Stacy Dyan Heard

If you're looking for a lawyer for a difficult family law case, stop what you're doing and call Stacy now. I promise you won't regret it. It is not an exaggeration to say that Stacy saved my life. I was in an abusive marriage. My children were also being abused. I was terrified that if I took... any action that my ex would take the children and I'd be unable to see or protect them anymore. I felt hopeless, like there was no way to extricate myself while keeping the kids safe. Eventually it got bad enough that I knew I had to act. I was lucky enough to find Stacy in late December, years ago. Stacy worked tirelessly through the holidays to help me rush to get an emergency restraining order -- an order we were successfully granted in early January. Unfortunately, we were only just getting started. That was the beginning of an incredibly hard-fought and complicated legal struggle. My ex was smart and well-funded, and was not above using every means at her disposal to undermine the process. We had to deal with: spurious CPS escalations, failure to respond to discovery, hiding money in foreign bank accounts, concerns of flight risk to home country, spurious allegations of neglect, and much much more. I am 100% confident that my case could've imploded with a less skilled attorney. Stacy did an unbelievable job in keeping all of these plates spinning. She is a gifted strategist, able to anticipate possible tactics and guard against them. One noteworthy example: Stacy had anticipated that my ex would attempt to make false allegations of neglect, and advised me to make regular well-child checkups with my son's PCP. As a result, when my ex attempted to claim long-running untreated illness, we were able to prove these allegations false. I was and am so grateful to have had an attorney that cared enough to prepare me for these practical considerations -- and wasn't simply content to file legal documents. 5 years later, when the divorce decree was signed, I felt confident that both Stacy and I had done everything in our power to work for the best result possible. I don't even walk to think what would have happened if I hadn't had Stacy in my corner. Having been out of this abusive relationship for years, free to rebuild my life, and having my kids' lives stabilized is a priceless gift. I'm very grateful for all Stacy has done.

I hired Stacy blindly because I was desperate and she was in my stepfather's networking group. I was charged over $4000 for her review of documents. I was then asked if I had questions and criticized. I was given no guidance and there was no plan at all. She had no understanding of domestic abuse, p...ower dynamics, or the hell that is the family law system. When I terminated her, she emailed my stepfather telling him, which made no sense to me and which I felt was inappropriate. She sent me a long letter clearly trying to cover herself in the event I filed a Bar complaint. I then hired a recommended attorney. In the free consultation, he immediately identified the problem and how to address it. This would have been a $50k case with Stacy, and would have been very detrimental to me emotionally. I also would have lost. On the bright side, her assistant - who appears to do much of the work - is very nice and professional.

I hired Stacy to represent me in a child custody/guardianship case. She is very knowledgeable about family law matters and provided me with information about the court process. Stacy told me she could help me if I helped her by providing her with the information needed to build my case. I found he...r experience and caring attitude very beneficial to me.

Stacy was referred by another attorney friend. Now that my case is over, I cannot recommend her enough to anyone doing their homework on seeking a family law attorney. The bottom line is that nobody wants to be involved in family court, but the facts are that sometimes you just have to be. When t...hat happens you want someone that knows exactly what they are doing. You want someone that is organized and will be honest with you even if it is not what you want to hear. You also want someone that knows family law forwards and backwards. She is all of this. Sometimes my situation was so messy that I didn't even know what to do or how to get through the day without feeling like it was never going to end. She was very reassuring. She had a plan and was very open about how we would solve the issues we were facing. She was also very honest about everything that could happen. I appreciated this because it helped me prepare for whatever could happen. From the moment I met Stacey I was impressed by her knowledge of the law and her confidence in being able to take over a case that was so incredibly messy. My case and the other party were very complicated. My ex was off the rails through the entire process and my previous attorney had sat on his hands for over a year. Within one month of Stacey taking on the case she did more for me in 30 days than the previous attorney did in one year! Any questions I ever had were answered quickly via email. She would also explain things thoroughly. Her assistant was amazing through our entire process, too. Extremely organized and on top of everything. Emails were responded to efficiently and timely. Not one time did I feel like I was hanging on by a thread waiting to hear back from them. In the end - our case is finally over. My kids are doing exceptionally well after being in a bad situation. I will always have a special place in my heart for what Stacey was able to accomplish in my case. She was ethical and honest with me the entire time.

Stacy Heard handled a complicated custody issue for us. It was high conflict with the opposing party and very stressful. Ms. Heard took over for another lawyer who had let our case flounder and got it back on track. She had to work hard to fix many of his mistakes and at the end, we got a better resu...lt than we expected. The best things about Ms. Heard are: She has your back 100% and you can trust her completely. She kept us up-to-date on all court filings, responses and deadlines. She is very knowledgable about family law which is her specialty. We had to file an appeal which was decided in our favor due to errors by the judge/commissioner. I know that our previous lawyer would not have done the due diligence to keep our case moving forward. There are 2 reasons we did not give her 5 stars overall. The first is when we had to deal with getting reports from the children's therapists. She would get annoyed that we didn't have the reports fast enough and when we did get them, they were not quite as specific as they could be. Therapists are bound to privacy/confidentiality rules and since we weren't getting full psych evaluations, there was less specific information available. There wasn't much we could do about it but we felt like she expected us to do more than was possible. The second reason is that after some of the court rulings were decided, we felt we hadn't done enough planning for contingencies. Ex: if we won what could we ask for, if we lost how could we limit the damage. Due to some of this poor planning we were unable to control some of the situations that came up because we didn't have clear guidelines from the court. We were partly responsible for this because we didn't think to ask about these scenarios. We did feel she could have had some strategies for us to handle certain outcomes. In all fairness, it is hard to tell which way your ruling will go but we do believe there could have been more planning for those situations. She is very professional but can sometimes come across a little too tough. You have to be able to handle that. She is also very empathetic and understanding. She will do everything she is capable of to win your case. She did as much as she could to help us win and we did win. We had a difficult, stressful and relentless case that was very hard to handle from almost every angle. Stacy did an excellent job for us and I would highly recommend her services.