When a public figure sits down across from me, the legal questions are usually not what’s keeping them up. They want to know who is going to find out. Whether it reaches their employer, their sponsors, the other parents at their child’s school. Whether the number on a financial affidavit ends up in somebody’s feed by Friday. And for a licensed professional, whether something said in a pleading ends up in front of a board.

Those are fair questions, and they deserve a real answer instead of reassurance.

Since going into private practice I’ve represented recording artists, professional athletes, elected officials, business owners who spent thirty years building a name in this town, and members of the area’s most prestigious country clubs. I’ve also represented the spouses and partners of high-profile people. Their privacy gets exposed by association, through no choice of their own, and their interests matter every bit as much.

Before I joined Smith Debnam, I spent more than sixteen years on the District Court bench, including two and a half years as Wake County’s Chief District Court Judge. Before that I served as Wake County District Attorney and as an Assistant District Attorney. From the bench I heard thousands of family and civil cases, and you learn things sitting up there that you can’t learn from the other table. You learn which cases blow up, and why. It’s rarely the big legal question. It’s a filing nobody thought to seal, a document that went to the wrong inbox, a client who answered a text at midnight.

Discretion Has to Be Built In From Day One

Information travels fast and it does not come back. One leaked filing. A settlement figure repeated at the wrong dinner table. A photograph on the courthouse steps that gets a caption attached to it by lunch. For someone whose living depends on how they’re seen, that exposure can reach careers, business partnerships, professional licensing, and how their kids get treated at school.

You can win the ruling and still lose the year.

So discretion can’t be something we add after a problem shows up. It has to be designed into the case from the first phone call. Most of my work for these clients happens away from the courthouse, resolving things privately so the sensitive details never make it into the public record in the first place. When a case genuinely has to be tried, my clients have someone who has tried more than a hundred jury trials. But for a public figure, the quiet resolution is almost always the better result.

Big Estates Are About Classification, Not Division

North Carolina is an equitable distribution state. In a large estate, the hard part usually isn’t splitting things up. It’s figuring out what counts as marital in the first place, and what it’s actually worth.

Closely held businesses. Professional practices. Stock options, restricted stock, and deferred compensation plans. Real estate, retirement accounts, interests sitting inside trusts.

Take a family business someone started before the marriage and grew during it. How much of that growth is marital? What’s the company worth, and worth to whom? Those questions get answered by appraisers, forensic accountants, and tax professionals, and the answers can swing by hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on who you bring in and how early you bring them.

Prenuptial and postnuptial agreements can simplify this picture or complicate it, and North Carolina gives spouses real tools to define property rights in advance. Handling a sophisticated portfolio well means assembling the right team early, tracing where every asset came from, and running the tax consequences of each settlement structure. A split that looks even on paper isn’t always even once it lands in the client’s hands.

I’m a Certified Family Financial Settlement Mediator, and much of that work is exactly this: getting complicated money sorted out efficiently and quietly.

Your Financial Life Can Become Public Record

This is the part that surprises clients most.

Family law in North Carolina runs on disclosure. Equitable distribution affidavits. Financial affidavits supporting alimony and child support. Asset inventories, tax returns, business records. Once those get filed, they’re generally public. Not public in some abstract sense, either. Public as in a reporter can pull them. So can a competitor. So can anyone with a laptop and an interest, from home, at night, now that court records are searchable online.

For a high-net-worth client, that means account balances, income figures, business valuations, and private holdings sitting in a file that anybody can request. Once those numbers are out, no order really puts them back.

My job is to keep them from going out at all. Where I can, I resolve the financial issues through private negotiation and mediation, so the sensitive figures move between lawyers instead of onto a docket. I structure disclosures to give what the law requires and not a line more. And I seek protective orders or sealing for the material that genuinely warrants it. Knowing the difference matters, because judges can tell when a lawyer is overreaching, and asking for too much is a good way to get less.

Protecting a client’s finances and protecting their privacy turn out to be the same job.

Keeping Information From Leaking

Some of this is legal work. We can pursue protective orders governing discovery, move to seal what deserves sealing, and write real confidentiality provisions into settlement and separation agreements. Non-disclosure agreements can bind more than the parties. They can reach household staff, assistants, and business partners, the people with access that nobody thinks about until it’s too late.

