David M. Hudson is a distinguished family law attorney and a partner at Siemens Family Law Group, recognized for his commitment to client-centered advocacy. As a North Carolina Board Certified Specialist in Family Law, David excels in understanding the unique circumstances of each client, fostering strong relationships, and maintaining open lines of communication. His collaborative approach ensures that clients feel supported throughout the legal process, as he works alongside them to set and achieve their goals.
With a focus on cooperative resolutions, David is dedicated to minimizing conflict, especially when children are involved. However, he is equally adept at managing high-conflict cases, always striving to uphold a professional and respectful relationship with colleagues and the courts. His unwavering commitment to ethical standards in legal practice sets him apart in the field.
Originally from Ponca City, Oklahoma, David grew up along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics with a minor in Religion from Berry College in Georgia before receiving his law degree from the University of Richmond in Virginia. Admitted to the bar in Louisiana in 2006, David established a successful family law practice in Lake Charles for over thirteen years before relocating to western North Carolina with his wife, Tanya, and their daughter, Ember. He became a member of the North Carolina bar in 2019.
David’s extensive experience spans nonprofit and for-profit legal environments, allowing him to connect with clients from diverse backgrounds. He is currently accepting family law cases in Buncombe, Haywood, Madison, Yancey, McDowell, Henderson, Transylvania, and Jackson counties, furthering his mission to provide compassionate and skilled legal representation in family law and domestic violence matters.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-hudson-law/
Website: wnclaw.com/
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Interview Transcript
Peter
Hey, welcome to the Family Law Formula podcast where we uncover the secrets of running a successful family law practice from those who have actually done it themselves. And I’m your host, Peter, and in each episode we dive deep into strategies and tips and insights that can transform your practice. Today we are joined by a gentleman named David Hudson. He has a law firm in Asheville, North Carolina. They exclusively work in the family law practice and he’s going to share some of his invaluable experience and expertise. And the goal is to take that family law practice to the next level. And we had a great conversation leading up to our podcast today, and I know you’ve been practicing since 2006, so almost 20 years, the majority of that in the family law space. So tell me maybe a little bit about your firm and why family law, why are you involved in it? We’d love to hear a little bit about your story.
David
Sure. Thanks Peter. It’s good to be here. So let’s start with my firm. I work at what I would consider a boutique law firm. I think I mentioned before, I don’t know that we use that word for marketing purposes necessarily. It’s kind of a new concept, but yeah, we do exclusively family law. I’m in Asheville, North Carolina, and we’re a decent sized city in a mostly rural area, and so we’re the population center. You’ve got people who are in our county, but you’ve got people coming from all the surrounding counties as well, looking for the level of experience that we can offer that maybe some of the other general practice attorneys can’t. I’m a board certified family law specialist here in North Carolina, as is the senior partner of the firm, and we have three full-time attorneys here, two of which are specialists, which is fantastic. We like to think of ourselves as having a pretty deep bench of experience to call upon.
David
But you asked why family law? I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever had an attorney who does family law who’s been able to fully explain how they ended up here. No one really goes to law school thinking I’m going to come out and be a divorce lawyer. Right. It’s not the career path people think of unless they have their own personal family law traumas in the past that they’re wanting to resolve. It’s something I fell into when I first started work. I ended up in a small, private nonprofit law firm in Louisiana when I was first barred. It wasn’t all they did. They did a lot of stuff that was on the surface, at least not family law, protective orders, and even things like helping people recover from hurricane damage was Louisiana. We had a ton of that stuff coming in right around the same time.
