Born With Audacity

Because it’s such an emotionally fraught practice area, family law attorneys often act as therapists for clients going through a painful period in their lives.

That’s not how Regina Edwards operates.

“I’m not supposed to be a therapist,” she says. “I’m not trained for that. Lawyers do themselves a disservice when they try to do it, because they’re going to to do it badly and lose objectivity that could help their clients down the road. If you match their energy, it doesn’t help their legal case.”

In fact, Edwards, who runs a family law firm in Lawrenceville, will only take clients if both sides agree on expectations and emotions. “If someone calls me and says, ‘I want my ex to suffer because he had an affair with the Hooters waitress,’ I’m not the attorney for you,” she says. “If you want to hire someone that just tells you what you want to hear, you go to trial, and they get paid as you go down in flames, knock yourself out.”

But, she adds, “If people say, ‘I just want to get through this process as quickly and efficiently as possible, and minimize the damage emotionally to my children,’ that’s my ideal client.”

Edwards is all about efficiency. She finished law school at age 23. She currently bills flat fees, rather than hourly rates like most family law attorneys, and has created systems to keep her small firm profitable. At any given time, Edwards has 50 or so active cases, closes three to four per month, adds three or four more. She also takes on about 10 pro bono family law cases per year—often family violence cases.

Trials tend to occur for her, she says, only when the opposing side is being unreasonable. If her client is the unreasonable one, she adds, she won’t take it to trial. “I’ll tell them they need to hire someone else because I have to maintain my integrity with the judges,” she says. “Judges know I’m going to have a solution that matches the facts of the case.”

But if the other side is unreasonable, she’s ready. “There’s nothing that the other side can throw at me that I haven’t seen before,” she says. “There’s no objection I haven’t seen. There’s no lie I don’t know.”

Edwards was 5 years old when she decided to become a lawyer. A self-described “argumentative child,” she loved to poke holes in her parents’ explanations.

“I remember my parents saying, ‘The car won’t start until your seatbelt is fastened,’ so I would pretend to fasten my seatbelt, but then the car would start anyway,” Edwards recalls. “Eventually, my mom told me, ‘There’s a profession where you can get paid to argue. That will be at some point in the future. But that is not today.’”

“​​Regina was consistently intellectually curious and inquisitive,” remembers her mother, Patricia, a high school educator and counselor. “She not only asked ‘why’ questions, she also wanted to understand the ‘how.’”

Her father, Joseph, was an Army officer, and the family moved around a lot. Born in upstate New York, Edwards called everywhere from Germany to Virginia home. Along the way, she zipped through school like she was late for an appointment. She skipped kindergarten and could’ve gotten her diploma at 15, but Mom and Dad weren’t ready to send her off to the dorms yet. So they made a compromise. For Edwards’ senior year, along with classes and track, she interned at the Superior Court in D.C. How does a high schooler land such a prestigious internship? “I just started emailing judges saying, ‘Hey, I’d like to come in once a week to do filing,’ and one responded,” Edwards says. “I don’t know why I had that idea. I was born with audacity.” 

There, Edwards met attorneys, read pleadings, and followed cases through the legal system. The experience affirmed her desire to be pre-law as an undergraduate.

But for a time she considered politics. At North Carolina Central University, she studied political science, interned at the White House (the year after Monica Lewinsky), and worked with the North Carolina Democratic Party as John Edwards, not yet a national figure, helped shift the state politically. It was an exciting atmosphere, but changes felt too small and gradual. “You could spend a lot of time working on an initiative and not see it go through—or it takes 12 years,” she says. “It seemed like a lot of push and pull without really going anywhere.”

And the law—a specific kind of law—kept calling. “I never saw myself as a big corporate lawyer,” she says. “For me, it was more about helping people keep their housing, get child support, and get away from their abusers. That’s why I liked public interest law over politics. Even though it may seem very small to the outside world, getting someone a restraining order or $500 in child support could be the difference between life and death.”

