Carlene H Lacy

Carlene is a sole practitioner and works one-on-one with her clients. She always meets with them and personally handles each and every client's legal matters. Her goal, when entering the legal profession, was to focus on the elderly and estate planning. She is finally in a position to fulfill that dream.

Her broad spectrum of experience and background in the engineering, building, marketing and business professions gives her a working insight into the unique needs of clients. Her concentrated experience in criminal defense offers clients in need of those skills a confident, experienced and knowledgeable litigation professional.

Carlene was born and raised in New Mexico. Her father was sheriff of DeBaca County, NM, and provided her with a compassionate outlook and first experience with the law and legal issues. However, it was after many years in engineering, marketing and corporate management before she finally fulfilled her dream of studying law.

Carlene studied engineering at New Mexico State University and began a career of plumbing, HVAC and high-pressure piping design in Dallas, TX. She worked on many recognizable buildings in the Dallas skyline as well as DFW Airport. She joined The Southland Corp. (7-Eleven Stores, Dairies, Ice plants, Food Distribution, etc) where she was named Stores Planning Manager for world-wide design and development of 7-Eleven Stores.

After several years in that position she was asked to form a liaison department between marketing, construction and equipment suppliers. The resulting position of Stores Equipment Manager allowed her to use her acquired skills in engineering and her knowledge of marketing and customer needs to propose and develop equipment that is used in retail food stores throughout the world.

After leaving Southland she accepted the position of Director of Special Marketing for an internationally recognized drink dispenser manufacturer. In this position she worked with the special customers, such as the corporate equipment and marketing departments of Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, McDonald's, etc. to fulfill their equipment development needs.

During this time she was a sought-after speaker for the food industry consumer marketing organizations. This led to the formation of a convenience store consulting firm which worked with middle to small sized convenience store chains, nationwide, to develop a full package project from site plans to marketing layouts.

When the opportunity arose to finally fulfill the dream of becoming an attorney, she and her husband left Las Vegas, closed her firm and moved to Oklahoma where she attended Oklahoma City University School of Law. (There was no law school in Las Vegas at that time) After law school she and her husband moved back to Las Vegas, NV where she worked with a firm which serviced the major casinos by providing personal injury defense and contract development with performers and unions.

She moved to Kingman, Arizona in 1998 where she began her career in indigent criminal defense. She worked in that capacity for several years and became the senior trial attorney for the Public Defender's Office. She functioned as Acting Public Defender for a year and then as Managing Attorney before entering private practice.