After a group of moms tore her apart in a local mom group on Facebook, TikToker Courtney (@lawyercourtneydriskell) is opening up about what’s going on.
For some background, she is a family law attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and she owns a law firm. She does not come from a family of wealth or lawyers.
She went to law school when she was almost 30 years old, pregnant, and going through a divorce. She needed to find a way to provide for herself and a child, so she decided to go to school.
At the time, she was working a minimum wage job and didn’t even have an associate’s degree. After finally earning her bachelor’s degree, she realized she had an interest in law.
So, she applied to law school and interned at the district attorney’s office in cases involving crimes against children.
During that time, she was raising her son alone and not receiving any financial support. She worked multiple jobs to put herself through law school.
She was an intern by day and an English teacher to kids in China by night. She would have time to sleep between midnight and 2 a.m.
“It was years of sacrifice to get to where we are, and I’m at a spot now where we opened up the law firm last year, and it’s amazing,” said Courtney.
“I’m so grateful for it. I’m grateful that it’s been successful, but it’s still hard. I work seven days a week, 12, 14, 16 hours a day, even when I go on vacation with my family.”
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She really cares about her clients and can relate to the challenges they’re facing. She offers free consultations because she wants people to feel like they can call and ask for help without worrying about money at first.
She also has high standards for her team and accepts nothing but the best quality work from them. However, her team has started to burn out recently because of all the work they’ve been doing.
“I tried to keep our rates low because I’m like, the lower our rates are, the more clients that can afford us, and I had to do three rate increases this year,” explained Courtney.
“I started my rates so low that I had to start bumping them up because I’m not making enough to pay my team what they deserve.”
After increasing the rates, she gave every single one of her team members a raise. Meanwhile, her pay has not increased at all. One day, she saw that a mom in Tulsa had posted about how irritated she was with Courtney’s firm for raising their rates.
But Courtney had had no choice. Sadly, it means she will have to lose some clients, but she needs her legal team and has to pay them fairly.
The only other alternative is that her firm shuts down, and then she won’t be able to help people, which is what she has always wanted to do. It’s why she got into the law profession in the first place.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
