Joshua Michael Stahley

There is a particular disappointment familiar to anyone who has retained a large firm: the partner who took the meeting is not the person who makes the calls. The work descends. By the third month the matter sits with someone competent but unacquainted, reading the file for the first time at the client’s expense.

This firm is arranged so that cannot happen. It is a practice of one lawyer by design rather than by circumstance, and the effect is not modesty but continuity — the person who drafted a trust in 2019 is the person who will administer it, defend it if it is contested, and remember precisely why the third clause reads the way it does.

What follows is his account of himself: where he trained, what he is admitted to do, and how the two halves of this practice — drafting instruments and litigating them — continually instruct one another.

Joshua Michael Stahley founded the firm in 2016 on a conviction that has not since required revision: that a client of a serious practice should speak with the lawyer doing the work. He is the attorney on every file the firm opens.

He read tax law at New York University, having taken his law degree at the University of Florida, and practises across the boundary that separates planning from dispute — drafting the instruments in one department and defending them in another. It is an unusual combination, and it informs both halves. A plan drafted by someone who has litigated one is a plan drafted with an eye on how it will be read by a person who resents it.

The practice is deliberately broad. A family that engages the firm for an estate plan may return with a guardianship, the sale of a company, a dispute with a contractor, or a matter before a state agency. Handling those under one roof means the lawyer already knows the family when the difficult call comes, and there is no month lost bringing new counsel up to the facts.

He is admitted in Florida, before the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and before the United States Tax Court. He works from the principal office in Fort Lauderdale and meets clients at the firm’s offices in Miami, Coral Gables, Boca Raton and Sunrise.

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