David
But what I started to realize was almost everything in a lot of cases ended up relating back to family law. Eventually people were out of their houses and having to maybe relocate because their houses had been by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, but they’ve got this family law component because there’s a co-parent that they have to deal with if they’re relocating or they have to fight over the new child custody schedule. People are seeking protective orders, but they need to be sure they can get custody of their child as part of the process or maybe they have to have contact with this person despite being afraid of them because they have a child together. So I came to learn that if someone is involved in family law, it affects every part of their life one way or the other. And so I came to realize how important it was and I came to realize I’m actually pretty good at it. I think the biggest practice tip I can give people is focus on what you’re actually good at. Once you find out what that is, you can’t put a high enough value on not only enjoying what you do, but being qualified. You’re going to hate every day of work if you’re struggling to actually figure out how to do your job. So I fell into it and then I found that I liked it and then I found that I was good at it probably about at the same time and I just never would about.
Peter
That’s great. It’s good to hear the balance between you enjoy it, you’re good at it sounds like you like helping people, right?
David
I do. I can’t say that’s a huge component of every case. It depends on the case, but I do like helping people and my motto has always been try to leave every client better than I found them.
Peter
And I think there’s something that every family, every attorney shoot, every person can glean something from that right there. I mean, leave people, leave relationships, leave conversations better than you found ’em. Right. I can imagine that there have been litany of cases that were hard and there’s been some that struggle hard, but had a memorable moment. Talk to us a little bit about a case that stands out in your career that could maybe encourage some lawyers out there.
David
Sure. Yeah. I can speak to a recent case that I had obviously without talking about case specific details too much, but this was a case that I honestly just got a ruling back on in the last few weeks. It’s one that was in litigation for years. We were involved in a heavily fought case over every aspect and we finally had a conclusion and then literally weeks after we had resolved the last issue, we find out the opposing party has decided to move to another county without permission and now we’re back in court right away. And then we were in court for another year and a half at least before we ended up with another resolution. And so at the end of the day, my client spent thousands and thousands of dollars he should have never had to spend, which I don’t mind making the money, but I always tell my clients, I’d rather you not have to spend it if we can find you a reasonable resolution.
David
But we ended up finally at the end of the day with a court order that got him his kids back in his custody the majority of the time after he’d been denied that for years. Literally it meant the world to him. You could tell it did. We weren’t always sure we were going to get there, but we managed to get there and that case is the kind of case that makes me keep doing this. There were moments when you just wanted to throw your hands up and say, I can’t deal with this anymore. It’s so unreasonable or it’s so crazy, but I stayed with it. My client thankfully stayed with it. He had the wherewithal to keep me in it and at the end of the day, we’re both pretty thrilled with where we landed, even though we had to go through fire to get there. That’s the sort of case that stands out to me is why I do this.
Peter
Yeah. You mentioned a couple of times it was a lot, a long process, a lot of details, probably a lot of things in there that maybe kept you up late at night. The other side of being involved as a lawyer where you’re maybe running the business side of the firm and handling everything from marketing to budgets and all that kind of stuff. So what are some of the biggest challenges that you faced when it comes to just family law as a whole that have been a big challenge for you and what have you done to overcome those?
David
Sure. Yeah. I think what’s challenging is very specific to each person. There are areas that I’m not as good at. I think I’m pretty good in the courtroom. I like that. What I’m not so good at is what you were just talking about. The struggle is marketing myself. It’s finding a way to attract the right clients, the people who can actually afford your services, but who are also the kind of people you want to work with, the kind of people you want to help. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of a case. That’s what keeps you up at night. You mentioned what keeps you up at night. It’s feeling like you might be making things worse for the world by what you’re doing. That has been my struggle, especially since I moved to this firm, my old firm down in Louisiana. It wasn’t focused on family law.
David
I had plenty of clients, I had plenty of work. The work just kind of came through the door from various ways. Here it’s a competitive small area and there are several very good attorneys in this town and we’re all competing for the same higher profile or higher dollar clients, those who can really afford the kind of work we do. And so marketing is tricky and I’m not sure I have completely overcome that yet, but that’s what I’m working on coming on your podcast Now, maybe in part I want to get out there, I want to have people hear from me. It’s an ongoing struggle because you’re always needing new clients in the realm of family law. You get repeat business. Sure. No matter how much you might hate that people are back in court after you helped them out before. Sometimes from a new marriage that fell apart sometimes from a new kid, but sometimes because you’re just back in court, but you can’t rely on that. You have to get the new cases coming in and you can only go so far with word of mouth. That’s important.
