Shelbie Hankey is the founder of Hankey Law Firm, a family law practice based in Cullman, Alabama, serving clients across Northern Alabama in divorce, custody, and child support matters. Her firm's promise to clients is direct: "You're a person, not a case number."
I asked Shelbie what led her to start her own firm.
"I opened my firm by default," she told me. "I was practicing at a large firm in Birmingham and they kind of did away with the type of cases I was handling. I was in my 20s, wasn't married, didn't have children yet. So I took what I had and opened a little bitty one-room office."
She started with real estate closings - work she knew from before law school - and built from there. Two decades later, the firm has grown into a team with a clear identity: client-first, empathy-driven, and deeply rooted in the community it serves.
"I don't know that I really had a vision when I started, other than to just survive," she said. "Now, there's just the only real problem I have is there being enough of me to do everything I want to do."
What she wants to do more of is serve. Shelbie has begun partnering with a local state bar to run legal clinics, currently four times a year, with plans to expand to monthly, where community members can get basic legal guidance before small problems become large ones.
"A lot of times people just really get overwhelmed with any kind of legal document and what they end up doing is ignoring it," she said. "And then it ends up snowballing and it becomes a much bigger problem than it ever had to be."
Some of the most meaningful work the firm has done has been exactly that kind of intervention. She has helped people who were born at home and never received birth certificates - people who, without that document, couldn't get a driver's license, couldn't go to college, and were at an impasse in their lives.
"It's about access to justice and making sure that people can have the assistance they need to navigate the legal system."
Inside the firm, she leads the same way - by trying to understand where people actually are. She describes herself as naturally type A, and building the empathy side of leadership took time.
"It took a while for me to build that empathy side of me, to understand that people maybe weren't just not doing their best work intentionally, that there was a reason behind it."
The people who work at Hankey Law Firm notice. She keeps firm boundaries around work hours, holds one-on-one conversations when someone is struggling, and has built a culture where the team consistently says how much they love working there. Two decades in, Hankey Law Firm is exactly what she built it to be: where empathy meets legal acumen.
Are you dealing with a family law matter in Northern Alabama? Connect with Shelbie Hankey and check out Hankey Law Firm, LLC.