It Takes an Online Village

Muhammad Elsayed has always had a thirst for knowledge. He was born in New Jersey to parents who immigrated from Egypt in the late ’70s. When Elsayed was 4 years old, the family moved back to Cairo, where he attended three years of school before they returned to the States.

“I didn’t actually start learning English until the second grade, when we moved to Virginia,” he says.

But he soon caught up with, then surpassed, his peers. As a youngster, he devoured novels of all kinds, sometimes in one sitting. At George Mason University School of Law, he was not only the youngest graduating member of the class of 2013, he was valedictorian.

During law school, Elsayed interned on both sides of criminal law—at the Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney in Arlington and the Fairfax Public Defender’s Office and Federal Public Defender Office in Alexandria. “I really enjoyed defense work more and found it to be more fulfilling,” he says.

Elsayed’s first job out of law school was as an insurance defense attorney at a large D.C. firm. But he wanted a more personal connection with clients, so he moved to a smaller firm, Greenspun Shapiro, staying there for six years as he built a wealth of experience.

“I had certain benchmarks I wanted to meet,” he says. “Trying a murder case, doing a federal trial, doing my own solo jury trial on a felony—and I got to do all those things before I left on my own.”

In his first solo jury trial, Elsayed represented a hired driver charged with malicious wounding from a fight he’d had with a drunk, unruly passenger. It was a contentious trial with argumentative witnesses, a point Elsayed used in his favor.

“When I was cross-examining the alleged victim, he got very angry,” Elsayed says. “He was red in the face. He was just very argumentative, interrupting, speaking over me and things like that. So one of the closing arguments I made to the jury was, ‘You saw what this witness was like on the stand when he was in a suit and in court, supposedly on his best behavior. Can you imagine what he was like drunk in the middle of the night?’”

The jury sided with the hired driver.

Elsayed Law, located in Fairfax, began in October 2020 as a partnership between Elsayed and his older sister Maryam, a solo family law practitioner. “We talked about it on and off ever since we went to law school together,” he says. “The timing just happened to be right in 2020, and we decided to make the move.”

At first, Elsayed worried that he’d no longer have the support he had at a larger firm. “I quickly realized that was not the case,” he says. “Everybody in my network I’d developed in the six years before was still just as happy to help out and to mentor me and to answer questions.”

Elsayed has also been aided by email and Facebook groups for criminal defense attorneys, whose members provide both advice and physical assistance when needed.

“Just last week, I reached out to see if anybody would be willing to file something for me in Stafford County, which is quite a drive from Fairfax,” he says. “Within minutes, somebody responded. I sent it to him, and he filed it and date-stamped a copy. This is somebody I’ve never met in person; we just happen to be part of the same network. I’ve done this multiple times, and been on the other side as well, where I was able to help out other people.”

The legal community, he’s learned, is a small world, and lawyers’ reputations can have a huge impact on their careers. For attorneys like Elsayed, who strive to treat people with dignity and earnest attention, this is good news. He’s not only gotten referrals from his network, but from opposing counsel as well. A significant number of clients also seek out Elsayed because they’re looking for an Arabic-speaking attorney, a rarity in Northern Virginia.

Three years into the partnership with his sister, Elsayed says things are going great. “I’m just trying to enjoy the present and see where it takes me from there.

“What ultimately drew me in was the freedom that comes with it: the flexibility to set your own hours and the thrill of finding your own clients and making your own way.”