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May 19, 2026
Katie Egan is board certified for Family Law Trials by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. The credential is rare and important. It cannot be bought, networked into, or accumulated through seniority. The only way to earn it is to have actually done years of trial work and to prove it to an external panel of judges and lawyers who do not know the applicant and owe her nothing.
The default assumption in American culture is that lawyers are largely interchangeable. A law license is a law license. A divorce attorney is a divorce attorney. Law firm marketing reinforces this, because every firm website uses the same vocabulary: aggressive, compassionate, experienced, results driven.
That assumption is wrong in the same way it would be wrong to assume that all doctors are interchangeable. A patient would not let an internist perform open heart surgery merely because the internist went to medical school. But the legal profession has done a poor job of teaching the public how to distinguish a lawyer who happens to handle divorces from a lawyer who is actually trained, tested, and externally verified to try family law cases in a courtroom.
The difference matters. It possibly matters more in family law than in almost any other area of practice, because the stakes are personal, the proceedings are emotionally charged, and cases that go badly cannot be unwound.
WHAT BOARD CERTIFICATION IS
Board certification is a credential that exists above and beyond a law license. It is voluntary. It is not required to practice. It is not awarded for paying dues, attending continuing education classes, or appearing on a directory list. It is only earned through an external review process, and most lawyers never attempt it because most lawyers would not qualify if they did.
In medicine, board certification is the norm. Patients expect their cardiologist to be board certified in cardiology. In law, board certification is the exception. Across the entire United States, only about four percent of practicing lawyers hold a board certification of any kind from any certifying body. The percentage of lawyers certified specifically as family law trial specialists is a small fraction of that.
THE NATIONAL BOARD OF TRIAL ADVOCACY
The National Board of Trial Advocacy was founded in 1977. The idea for it came from Warren Burger, then Chief Justice of the United States, who in a 1973 lecture at Fordham Law School publicly called the absence of trial lawyer certification a major cause of what he described as the low state of American trial advocacy. He argued that if the medical profession could identify its specialists, the legal profession could too, and that the public deserved a way to find lawyers who could actually try cases.
The NBTA is accredited by the American Bar Association. It certifies lawyers as specialists in a small number of trial practice areas, one of which is family law trial advocacy. Across all of its specialty areas combined, approximately 2,000 to 2,400 lawyers in the entire country hold NBTA board certification at any given time. The number certified specifically as family law trial specialists is a small fraction of that total.
WHAT BOARD CERTIFICATION SAYS ABOUT KATIE EGAN
Every element of the NBTA certification process is documentary. The board is not predicting what Katie Egan might do as a lawyer. It is certifying what she has already done.
The trials counted toward her application are real cases. Each one was tried by Katie as lead counsel, from opening through evidence, cross examination, and closing argument, to a verdict or judgment entered by a court. These are not cases that settled on the courthouse steps. They are cases tried in front of judges, with witnesses on the stand, with the outcome depending on the work Katie did in the room.
The judges who endorsed her application have personally watched her try cases. They are not friends of the firm signing a generic letter of recommendation. They are jurists who sat on the bench while Katie examined witnesses, made evidentiary arguments, and handled objections in their courtrooms. The same is true of the attorney references. These are lawyers who have been across the table from her, or who have observed her work in their own matters, and who were willing to attest in writing to her courtroom ability and her professional integrity.
What all of this validates, taken together, is not theoretical aptitude. It is a sustained body of work, done by Katie, witnessed by judges and opposing counsel, documented in real case files, and tested under examination conditions by people who do the work themselves.
There is something else the credential says, though the NBTA does not put it this way. Family law trials are not the same as commercial trials, and they are not the same as personal injury or criminal trials. The witnesses are spouses, parents, and sometimes children. Financial issues are tangled together with custody and household stability. The cases routinely involve forensic accountants, business appraisers, mental health professionals, vocational experts, and guardians ad litem. The proof problems are different. The emotional pressure inside the courtroom is different. The standards for admissibility, the use of hearsay exceptions, the management of expert testimony, and the rules governing what a child can and cannot say in a proceeding are specific to this work. A lawyer who has tried these cases to verdict, repeatedly, has developed a particular set of skills that does not transfer automatically from other kinds of litigation.
Katie has those skills. Her board certification is the external validation of them. The body of work that earned the credential, the cases tried, the clients represented, the hearings prepared and conducted, the briefs written, the years of preparation, came first. The certification followed because the work was already there to be validated and confirmed.
WHY THIS MATTERS PARTICULARLY IN FAMILY LAW
Most family law matters never reach a trial. They settle, mediate, or are resolved by agreement. That is often the right outcome. But the value a family lawyer can produce in any negotiation is directly tied to what would happen if the case did proceed to trial. Opposing counsel knows whether the lawyer across the table can actually try the case. Judges know. Financial experts know. Eventually, the other side’s client learns.
A lawyer who cannot credibly try a contested family case is negotiating from a different position than a lawyer who can. That difference shapes every settlement figure, every custody arrangement, and every protective provision in a final decree.
In high net worth and high conflict family cases, where the issues include business valuations, executive compensation, trust and estate interests, complex custody disputes, and assets in more than one state or country, the ability to actually take a case to trial and win is not theoretical. It is the floor on which the entire negotiation stands.
Board certification is one of the only credentials that tests for this directly. A lawyer can be elected to academies, listed in directories, or ranked by publications without ever having to demonstrate courtroom skill to an outside examiner. NBTA board certification requires that demonstration.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE FIRM AND ITS CLIENTS
Both senior partners of the firm, Aaron and Katie, are now board certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy for Family Law Trials. That pairing is unusual. In most firms that present themselves as family law trial firms, this credential is held by one lawyer or by none.
For clients, that means the firm’s bench strength is not a marketing claim. Both senior lawyers in the firm have independently met the same exacting external standard. For the firm’s associates, it means working nad training alongside two lawyers who have been tested and verified as family law trial specialists by a national accrediting body. The training is not theory passed down from one practitioner who tried cases years ago. It is two lawyers who have done the work, who are doing the work, and who remain accountable to a recertification process that requires them to keep doing it.
Katie earned this credential. The trials, the hearings, the briefs, the years of preparation, the examination, and the peer review are all hers. The work that earned the credential is the work her clients have been receiving all along.
Congratulations, Katie.
