Description:
The Role:The Litigation Associate will work directly with the firm's partners. The attorney will assist with and, depending on experience, take primary responsibility for contested estate, trust, guardianship, and real-property matters.
Our litigation matters include:
- Will contests and contested probate proceedings
- Trust disputes
- Breach of fiduciary duty claims
- Removal actions involving personal representatives, trustees, guardians, and other fiduciaries
- Undue influence and incapacity claims
- Estate and trust accountings
- Guardianship proceedings
- Partition, ownership, title, boundary, and other contested real-property disputes
- Related civil litigation matters
Responsibilities:
The attorney's responsibilities will include:
- Managing litigation matters from initial investigation through resolution
- Drafting complaints, answers, motions, discovery requests, discovery responses, memoranda, and other court filings
- Conducting legal research and preparing written legal analysis
- Handling document review and discovery
- Preparing for and taking depositions
- Preparing witnesses and clients for hearings, depositions, mediations, and trial
- Appearing in Maryland courts
- Participating in hearings, mediations, settlement conferences, and trials
- Communicating regularly with clients, opposing counsel, experts, and court personnel
- Developing case strategy in collaboration with the firm's partners
- Maintaining organized files, deadlines, billing entries, and case-management records
- Working with paralegals and other members of the firm's litigation team
- The level of independent responsibility will depend on the attorney's experience and demonstrated ability. We're building out this practice area, and the attorney who joins us now has real room to shape it.
Qualifications:
Required qualifications include:
- Active membership in good standing with the Maryland Bar
- Strong legal research and writing skills
- Excellent organizational and time-management abilities
- Sound professional judgment
- Strong interpersonal and client-communication skills
- The ability to manage multiple deadlines and matters
- A willingness to take ownership of cases and move them forward proactively
- Professionalism, reliability, and attention to detail
Preferred Qualifications include:
- Approximately two to five years of civil-litigation experience, although we are flexible and will consider strong candidates with different levels of experience
- Admission to the District of Columbia Bar
- Experience drafting substantive motions, handling discovery, appearing in court, taking depositions, or managing litigation files
- Experience involving estates, trusts, probate, guardianships, fiduciary disputes, or real-property litigation
- Prior estates-and-trusts litigation experience is preferred but not required. We are willing to train an attorney with strong general civil-litigation skills and an interest in developing expertise in this area.
Judicial clerks, government attorneys, and litigators seeking to transition into estates-and-trusts litigation are encouraged to apply.