She began law school at Tulane University when she was just 20, worked 30 hours a week at legal aid and various law firms, and after graduation moved to Atlanta, where friends were settling. At Georgia Legal Services Program, she took on civil cases ranging from landlord-tenant disputes to divorces. She got to work in court from day one—with the supervision of a practicing attorney—while she studied for the bar. 

She was still young, and looked younger, and was practicing in rural areas. “This was back when Georgia still had the Confederate flag on their flag, so it wasn’t great,” Edwards says. “But I can’t control that I’m the only Black person in the courtroom, or the youngest person. I know the facts of the case better than anyone, I know the law, and at least I can get the respect of the judges who recognize I’m not trying to mail it in.”

This is where she got her first real taste of family law. Most of her colleagues disliked how emotional and petty it could get, but Edwards saw that as a challenge. And there was real help to give.

“I worked with women who felt like they were stuck in bad marriages because they didn’t have jobs, skills or money,” she says. “They’d say, ‘I have to stay and get beat because I have no other options.’ But once we got them child support and access to resources like job training or Section 8 housing, they could separate and still feel comfortable that they could support their children.”

After two years in legal services, Edwards moved to a disability law firm, where she traveled regularly. Then she joined a firm that focused on family law. She stayed only six months.

“I learned a lot about how I wanted to run a firm and how I didn’t want to run a firm,” Edwards says. “I didn’t like the way they treated me, I didn’t like the way they treated the clients, and I didn’t like the way they billed.”

So at age 27 she hung a shingle and hasn’t looked back. One of the key tenets of her firm is flat-fee billing. Edwards believes hourly billing can encourage firms to drag out a case and make clients distrustful. “Most people think I’m insane for doing flat fees for family law,” she says with a smile. “They still do, and it’s been 20 years. … They always say, ‘What if a client calls all the time?’ Well, nothing’s stopping you from having a communication policy. Even when I was hourly, I had a strict policy.”

She has streamlined processes like discovery. With any new document, her paralegal puts requests in one column to which Edwards clicks one of three options: answer the request; answer the request subject to objections; do not respond. Another column has a drop-down menu of objections they’ve gathered over the years. The whole process takes 90 seconds.

“I’m trying to skip all the complicated stuff,” she says, “so the system will show what you gave me, and what you didn’t, so we don’t have to go back and forth. Everything is in one place.”

“Regina has always been extremely efficient and also completely brilliant,” says Ashley Pepitone, a friend and fellow family law attorney who followed Edwards’ example in using flat fees. “That she’s able to be as successful in the courtroom and in business with more ease just bothers people. It bothers people until they realize she is the most giving person who really, truly wants to better the lives of other people.”

Her streamlined system may be her own invention, for example, but she doesn’t gatekeep. Since 2019, Edwards has run a Facebook group called “Lawyer on the Beach” to teach her systems and offer advice. The network has nearly 16,000 participants and Edwards hosts regular retreats for its members.

“We do a lot of online webinars and we had our first retreat to Cancun in May,” she says. “We also focus on work-life balance, and how to use technology to work less. People take the beach metaphor literally but I don’t even like the beach—I like being at the ocean on my balcony, looking at it from a safe, shark-free distance—but the point is your beach can be anything. It can be leaving every day at 2 to go to your daughter’s dance practices. It’s making time for life rather than being in the office until 10 every night.”

Though often working remotely, Edwards maintains an office in Lawrenceville—walking distance from her house. As a morning person, she likes to prepare for court at 6 a.m. then walk to the courthouse for trial.

And the cases keep coming. Edwards recalls what should have been an uncontested divorce between a childless couple. Edwards’ client was ready to go but the husband wouldn’t sign the papers; so it went to trial. There, Edwards ran an appraisal on the house, the value came in $100,000 higher than anticipated because of a recent deck the couple had added, and Edwards argued that her client was entitled to the extra cash. Which is when the husband ran his own appraisal and it came back at the original price. What changed? “He ripped the deck off the house to get a lower appraisal so he wouldn’t have to give her any money,” Edwards says. “What was so frustrating to me was he paid $60,000 in attorney’s fees and money to remodel the house just to get the same thing that we offered from the beginning.”

If he had just listened to Edwards early on, he could have kept the deck.