Peter
So you mentioned word of mouth, repeat, right? Repeat pros and cons. What other things have you guys done as a firm to get your firm name out there, get your expertise, what other things have you done?
David
Yeah, so this is an ongoing initiative that we’re actively working on right now. The firm has always been pretty good about being public service oriented. I think we get the name out there in part by, there are some charities that my senior partner has always supported, or at least for as long as I’ve known him. We try to work actively with other attorneys in the area. You get a lot of referrals from other attorneys once you have a reputation for doing good work, either because they have a conflict of interest but want to actually refer the client to someone who’s going to take care of them. You actually get referrals from the court, maybe not always openly, but your name gets dropped in a positive way that’s going to push people in your direction. I’m trying right now to open up a little bit more a front of public education.
David
I’m working on my first what we refer to as a lunch and learn, which I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of those in the industry where you offer free education on a certain topic to a certain group. Maybe there’s a lunch to get people in the door. We’re focused on putting one together for this fall sometime aimed specifically at mental health professionals in the area and what to do when you get served with the subpoena because that happens all the time in connection with family law cases and no one ever knows what to do when they get that subpoena. And so it’s trying to do that one to make our job easier because when people actually know how to properly respond, they don’t do stupid things that we then have to take them to court to figure out, but also because that helps spread the reputation, I want people to know that I’m someone who’s knowledgeable about these things so that if they get served with a subpoena and want to hire someone to address it, they can come to me. If alternatively they’ve got a client who needs some help and maybe is struggling and wants to file for divorce or file for custody, my name’s at the top of their list. So that’s part of it is getting known not just in our industry but in other industries of professionals who either need their own services or who are often in contact with people who do. That’s
Peter
Great. So I love this lunch and learn concept. That’s awesome. You have several other on-ramps and the goal is leads in cases. So let’s talk about that briefly for a second because I think every lawyer wants not necessarily more cases, but I would say more of the right cases. They want the right case. When you think about family law for you and your firm specifically, what would you say is quantitatively too much as far
David
As volume because of family law, it’s hard to just name a number because the range of what we do, there are cases that are in active litigation that are taking 10 hours of my time at a chunk, and then there are cases that are sort of on the back burner as we’re negotiating slowly or we’re just doing discovery. Realistically, I think about it as I want to have somewhere between 10 and 15 really active cases, ones that are requiring my regular attention, but then I also want to have a few others that are sort of waiting for the next step and I know I’ve got a little time, but they’re going to be coming back up for finalizing the divorce or whatever it might be, or we’re in negotiations, but we’re in those early phase where we’re not in litigation, where we’re not with court dates coming up.
David
I don’t know that I have a solid number. It’s just you kind of start to feel it when it does feel too heavy and sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes you get hired by three or four new clients all at once that you consulted with over the last few weeks and suddenly you’re just swamped and sometimes you got to a quiet week or two where it’s catch up time. But yeah, 10 to 15 truly active cases and then probably at least that number as well that are sort of slowly plotting along on some course, but not needing to be actively touched on a daily or even a weekly basis.
Peter
Yeah, it’s interesting the thoughts around that whole, some that are further along or take more time and there’s so many variables I can imagine to pretty much any case that you’re going to get involved in. And with family law, I think there is a little bit more of that edge towards the emotional side, right? I mean, you’re talking with clients who are in probably one of the worst seasons of their life. They’re struggling through that and that has effects on you as well. How do you balance the emotions, the work schedule, how your work life balance, what do you do to balance that out?
David
Yeah, I mean work-life balance is a struggle I think for every family law attorney that I know, and it’s one that I have really prioritized over the past couple of years getting in hand. Speaking for me personally, I’ve got a young child. I’m not young myself. I’ve got an 8-year-old at home, and so I’ve really tried to prioritize being able to be home with her as much as I can. I make a point on her summer break of working from home almost every Friday so I can be around more with her, but I think you’ve got to have boundaries. I know family law attorneys who give their cell phone out to every client, and I think they’re insane because people have emergencies in their mind at all hours of the day and night, but nine times out of 10 at 3:00 AM what am I going to be able to do for you?