The rest is discipline. Keep the case team to a need-to-know circle. Use secure, encrypted communication. Control who can open which document. And have an honest conversation about what not to post, forward, or say out loud in a restaurant.

A year of careful work can come apart in one reply posted at eleven o’clock at night. I’d rather spend an hour on that conversation up front than a month cleaning up after it.

The Part Nobody Puts in the File

Divorce is hard on anyone. Going through one while people watch is a different animal.

A lot of my clients feel like they’re never allowed to simply have the experience, to grieve the end of something, because they’re simultaneously managing an employer, colleagues, a fan base, and children who hear things at school before anyone has explained them at home. Pretending that isn’t happening doesn’t serve the client.

I can’t make that go away. What I can do is shrink the public footprint of the case, warn people in advance about the flashpoints that tend to come (they’re predictable), coordinate with communications professionals when that’s warranted, and keep the focus on where this lands in five years instead of reacting to what somebody wrote this morning. The goal is to give people back some control over their own story.

Why I Push Hard for Mediation

Litigation is public. Mediation isn’t. For most of my clients, that’s the whole argument.

But there’s a second reason. Mediation lets you build things a court simply can’t order. A parenting schedule that accounts for a touring calendar or a season. A business arrangement that keeps two people from being partners forever. A buyout structured over years instead of all at once. Courts are bound by statute. A negotiated agreement isn’t.

And material that never gets filed can’t be unsealed, leaked, or requested.

When a License Is on the Line

For a physician, a nurse, a lawyer, a pharmacist, an accountant, or anyone else who practices under a license, a family law case carries a risk most people never see coming. The license is the career. Everything else runs downstream of it.

The exposure usually isn’t the divorce. It’s what gets said inside it. An allegation of substance abuse dropped into a custody pleading. A domestic violence protective order, which is public and, depending on the board, reportable. A charge arising out of one bad night. An admission in a deposition about drinking or prescriptions that felt harmless in the moment and reads very differently sitting in a board’s file. And sometimes an opposing party who works out that a complaint to a licensing board costs nothing to file and a great deal to answer.

Many boards also require self-reporting, and those deadlines don’t pause while a custody case works its way through District Court. The two tracks have to be handled together, not one after the other. In practice that means weighing how a pleading is worded before it’s filed, being deliberate about what goes into an affidavit and what stays out, knowing which orders enter the public record and which don’t, and bringing in licensing counsel early when a board matter is genuinely in play.

A parenting schedule can be revisited. A license, once it’s under review, is a much harder thing to put back.

Representing Judges Before the Judicial Standards Commission

Few things are harder on a sitting judge than an inquiry from the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission, the body that investigates allegations of judicial misconduct and disability and recommends discipline to the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

I know what that’s like from the inside. I wore the robe for more than sixteen years. I know what it does to a person to have a career built over decades suddenly held up for examination, and what it does to a family. These matters are serious, and they are frightening, and I’m not sure lawyers who haven’t sat on the bench fully appreciate that second part.

I’ve represented several judges before the Commission. What I bring to that work is an understanding of judicial life from having lived it, and the discretion these matters require. A judge in that position deserves counsel who takes it as seriously as they do.

Why Clients Trust Me With This

High-profile clients need more than a competent lawyer. They need one who has seen the case from both sides of the bench and who keeps their confidence completely.

My background is an unusual combination: former Chief District Court Judge, former Wake County District Attorney, Certified Family Financial Settlement Mediator, and a trial lawyer with more than a hundred jury trials behind him. I’m a past president of the Wake County Bar Association and a recipient of its President’s Award for Excellence, and in 2024 the Governor awarded me the Old North State Award. I’ve taught family law and civil litigation as an adjunct professor at Meredith College and led more than a hundred hours of continuing legal education for lawyers around the state.

The credentials matter less than what they add up to, which is judgment. I can look at a matter and see it the way the judge will see it. I can usually tell where it’s going to go wrong before it does. And I know how to steer it toward an ending that protects a client’s privacy, their assets, and their name.

Contact

If you’re a public figure or the spouse or partner of one, a high-net-worth individual facing a family law matter, a physician, nurse, lawyer, or other licensed professional whose career could get caught up in one, or a judge facing an inquiry before the Judicial Standards Commission, and privacy is a priority, I’d welcome a confidential conversation.