Louisiana Articles & Resources - Hampton Law Firm

I have been turning a question over in my head lately: What do you do when someone you love is hurting and you cannot reach them? I do not mean when they are angry with you, acting out, refusing help or deliberately pushing you away. Those things at least give you something to respond to. You can address the behavior, have the argument, schedule the appointment or ask another question. I mean the quieter kind of pain, when someone you love is simply hurting somewhere so deep

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

My firstborn turns ten this week. Ten. I have repeated that number several times because I am still trying to determine how that's mathematically possible. I distinctly remember bringing her home from the hospital approximately six months ago. Yet somehow, Sara Rose is now entering double digits, has opinions about my clothes, can identify when I am being unreasonable, and is old enough to retain evidence of my mistakes for future use. For her birthday, I bought her a purse a

About a year ago, I started doing pelvic Pilates because my lower back hurt. This was unusually responsible of me. My normal medical plan is to ignore a problem until it becomes disruptive, Google it at midnight, briefly diagnose myself with something fatal, and then wake up the next morning and go to work. Pelvic Pilates, annoyingly, worked. My back got better. My abs got stronger. At some point, I looked in the mirror and realized I had developed what I consider the thirty-

A brief warning: this one contains adult subject matter, questionable judgment, and significantly more discussion of nudity than is customary for a law firm website. Proceed accordingly. I overthink everything. I am a lawyer, so for years I called this a professional skill. Eventually, I had to admit that sometimes my brain is less “legal analysis” and more “seventeen tabs are open and one of them is screaming.” Either way, I knew I had a tendency to complicate things. What I

Nobody tells you this part. There is plenty of information about divorce. There are checklists for separating bank accounts, articles about co-parenting, podcasts about healing, and enough women on the internet telling you to rediscover yourself through Pilates and solo travel that I am beginning to think Delta Airlines is funding the entire divorce-recovery industry. But nobody tells you when you’re supposed to let another person see you naked. I feel like that deserved at l

The practical reasons a Power of Attorney matters. Over the last several weeks, I have handled two interdiction cases involving families in terrible situations. I cannot tell their stories in a way that would identify them, and I would never try. What I can say is that both families loved someone whose condition had progressed far beyond ordinary forgetfulness, questionable judgment or the occasional decision to order seventeen decorative pillows from Facebook at two o’clock

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

A defendant receives ten years in prison. The judge has barely finished speaking before somebody whispers, “That means three and a half.” Another person says, “No, violent offenders do sixty-five percent.” Somebody’s aunt says, “He has priors, so he is habitual.” Then a man who attended absolutely none of the court proceedings announces that the defendant will be home in eighteen months because his cousin had the same charge. His cousin probably did not have the same charge.

Explaining Felony Plea Forms in Louisiana If you are pleading guilty to a felony in Lincoln or Union Parish, you are going to receive a stack of papers asking you to sign, date, initial, acknowledge, waive, certify, and swear that you understand several paragraphs written by people who apparently believe ordinary English is a gateway drug. These forms matter. They are not courthouse permission slips, and your signature is not merely proof that you successfully located a pen.

Every so often, a law enforcement officer sends me a picture of a plea offer and asks me what, exactly, the prosecutor is asking them to approve. The charge usually is not the confusing part. The officer knows the charge, knows the investigation, and probably knows considerably more about where the defendant was standing at 2:17 a.m. six months ago than I ever will. "Has law enforcement approved the plea agreement?" It is also important because during almost any felony plea,

Louisiana’s Habitual Offender Law is what happens when the State looks at a person’s new felony conviction, pulls out the person’s entire criminal history like a CVS receipt, and says, “Actually, we are not finished here.” It is not a separate crime. Nobody gets arrested for “being habitual.” It is a sentencing law that allows the district attorney to ask for a much larger sentence on the new felony because the person has qualifying prior felony convictions. You may also hear

Apparently, some people believe that the passage of a few quiet months constitutes a formal legal pardon. It does not. They say something false. They publish it. They tell other people. They cause damage. Then several weekends pass without a sheriff’s deputy appearing at the door, and they slowly begin to relax. By month three, they have apparently conducted their own legal research and concluded that the injured person has moved on, given up, found Jesus, forgotten how to re

There is a certain area of land near Haile Baptist Church that I have recently begun calling the Black Hole of Haile. That is not an official legal term. You will not find it in the Louisiana Civil Code, on the tax assessor’s website, or printed beneath anyone’s impressive courthouse portrait. It is simply the most accurate description I have found for a piece of North Louisiana where families have lived, houses have stood, children have been raised, and land has been treated

Saturday morning, I was sitting on my couch doing absolutely nothing productive, which is apparently when my brain prefers to open investigations no one asked it to conduct. I was watching television, scrolling through the news and reading an article about two people I barely knew existed until the internet informed me their marriage was over. I knew enough to recognize one of the names. The husband works in music. There were photographs of the house, old quotes about their f

If you read Please Excuse the Mess, then you already know what the house may look like when you get here. What I probably should have explained is that the house is not the only thing around here with several projects going at once. I don't experience much of anything at a reasonable volume. I don't get mildly irritated with software. I become personally offended by it. Somewhere in my head, I have already decided the programmer who designed it either hates lawyers or simply

It is fairly easy to like me on a weekend. I can fix my hair, put on a dress, meet you somewhere that does not contain a single stray sock and carry on an uninterrupted adult conversation. I can laugh, flirt, order something I would never bother making at home and create the convincing impression that my life is calm, orderly and routinely accompanied by good lighting. That is not false advertising. It is simply the display model. To be more than a weekend, you are eventually

I Had to Become the Person Who Told Me No There are moments when missing someone is not quiet or sentimental. It is not looking through old pictures, hearing a familiar song or wondering how they are doing. It is an almost overpowering need to reach for them. You want to pick up the phone. You want to type their name. You want to ask them to come over, even if they only stay for an hour. You do not want closure, perspective or a lesson about letting go. You want your person.

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

Sometimes the hard days win. Today won. I do not enjoy admitting that, because I prefer to believe I am at least stubborn enough to win a Tuesday, but today had other plans and apparently came prepared. By the end of it, I was not having a “hard day” in the cute little way people say that when they had one inconvenient email and needed to breathe deeply in a parking lot. I was having the kind of day where you sit there and realize something in your work life has to change soo