Before family law became Chrissy Mincy’s bread and butter, music fueled her youth.
Musical notes leap off her memory like sparks from a wildfire as Mincy recalls her father playing Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” by ear on an acoustic guitar in their Soddy-Daisy home. For years, she thought he composed the song, she says.
Mincy learned the true origins of the tune as she and her father spent hours listening to Chattanooga’s KZ106 and vying to be the first one to guess the classic rock songs the radio station played.
“I listened to a lot of seventies music with my dad,” she says, smiling at her fond memory of their games of “Name That Tune.”
Music either made Mincy brave or it brought her innate courage to the surface as she found ways to spend her years as a student at Louisiana State University working along the edges of the industry.
If Mincy wanted to attend a concert, she’d call House of Blues or Tipitina’s and offer to place posters advertising the event around campus in exchange for free tickets; she landed a marketing job surveying the audiences at the concerts of Atlantic Records’ recording artists; and she strutted into Rhythm & Brews in Chattanooga while on summer break in 2003 and told owner Mike Dougher he needed to hire her.
Not so fast, Dougher said before testing Mincy’s knowledge of music for three hours.
Mincy didn’t know how to wait tables, she says, but she knew music, and she secured a spot on Dougher’s payroll.
At some point after Mincy graduated from LSU with a degree in communications, she had an epiphany: her lifestyle was fun, but the kind of fun one has in their twenties, not their forties. If she was going to make a good life for herself, she was going to have to forge a different path.
The law
Mincy didn’t grow up dreaming of working near music; rather, she wanted to become a lawyer.
Asking her why yields nothing useful.
“I like helping people. And I like solving puzzles,” she shrugs, as though she’s trying to connect loose threads. “But, really, I have no idea why I wanted to become a lawyer.”
Regardless, the notion returned to Mincy, and she spent the next four years commuting to the Nashville School of Law while holding down two jobs. Between her classes and work, she estimates she was putting in 90 hours a week – before studying.
“I couldn’t wait to work one job in one city,” she says.
Not so fast, said a representative of a large Chattanooga law firm at a career fair, who informed her that they didn’t hire Nashville School of Law graduates.
Ouch.
“I thanked them for not wasting my time and left the fair thinking, ‘I need to figure out how to do this.’”
As Mincy searched for an open door – or even a door that was barely cracked – she discovered a pair of mother hens who were willing to take a fledgling attorney under their wings: criminal defense attorneys Mary Sullivan Moore and Bill Speek.
“Mary and Bill let me shadow them. They showed me around the courthouse, and Mary let me work with her on one of her murder cases. Their kindness was incredible.”
After Mincy passed the bar, Speek and Webb provided her with free office space in exchange for a percentage of her earnings.
There was just one glitch: Mincy had spent law school swearing she wouldn’t practice criminal defense.
“I couldn’t imagine my incompetence keeping someone in jail, or putting someone in jail who didn’t deserve to be there. Life and liberty are important, and I thought I wasn’t ready.”
As Mincy tried to gain a foothold in the legal profession, she appeared to lack the confidence that had powered her march into Rhythm & Brews. Worse was her inability to answer a critical question from one of her first defendants.
“We didn’t study sentencing guidelines in law school because they changed while I was there. So, I’m covering a case for my bosses, and the first thing the defendant asks is, ‘What am I facing?’ I had no idea.”
Fortunately, Mincy found a nurturing work environment with Speek and criminal defense attorneys Gerald Webb and Johnathan Turner. To her benefit, their definition of nurturing included throwing her into the deep end of the proverbial pool, where she would have no choice but to learn how to stay afloat.
“They put me in situations that were sink or swim, which was amazing. They trusted me to do the job.”
Practicing empathy
Mincy segued into family law as the fallout from the cases Speek and the other attorneys took on impacted their clients’ lives. For instance, as the men handled the criminal defense work, Mincy picked up the ensuing child custody matters and divorces.
At some point, Mincy saw that she’d built a trailhead for a path that could take her forward.
“I realized I could do a lot of good in family law. People grieve when a relationship breaks down, and the way they process their grief can do a lot of damage. They’re under a microscope and everyone is analyzing every move they make, and people who lack support can make terrible decisions. Being a part of someone’s support system is an honor.”
To become an effective family law attorney, Mincy shifted the way she handled cases. As a criminal defense attorney, she urged her clients to avoid discussing the facts of an incident, but as a family law attorney, her clients were continually creating new evidence in real time.
“Clients create new evidence when they send the kids home without brushing their hair, or when they spend $500 at Target,” Mincy says. “So, it’s important for me to teach my clients what the courts want and how to make good decisions. And it’s their job to disclose the facts of their case to me and to tell me what they want to accomplish.”
While Mincy had no point of reference for empathizing with her criminal defendants, she found several patches of common ground with her family law clients.
“I’ve been a wife and I have a child with someone I never married, so I’ve lived through the divorce and the custody aspect of what I do.”
Mincy’s personal experiences with the complications that can arise when sharing custody with another individual have helped her to assemble a set of tools she says are making a positive difference for her clients and their children.
She’s especially proud of a provision she recommends making a part of every parenting plan.
“I used to pick up my daughter when it was time for her to come home and, invariably, she felt like I was ripping her away from the other house. Meanwhile, I’d be sitting in the driveway, frustrated because I had work to do. Now the one whose time with her is ending drops her off.
“Think about the subtleties of that. The parent with the child says, ‘It’s time to go to mom’s house. Let’s get ready.’ They prepare the child for the transition and tell them it’s OK. Meanwhile, the other parent is getting stuff done at home.”
Mincy says she began placing this provision in her clients’ parenting plans after experiencing the frustration that can accompany the other method.
“I realized this tiny provision was more important than I thought it was,” Mincy says. “Details are important.”
Life as it stands
Now 40 (the “just turned” variety, Mincy notes), Mincy has many miles of established trail behind her. She’s founded and is leading her own family law firm, Mincy Law, and is an active volunteer with Hamilton County Drug Recovery Court, where she provides private defense counsel.
She’s also serving on the boards of Friends of the Festival, a nonprofit that produces the annual Riverbend Festival and other live music events in Chattanooga, and Launchpad, which provides sober living housing for women.
In addition, Mincy continues to take the occasional criminal defense case – and even professes a love for the work. She’s presently handling the matter of Tauris Sledge, a former East Ridge High School student who was arrested after an altercation with School Resource Officer Tyler McRae in 2022 and indicted on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
All of that is work of one form or another, and it contributes to the kind of lifestyle one leads in their forties. It is not, however, where Mincy’s adult life begins and ends.
When the dust of battle has settled and ringing in her ears has stopped, Mincy still surrounds herself with live music.
She doesn’t talk about musical performances the way many people do. Instead, she dives deeper, to a place where a concert is not a list of songs she heard or a collection of videos on her phone but an experience she shared with the artist and the people around her.
Mincy’s description of seeing Paul McCartney perform at Bonnaroo, for example, sounds magical.
“There was a ton of people there, but no matter where you were, it felt intimate. The exchange of energy between the crowd and the performer – that’s what makes live music special.
“After [McCartney] finished, the people I was with wandered back to our campsite. We’d all seen the show from a different place, and everyone shared their perspective. It was incredible.”
That said, even McCartney can’t hold a candle to Mincy’s dad. When a Led Zeppelin cover band began to play “Over the Hills and Far Away,” she called her father and said thank you for introducing her to one of the great loves of her life.
Family law might be Mincy’s bread and butter, but music still fuels the twentysomething inside of her, and likely always will.