Supporting the badge doesn’t mean defending everyone who wears it. I remember the blue dress I wore when I was sworn in as a prosecutor. I was pregnant with my son, JB, and a close family friend who had just been elected to the Court of Appeals administered the oath. I was so damn proud that day. I felt like I was following in my daddy’s footsteps and, in a different way, my uncle’s footsteps too. My father had devoted his career to prosecution. My uncle was a law enforcement

From the road, my office looks like the kind of place where a woman in a pretty dress helps somebody sign a will, explains why the family land cannot simply be “put in all the children’s names,” and then goes home at five o’clock with her desk clean, her emails answered and her nervous system largely intact. It is a very convincing building. Hampton Law Firm sits quietly in a small North Louisiana town, painted in calm colors and arranged to make people feel as though whateve

I am going to say this plainly at the beginning so nobody has to read halfway through this article while trying to determine whether I am whispering my opinion behind a decorative hedge: I am on Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s side. Plainly, clearly and publicly. That does not mean I believe an attorney general is above the law. It means that when the government indicts its own chief legal officer on sixteen felony counts arising from legal letters she sent while def

Some court days are serious in the way criminal court is supposed to be serious. People are pleading guilty to felonies. Rights are being waived. Sentences are being imposed. The judge is making a record. The lawyers are making sure everything is legally correct, factually clear, and procedurally sound. Then there are other days where all of that is still happening, but somewhere in the middle of the docket a man starts explaining how rats naturally lead to snakes, the State

At one point, I had seven women working in one small law office. Seven intelligent, capable, hardworking women who could handle real estate closings, successions, client calls, filing deadlines, title problems, scheduling disasters, and the occasional software problem that required prayer, threats, and somebody walking away from the computer for twenty seconds before trying again. It was a real office. We had letterhead. We had files. We had confidentiality policies. We had c

This Monday morning, I caught my reflection as I walked into the office and had a small, almost unfamiliar thought: there you are. It was not one of those shallow moments where somebody compliments you and suddenly you feel better about yourself. It was quieter than that. My hair was done, I had on a dress I genuinely liked, and for the first time in a long time, I felt put together in a way that made me recognize myself again. Sometimes, after a hard season, looking in the

More Than a Statute Over the last several months, I have had the unusual experience of sitting on the other side of the desk while my own lawyer handled a crisis in my life. Because I am a lawyer too, I understood what I was watching in a way that many clients may not. I could see the emergency filings, the calls that had to be returned quickly, the conversations that required careful wording, the court appearances, the research, and the constant effort to anticipate what the

People assume lawyers are trained to read statutes, contracts, court opinions, deadlines, and fine print. And we are. We learn how to spot an issue, find the rule, apply the facts, organize a file, prepare a document, meet a deadline, and stay professionally composed when somebody says something that makes no earthly sense. But some of the most important reading I do has nothing to do with a page in front of me. It is reading the person sitting across from me. It is knowing w

Most people do not need a lawyer because life is going smoothly. They need a lawyer when something has cracked open. When a marriage breaks. When children are involved. When someone dies. When a charge is filed. When a family turns on itself. When one bad night becomes paperwork. When one accusation becomes a reputation. When one court date feels like it could change everything. By the time most people call a lawyer, they are not just looking for a statute. They are lo