Elise Buie is the founder of Elise Buie Family Law, a Seattle-based firm serving clients across Washington state. Her writing on divorce, parenting, and family law has appeared in Psychology Today, Above the Law, The Seattle Times, and HuffPost, among others. After evacuating New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, she eventually relocated her family to the Pacific Northwest and built a fully virtual firm from the ground up.
I asked Elise what led her to start her own practice.
"Well, very honestly and basically, it was that I needed to pay for four children to go to college," she told me. "I was working for somebody else at the time, and when we were in negotiations about her hiring me on full-time, she just was not going to pay me fairly at all. I thought, I can't do this. I've got four kids to send to college."
She started the firm with that single goal. She later remarried, blending their families into a household of six kids. Growing a law firm while raising six children forced her to approach leadership differently than many founders do.
"I think a lot of us get in that mindset of, oh, we just do it all," she said. "I am the reverse. I'm a 'who can help me' girl. I think probably just having that large family of kids — six is not a small number of humans to be maximizing while you're growing a law firm. Because I was so open to delegation, that helped me so much to build a team."
She brought in people with different skill sets, empowering them to take ownership of their roles. She built out a large virtual assistant team to handle data and metrics, and she worked with an executive assistant to manage her personal delegation.
"I learned very early on that I tend to be somewhat of a perfectionist," she said. "I really would be like, well, I can't delegate this unless it's going to come back perfect. I had to understand that you're missing the boat completely. Maybe it comes back at 80% perfect. But one, there's teaching in all of that. And two, if somebody's taking 80% of the load off of me, I can do the 20%."
She began doing regular exercises to evaluate her time, asking herself: Did I actually go to law school to do this?
She added that she has also learned to be honest about her weak spots — leaning into what others do better rather than holding on. "I have come to understand that my perfectionism was a blockage I didn't need. The people around me are so much smarter, wiser — they come up with better."
Today, her team is around 50 people — a combination of employees and contractors, all working virtually. To keep everyone aligned, she relies on a strong leadership team, regular meetings, and a culture of open communication. Their bonus structure includes consideration of specific behaviors — one being feedback.
"We consider ourselves a very flat organization," she said. "We want feedback to be flowing all the ways. When we look at our org chart, we think of me as the middle, but we think of it as like a bicycle spoke. It kind of goes out, but I want people to feel as comfortable giving me feedback as I would feel giving somebody feedback."
That culture of psychological safety is central to how she runs the firm, and it extends directly to how they treat the people who hire them.
"We are doing our very best to create an environment, both for our clients and for our team members, that is safe, emotionally intelligent, filled with unreasonable hospitality, where we are having direct conversations. That's what I think is important, both in my firm, but also for family law clients — being able to have those difficult conversations."
Are you dealing with a divorce, custody dispute, or family law matter in Washington state? Connect with Elise Buie and check out Elise Buie Family Law Group.