Louisiana Articles & Resources - Hampton Law Firm

Every day, somebody somewhere is offering a very confident opinion about the terms under which love should be allowed to survive. We have rules for it now. Timelines. Checklists. A person does this, so surely you cannot still love them. A child makes enough bad choices, gets in enough trouble, breaks enough hearts, and somebody decides the love should have expired by now. A spouse becomes distant, distracted, absent in the ways that matter most, and people start talking as th

By the time I walked in the door, my phone was already in my hand to call my husband. I had not even consciously decided to do it. My thumb just went there on muscle memory, like it had been operating under an old agreement nobody ever formally terminated. Then I looked down at the phone, remembered where life actually is right now, and stood there in a hot house with water spreading across the floor while the air conditioner apparently decided it, too, was no longer interest

A Louisiana Saturday Night I was not raised to crawl around in somebody’s yard like a worm being electrocuted. At that point in my life, I was introverted, focused on school, and generally built for a booth in the corner, a small group of people I already knew, and a reasonably clear exit plan. Then I started dating a man who was outgoing enough for both of us and had the deeply dangerous gift of making absolute nonsense sound like a confidence-building exercise. He could loo

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

Most people do not think of Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat as part of their estate plan, which is bold considering some of us touch those apps more often than we touch our spouse, our Bible, our bank account, or the laundry we keep restarting because we are not emotionally prepared to fold it. We scroll in bed, in the bathroom, at red lights, in the school pickup line, and during conversations where we are nodding like we heard a damn word. Then we act shocked when somebody

I was sitting at my desk yesterday morning, hair fixed, makeup good, dressed like I had my life together, trying to get started on some serious work when I looked down at a Post-it note from the day before that said, in my own handwriting, “Trade Sara and JB for a long time.” I sat there looking at it for a solid minute, trying to figure out whether I had actually lost my mind and decided to start bartering children. There was no explanation beside it. No little arrow. No rem

A reverse mortgage is one of those things that sounds simple enough while everybody is alive and nobody is asking too many questions. The homeowner gets to use some of the equity in the home, there usually are not regular monthly mortgage payments, and the family quietly files the phrase “reverse mortgage” into the same mental drawer as Medicare paperwork, old insurance policies, and instruction manuals nobody has opened since 2004. Then the homeowner passes away, and suddenl

There are days when I look around my house and think that calling it a “home” is technically accurate but wildly incomplete. A home is supposed to suggest a certain amount of peace, shelter, order, maybe a candle burning somewhere that does not smell vaguely like a combination of coffee, laundry detergent, and something you cannot identify without getting down on your hands and knees. What we have here is more like an unlicensed institution with Wi-Fi, legal files, three sma

By lunchtime today, I was sitting in front of a meal I could not eat, trying to decide whether I needed to go back to work or go to the emergency room. I had driven thirty minutes out of my way because I wanted to have lunch with someone. I wanted the conversation. I wanted an ordinary hour in the middle of an ordinary weekday. Instead, I sat there trying to take a bite because that is what people do at lunch, while knowing my body had already spent the day making other plans

There are some seasons in life when you might find yourself standing in a quiet kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator the only sound, staring at your phone as if it might light up with a message that never comes. Most of us go about our days without taking a moment to really look at ourselves. But somewhere inside the rhythm of our daily life, there can be a space that has quietly been reserved for someone who no longer seems interested in occupying it. That space can belong t

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

More Than a Statute My first memory of a law office is not a courtroom, a hearing, or some dramatic legal moment from television. I was probably about five years old, and my dad’s office was in an old two-story white house on Main Street in Farmerville, where AutoZone now sits. It was his first office of his own in Farmerville, although he had practiced in other places before then. To me, it was simply Daddy’s office. I remember the reception area, the phones, the old house,

Self-defense is one of those legal concepts people think they understand until they see what it actually looks like inside a courtroom. Most people hear the phrase and think the question is simple: someone was threatened, someone defended themselves, and the case should be over. But self-defense is not a magic phrase, and it is not a blanket excuse for violence. It is a legal justification that depends on the facts of the moment, the force used, whether that force was reasona

Years Later, Someone Will Still Be Reading Your Report I have worked in enough different places in the criminal justice system to understand that most people only see one small piece of it. I have been a prosecutor. I am now a public defender. I have reviewed cases to determine whether the State had enough evidence to file charges, whether the evidence could be proved at trial, whether the evidence was legally obtained, and whether the record would survive the scrutiny that c

Some people fall apart loudly. I tend to get productive. I make lists. I answer messages too fast. I decide the office needs a new system, the house needs to be reorganized, the problem needs to be solved immediately, and if I can just get enough things handled, enough drawers labeled, enough work completed, enough pieces of life put back where they belong, then maybe I will feel settled too. For a long time, I thought that was simply discipline. Sometimes it was. Sometimes i

Yesterday, our conference room looked less like a law office and more like somebody had decided people deserved a morning to breathe. We had planned a staff day at Hampton Law Firm: a massage table set up in the conference room, candles burning, music playing, biscuits and gravy on the table, and a rotation of thirty-minute massages between the work that still needed to get done. Calls were answered. Files were handled. Tasks that had been piling up got checked off. It was no

I was afraid you would think I was weak. I have never made a life out of looking perfectly calm, perfectly agreeable, perfectly polished, or perfectly easy to explain. I have opinions. I feel things deeply. I can be loud when something matters to me. I can be emotional, stubborn, funny, intense, and entirely too honest when I am tired of pretending something makes sense when it does not. I know that about myself. I have always known that about myself. If somebody decides that

I was having lunch with my father one day when I looked across the restaurant and saw someone I once shared a home with sitting across the room. We were not far apart. Close enough to see each other clearly. Close enough that there was no question whether either of us knew the other was there. Close enough that a person could have stood up, walked across the room, said hello, and acknowledged the history sitting between us in some ordinary, decent, human way. Instead, my

Don't Forget To Plan for Your Online Accounts, Too. Most people know they should think about the house, land, vehicles, bank accounts, and personal belongings when they make a will. Those are the things we usually think of first because they feel like traditional property. They are visible. They are familiar. They are the kinds of things families have been dealing with in successions for generations. But today, a lot of important information is not sitting in a filing cabinet