Keep on Swimming

During one of her law school classes, Dara Goldsmith listened intently as a guest speaker described how he’d negotiated a settlement on behalf of passengers on a Delta airplane that crash landed in New Orleans. He called it, “the least amount of money paid out in the history of aerospace when you take into account cost-of-living adjustments” after a Delta plane carrying about 100 passengers collided with the runway in New Orleans.

When he finished his story, Goldsmith raised her hand. “Was that crash on January 2, 1976?”

“He turned white and said, ‘Yes, it was,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, I was one of the passengers on that aircraft.’”

“I was 9 at the time,” she notes. “The landing gear didn’t come down correctly and we landed in a swamp. We got to go down on the slide. I thought it was cool. … If anyone’s ever a white-knuckler near me on a plane, I’m like, ‘I’ve been in a plane crash. You only get one.’”

For nearly three decades, 58-year-old Goldsmith has drawn from that same level-headed attitude, peppered by an adventurous spirit and sarcastic sense of humor, as a trust and estate litigator at the women-owned Goldsmith & Guymon in Las Vegas. In court, she prides herself on describing the pros and cons of a case in easy-to-understand language and keeping her cool as “the reasonable person in the room.”

A practicing triathlete, she also belongs to the Las Vegas Masters swim team and regularly medals at meets across the U.S.

“Dara adds so much value to everything she does,” says 8th Judicial District Court Judge Nancy Allf, who served with Goldsmith on the Clark County Bar Association and State Bar of Nevada’s Board of Governors, and oversaw some of Goldsmith’s court cases before her retirement. “Volunteers for our professional organizations are few and far between, and someone like Dara is rare, in part because of her perspective, but mostly because she’s someone you can always count on. … She carries that same intelligence and character into her law practice. As a judge, I could rely on her representations as to the facts and the law. She was always prepared and able to respond to the most difficult questions, bringing her analysis of the issues with clarity and composure.”

Growing up near Malibu’s Zuma Beach in Southern California, Goldsmith began swimming competitively at age 7. It wasn’t her idea. “I was a little bit of a chunky child, so my parents gave me a choice of either swimming or ballet. So I joined swimming. It was less offensive than wearing a tutu.”

She apparently had fewer qualms about donning the requisite gown as homecoming queen at California State University Northridge, where she enrolled at 16 thanks to the state proficiency exam and a desire to keep competing in swim meets that caused her to miss many of her high school classes.

Following her dad’s lead—“he was an attorney in the aerospace industry, and he never could talk about it, so I was always interested,” she says—Goldsmith graduated from Pepperdine University School of Law in 1990 and later earned her LL.M. in taxation from the University of Miami. Moving to Las Vegas for the healthy job market, she joined Marquis, Haney & Aurbach but soon found herself in the middle of a “professional divorce,” and followed the Haney side when the company split. There, she was charged with the office setup, from acquiring letterhead and finding malpractice insurance to negotiating the lease and ordering computer software. “I was the newest attorney who knew how to set up businesses,” she says. “I got to learn how to set up a law firm on somebody else’s nickel. … At the time, I didn’t value that experience, but in retrospect it was great.”

One of her earliest, and most memorable, cases involved an estate settlement and a judge who happened to be the decedent’s best friend. When he declined to grant her request and recuse himself, young Goldsmith countered, “Your honor, I believe you would be better suited to be a witness.” He swiftly overruled.

Later, she got a call from the probate commissioner, who asked if she was married and if Gelbman was her married or maiden name. “He said I should change my name, and that he would reintroduce me to the judge at the next hearing,” she says.

Goldsmith took the commissioner’s suggestion to heart, re-registered her marriage certificate at the county clerk’s office, and continued to appear before the judge for another year and a half, until he retired. “He never put together that I was the same person,” she says.

In 1996, when her firm merged with another, she and fellow attorney Marjorie Guymon joined forces to open a firm together, taking cases, large and small, as far as the Nevada Supreme Court. Once, in a pro bono case, she represented the children of a couple killed in a car accident at the state line. With the family’s attorney convicted of stealing more than $1 million from clients, Goldsmith successfully recovered some of their inheritance through the Clients’ Security Fund, what was left of the lawyer’s practice, and his wife’s bankruptcy. “Those types of cases are very rewarding, when you are able to help people who’ve been taken advantage of. But they’re all rewarding in their own different ways because they’re all puzzles.”