David
The courts aren’t open. I can’t get opposing counsel on the phone. I can give you advice, but unless it’s a literal emergency, in which case you probably need to be calling the cops or something, I don’t know that there’s much I can do for you outside of fairly normal business hours. So you got to maintain healthy boundaries. I make sure my clients don’t have my cell phone number. Now I have a cell phone that my work line will roll to, but I don’t create an expectation that I’m going to answer if you’re calling past the time that we’re closed as an office, I try not to respond to my emails significantly past office hours unless it’s a real time sensitive issue. You don’t want to create an expectation that I’m going to be sitting down at 8:00 PM looking at an email from you. That’s my family time.
David
And the single biggest thing, honestly, it’s not just setting the boundaries, but it’s making clear to the client from the beginning what those boundaries are. Single best thing you can do as a family law attorney is set reasonable expectations with your clients from the start. They need to know that if they want someone who’s available to them at midnight, I’m not the attorney for them. There are other attorneys out there who do that. It’s not me. If what you want is the expertise I bring to the table, you’ve got to respect my time and my personal life as well.
Peter
Yeah, it’s interesting. I love this whole topic of your conversation because I would guess that a said lawyer would give out their cell phone because they’re trying to build trust, they’re trying to build that relational equity, if you will, but I can imagine balancing work life has over that’s the bigger priority. So when it comes to building trust with your clients or potential clients, what are some things that you’re doing or that you have done to build trust with your
David
Clients? Yeah, building trust is key for a lot of what we do. I tell my clients from the very beginning, and I don’t think they always listen to me, but I tell them from the very beginning, if you don’t tell me what’s happening in your life for better or for worse, I can’t help you prepare for it. I can’t help you get ready to defend against that allegation in court if I don’t know it’s there, but how you actually instill the trust, I think the biggest thing you can do is listen. You listen to your clients and you make it clear to them that you are doing that preferably without judgment. You got to keep a straight face, even if they’re telling you some crazy stuff, but you listen and you ask the right questions to let them know you’re actually listening, you’re actually engaging with them and that you’re spotting potential conflicts, potential areas where they might need your help.
David
This biggest thing they want, at least in that initial consultation, they want information, but they want to see if you are someone that they can talk to if you’re someone that they can trust. And I try to tell people from the beginning, not every attorney is right for every client and not every client is right for every attorney. And it’s okay if we talk and you decide I’m not the right person for you. If you don’t get a good feel for me, I can give you the names of several other good attorneys who are maybe a little different personalities for me who you might feel like you fit better with. I think they know when they meet with me, I’m not trying to sell them on me. I think that’s important because if a client thinks you’re looking for a case because you need money, they’re not going to think you have their best interest at heart. They’re going to think you’ve got your own interest at heart, you’re trying to wind your pocket. But if you’re really looking for what they need and maybe even willing to tell them if you think you may not be the right person for that, but you can help them find who is, I think that instills a degree of trust and I’ve always had good success with that strategy.
Peter
That’s really, really good. So we didn’t talk about this previous, but I’ve had this ongoing conversation with several other family lawyers and free consultation versus paid for consultation. What are your thoughts there?
David
No, we do pay consultations. Absolutely. And I’ve always done paid consultations with the rare exception of if it’s a referral from someone, I might as a favor waive the consultation fee. Certainly if they’re a former client, I might waive the consultation fee if they come back on something new. But if it’s just someone walking in off the street or more likely contacting us through our website with no prior contacts, you’ve got to charge for the consultation for a couple of reasons. One is to show them that your time is valuable. It instills respect. People have an innate sense that they get what they pay for. And if you’re not going to even pay me for sitting down with you for an hour and a half, then I don’t think you’re really putting value on my time. For what it’s worth, I charge far less per hour for my consultation time than I charge as my base billing rate.
