It’s not just business; it personal!
When Christina Meier first thought about law school, she envisioned becoming a prosecutor specializing in crimes against women and children. When that job proved tough to find, she realized that years of experience in the title insurance field on top of even earlier years helping her CPA mom handle estate issues gave her the ideal background for yet another way of using the law to help protect the vulnerable and those in difficult straits.
Today, her Meier Law Firm, PLLC handles estate planning, wills, living wills, power of attorney, trusts, health care proxies, guardianship and more. “We help people through some really difficult moments,” Meier says. “We deal with the heavy stuff -- death, incapacity, situations where a person suddenly loses the spouse who took care of everything for fifty years and they have nowhere to turnt. We help untangle all that and people find it’s a huge relief, a big weight off of their shoulders.”
To put her law degree truly in the service of the ideals she was raised with, Meier needed to found her own firm. “My mother was one of my biggest role models, a wonderful woman -- both she and my father were well respected and known for giving back to the community. Working with her, I saw how important it was to forge relationships, build trust, have empathy. Compassion and listening are a vital part of helping people find the right solutions to hard questions. I wanted to bring that into my legal world, and found I couldn’t achieve it working for someone else.”
The Meier team, three attorneys and three support staff, is committed to core values -- compassion, loyalty, integrity, empowering, no nonsense, and trustworthy -- that inform every relationship with clients and with one another. “Our practice is founded on providing counsel without judgment. People often don’t feel comfortable talking about family relationships and end of life concerns and sharing their thorniest dilemmas with a stranger, a lawyer no less, but our job is to offer the genuine respect and understanding that makes it safe to open up and tell us what we need to know to help you. From there, it’s a matter of down-to-earth, expert problem solving.”
Problems the firm helps solve are endlessly varied: there are clients who need guardianship over a loved one who neglected to file power of attorney until it was too late, clients who need to address concerns and find workable resolutions with their children while there is still time. There are families who need help locating assets, elders who need protection from financial exploitation, spouses who need help getting Medicaid coverage when a loved one requires nursing home care, beneficiaries who need help to get their intended share of an estate, and intra-family squabbles about the type of care a parent needs.
Having a source of calm, objective expertise in these matters can turn a nightmare into a manageable challenge. No two families are alike, yet in Meier’s experience, we’re all dysfunctional -- “it’s just a matter of style and degree, but everybody is. And these are high-stakes situations that can be distorted by grief and greed and grudges. We try to help people think through and plan work-arounds for family conflict,minimize any harm, maybe even find a path to some healing through good decisions.”
For more information, visit themeierlawfirm.com or call (518) 313-7809