s lives.