David
And we let clients know that, yeah, you’re going to pay to see me, but you’re going to pay me far west for that time than once I’m engaged as your attorney. I’m going to charge you more per hour. But it’s because some of our talk may not really be about your case, it’s just about your wife and what’s going on, and we do want to be able to get people the door, but it’s also a test. If you can’t afford to pay me a few hundred dollars to sit down for an hour and a half, you can’t afford to hire. And the other side of it, and it’s sort of the ugly side, but there are people who will consult with every good family law attorney in town to conflict them from representing their ex or their future ex. And if I’m going to have someone meet with me just to conflict me in their case, I at least want to get paid for my time when I’m then not able to take either side of that case ever moving forward.
Peter
Interesting. For family law attorneys out there that you’re debating consultation or not. Great thoughts there from David. Another thought that I have is there’s going to be some lawyers who are going to watch this and they’re getting ready to either start their own firm or maybe move into the family law space. With your dozens of years experience in this field, what advice would you give to new attorneys entering into the family law sphere?
David
So if I’m talking to someone who has never done this kind of work before, first and foremost, I would say make sure you get at least a little bit of a taste for it before you dip too deep because this is a field that is absolutely not for everyone. When I go to general conferences that aren’t family law focused, that I’m meeting other attorneys and we talk about, oh, what do you do? What kind of work do you do? Nine times out of 10, when I say family law, the response is you couldn’t pay me enough to do that kind of work because most people aren’t built for it. Most people don’t have the personality for it. It can be absolutely grueling, but if you’re built for it, it’s incredibly rewarding. So I would say try to dip your toe in if you can find a firm that does family law as part of their practice, but not all, and you can come on and take a few cases and see how you feel preferably working under someone who does know what they’re doing because our cases have real world consequences that can last for years and years in some cases.
David
But it’s also something where you have to acknowledge that there’s an emotional toll to what we do. And if you’re not prepared for that, it can be really shocking when you first start doing this kind of work. First time you have a client come in and start talking about how their ex or their current partner has abused them in various ways or that they’re afraid their child is being hurt in some way, it takes a while to grow the kind of skin you need to have to really do this well and not have it impact you personally. And that’s all the more reason to see how it feels the first few times before you go too deep into it. Start small. Don’t jump into, I’m going to start representing sexual assault victims. Maybe have a few simple divorces with a little bit of other component to it and see how that feels. And then build your way up to the really heavy stuff because it can get really heavy and you don’t want it to bleed over into your personal life. You don’t want to be taking this stuff home.
Peter
Great advice for anyone who’s out there starting a new firm or thinking about the family law space. I think one more question, David, and then share anything else that’s really on your heart that could potentially help some lawyers. One of the things I love to talk to lawyers about is growth and goals, because sometimes you have the lawyer who just says, well, I want to grow. That’s want more cases. Great, and I get it, but more specific goals and goals that are measurable and have some strategy behind them are way more successful. What are some of the future goals that you have for your practice like 12 months from now? What do you think is going to be different and what are your plans to achieve those goals?
David
Sure. So looking at us specifically in the next 12 months, we have hopefully a new associate joining us this fall. We’ve got someone who’s just sat for the bar and assuming that they are successful as we hope they are, we’ll have someone new coming in. And that’s important to us because right now one of our challenges as a firm, a small firm, but still a firm is all of the attorneys here are at the higher end of the billing scale. We’ve got two specialists and then we’ve got another attorney who’s only been doing family law for a few years, but he’s doing litigation as long as I have. And so we all bill at the higher end of the local spectrum and that’s great, but it does turn away a certain number of clients. Whereas if we had a younger person who’s newer, who’s billing at that lower level, it would help us meet a broader spectrum of the client base that’s in the area.