Reward doesn’t always equate to a financial victory. Known for her commitment to pro bono work, she handles everything from probate and guardianship cases to health care power of attorney documents for those who can’t afford the usual legal fees. She recently won the Clark County Law Foundation’s 2025 Liberty Bell Award for, among other things, helping create the CCBA’s Trial by Peers program, in which young people charged with misdemeanors are tried, defended and sentenced by other teens in court before a judge and assisted by a senior attorney.

The steady flow of pro bono awards for Goldsmith and her legal team from nonprofit organizations like Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, Southern Nevada Senior Law Program, and Nevada Legal Services often surpasses that of larger firms. The contrast has, at times, been so stark that, about 15 years ago, a state Supreme Court justice questioned the legal service provider about one of the honors. “How can this firm get this award? They don’t even have a statewide presence.”

“We can always count on them, and they take our cases,” the provider responded.

“So this Supreme Court justice went to a bunch of the big law firms and challenged them: ‘How can you let this little law firm beat you?’” Goldsmith says. “Then we were out of the running for a number of years, but that’s fine with us. We just want to get other people inspired to do it.”

To balance the demands of her day job, Goldsmith often combines her love of travel and adventure with the rigors of swimming the open sea. In addition to climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu—most travelers take the train—with her family, she’s competed in a swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco and the Waikiki Roughwater, one of the oldest open-water races. During the pandemic, she and a group of friends swam the entire stretch of Orange County coast; the following year, they skirted 24 of the 28 ocean-facing piers in California. On a recent trip to Italy, she and her husband crossed islands from Vulcano to Lipari off the coast of Sicily.

“It’s a thinking person’s sport, because you don’t want to swim by yourself,” she says. “It’s kind of like running, but it doesn’t hurt as much. It’s a really good way to exercise. It’s a really good release. … Some people scuba dive. Some people go out on boats. We swim.”

The most challenging course she’s completed was a relay with six participants, two at a time, from Catalina Island to mainland Los Angeles. Plunging into the pitch-black water off the deck of a fishing boat at 1:00 in the morning, she swam the third leg of the 26 miles unable to see anything but the shadowy shape of an oil derrick in the distance. “That was mentally challenging,” she admits, “to not be too scared.”

Her designated partner was at least 15 years her junior, six inches taller than her, and confident the route would be “a piece of cake.” “I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m golden. If some shark comes up, she is going to kick that shark’s butt. She’s going to take care of me,’’ Goldsmith says.

To her surprise, her partner jumped into the water and immediately burst into tears. “We can’t touch each other, so I’m like, ‘Focus, focus. You’re going to be fine. Put your head down and we’re going to swim, swim, swim, just like Dory. We’re just going to swim.’”

Another difficult race took place at Cozumel. Swimming against the strong current, Goldsmith realized she was going nowhere. “I could see the same rock for like half an hour, and I’m getting tired. This race is going really slow. There are not that many people around me. … I found out later that most people quit and swam back the other way.”

Hitching herself to a stout male competitor’s hip as they struggled to move through the water, Goldsmith finally reached the beach, only to find her husband, Michael, and youngest son, Trevor, waiting on the sand with their medals. It had taken her three hours to finish the 5K—her standard time for a race twice that long—so how did they finish before her? “My son goes, ‘Oh, I came in on a Jet Ski. I didn’t finish the race. And my husband’s like, ‘I just cut back and I couldn’t finish either. I quit an hour ago and swam back.’”

Such disappointments serve as reminders for the highly competitive Goldsmith that “lawyers don’t win all the time. You lose a lot. So you better learn to get back up on your feet and move on. Do your best. It’s all you can do.”

One of the oldest female-owned firms in the state, Goldsmith & Guymon has mentored a number of young attorneys, hiring people from “all ethnicities, colors and creeds,” not because they were mandated to, she says, but because, “that’s who we are.”

Goldsmith started bringing her boys to the office with her when they were just a week old. One day when Andrew, her oldest, was about 4, a female judge who was visiting the office, asked him, “When you grow up, are you going to be an attorney?”

“He looked her right in the eye and said, ‘No, that’s a girl’s job,’” Goldsmith remembers with a laugh. “Then she said, ‘Andrew, I’ve waited my whole life for someone to tell me that.’”

Turns out Andrew warmed up to the “girl’s job.” He’s now a Clark County public defender, and his brother Trevor is currently in law school.

Much of her own fearlessness, Goldsmith says, comes from “really looking at a problem and … not being confined to what, normally, people would think the solution is, kind of like MacGyver. He looks at a problem and is like, ‘Well, I don’t have this tool to fix it, but I do have a hairpin, a rubber band and a match, so I can make it work.’ I think maybe being in a plane crash did that. I never really knew there were walls or barriers.”