David
So diversification is something we’re working on in that regard, trying to not just be specialists, but trying to also have that entry level attorney available as well. Something we’re actively working on, although we’re still cutting our teeth on it, is trying to incorporate artificial intelligence to an extent into our practice. This is something that whether we like it or not is coming. It’s something that a lot of firms are already using to an extent for a lot of different reasons. I don’t use it to draft pleadings that I submit to the court, but I will certainly use it to help as one of many tools in legal research now you always have to vet everything. You can’t rely on it being completely accurate, but that’s an active push in the firm. We have three full-time attorneys. We’re all trying out different AI systems right now and testing them in our practice with the eye that we’ll pick one or two of those long-term as a real valuable use case to put into practice and incorporate.
David
And so that’s something I really hope a year from now we can have a much more established practice of this is the tool that we use for this job. We use this to help with the research. We use this to help look over our letters and make sure that the tone’s good or in some cases help the clients look over their communications and make sure the tone is good. That’s a real valuable use case that we’re trying to incorporate a year from now. The hope is we’ve grown a little bit, but not a lot as far as our firm’s size, but we’ve grown our client base not just in numbers, like you said, a lot of people want more, more. It’s about quality of clients, it’s about trying to get more of the clients that you want, who are the kind of cases that you’re interested in, and who are the kind of cases who can pay what you need them to pay for the kind of work that they really need and can actually stay on top of their bills.
David
I don’t want to be too money focused, but we all expect to get paid for our time. It’s important. And so that’s a big part of where we want to be a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, you want to have the same number of cases maybe or even less if the cases themselves are bigger, but still get paid well for your time and still be attracting the right kinds of people who then tell their friends who are the right kinds of people or their coworkers who are the right kinds of people. We’re really trying to get into more of that niche level of professionals who are looking for representation or their spouses or partners, but people who are at that higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum, not because we prefer those kinds of people, but because those of us in the firm, at least who are specialists, it makes sense for the people who have a deep enough checkbook to actually pay for our work. My skills are wasted on an uncontested divorce. I’ll do it, but you don’t need me for that.
Peter
Well, man, this has been so helpful to me specifically, but I can imagine there’s so many nuggets in what you’ve shared from the advice to new lawyers work-life balance, and even the last couple of things that you said about diversification and even utilizing different tools. I mean, you’re looking at their whole firm, which is exciting to see growth wise. And it’s not just about getting more cases. You’re really looking at the pieces and parts that make that go. Is there anything that comes to mind before we close?
David
There’s one thing I can think of specifically in the realm of family law. I mentioned this briefly earlier in the dynamic we have with the firm here that we like to sometimes bounce ideas off of each other, especially for a new attorney coming into the field, but even for older attorneys, not just mentorship, although that’s great if you can find someone who’s been doing this longer than you have, who you can bounce ideas off of who you can talk to or even just a colleague, someone who’s at the same level as you. But creativity is important to what we do, and no one has a monopoly on that. So if you can find a person or a group of people, preferably in your own firm for confidentiality reasons so you can be a little more open, but who you can share thoughts and ideas and spitball with the number of times I’ve gone and sat down with the attorney who works across the hall from me and talked through a case and left it with three new ideas on how to approach case strategy that I might not have come up with on my own or that he’s done the same.
David
No man is an island and you’ve got solo practitioners, you’ve got people just hanging a shingle, but even those, you need someone you can talk your cases through with. And you need support staff who you can trust and rely on to do good work too. And it’s all part of the package.
Peter
I love it. Well, David, it has been a joy. It really has, and I’m looking forward to hearing more and more about the growth of your firm there in Nashville and the future for you guys. I wish you the best of luck as you navigate all these challenges, but growth as well. And for those of you who are out there wondering if family law is for you or what’s your next growth season’s going to be like, man, make sure you bookmark this podcast to revisit because I think that there was definitely good points here to glean for the future. So David, thank you so much for your time. I’m really thankful for it, and I hope that you’ll join us again in the future. I’m sure we can unpack more later. But that wraps us up today for the Family Law Podcast. Stay tuned for the next one that’s coming out, and we’ll talk to you all soon.
