Abigail Jansen Sutton finds special meaning in estate planning. Inspired by her parents, Jansen Sutton brings both drive and compassion to handling people’s legacies.
An estate planner and administrator, Jansen Sutton drafts estate planning documents, finds the right will or trust plan for a client and handles pre- and post-death estate administration.
“When someone dies, we figure out everything they spent their life working to get, where it needs to go and how to tie up all those lives.” Jansen Sutton says, adding estate law – often complicated and occasionally messy – is always engaging and allows her to meet people from different walks of life.
Jansen Sutton says that her interest in stories led her to law. “With estate administrations, you get the really, really good stories. But nothing that’s not confidential. So you’re this sponge of family secrets.”
Initially, Jansen Sutton enrolled at Southern Adventist University as a science major, planning to follow her father’s footsteps into dentistry. But after taking a history class, she immediately switched her major. Studying history, Jansen Sutton says she fell in love with life stories and their complexity. She also feels that with a history major, she naturally shifted to law.
When she interned at Chambliss after graduation, her supervisor Greg Willett placed her in the estate planning department, where says she found her niche. “In many ways, your life story is your estate plan – trying to craft how you want to leave your legacy and making it meaningful.”
Jansen Sutton says Southern – also the alma mater of her parents, grandparents, husband Tucker, her husband’s parents and grandparents – might not produce many attorneys but it creates a close-knit law community.
She and her husband, both lawyers, met during their undergraduate studies at Southern. After attending different law schools, they were married in May 2023.
“He took his bar exam flashcards on our honeymoon,” Jansen Sutton says with a laugh. “We were sitting by the pool talking about what makes a contract.”
She says that while their specialties couldn’t be more different, she and her husband “both understand what it’s like to be an attorney. He has funny courtroom stories, and I have funny conference room stories. It makes for interesting dinner conversation.”
Both first-generation lawyers, they also field many legal questions from their families and friends, “which can be really scary but also really cool.”
Eight months into her position, Jansen Sutton says Chambliss provides “a fabulous work environment with a wide breadth of expertise and vast knowledge” that she feels is invaluable. Her favorite part about the firm is the people – “talented, educated, kind people” – with whom she chats to start her day.
Despite the perfect fit, Jansen Sutton still finds the nature of her specialty difficult. She works with clients and grows to care for them, and then they pass on. “It is really, really sad, but it’s a great opportunity to realize you are helping a family through a really tough part of their lives and the importance of that.”
Jansen Sutton finds that slowing down to listen to her clients is critical to estate planning. She explains that once a client has died, they can’t clarify meaning or intent, so every word must be clear, and is why she pays close and careful attention to her clients’ wishes.
Jansen Sutton credits some of her ambition to her time at Girls Preparatory School in Chattanooga. Entering GPS in eighth grade changed her trajectory, she says.
“When you’re going to an all-girls school, every person that raises their hand in class is a girl; every person that holds an office is a girl; every person that gets straight As is a girl; the fastest runner is a girl. You get used to this idea that it’s OK to speak up as a girl. Like, I can be president – I don’t need to be secretary.”
At Southern Adventist, Jansen Sutton says professors like Mark Peach and Shannon Martin further pushed her to pursue every ambition.
“While I was in law school, my great uncle told me, ‘I didn’t think they let girls into law school.’ And I was, like, viscerally angry. But then I sent him an invite to my law school graduation, and he was going to attend.”
Jansen Sutton credits most of her drive, however, to her parents. She says they inspired her both with support and by example. “My parents instilled in me this idea that if you want to do something, let’s go do it, we’ll help you get there.”
She says she seeks to be driven like her father, Erik, who put himself through school and started his dental practice while always making time for family. And she hopes to be compassionate like her mother, Tanya, who she says does everything for everyone and “always has a little bit left in her cup for somebody else.”
“My parents are incredible people. They are the most hard-working people I’ve ever met. The person I am today is because of who they are.”
After graduating with her law degree from the University of Georgia, Jansen Sutton moved back to Chattanooga to be with her family. She spends most weekends on the lake with them, including her brother, Zach, and his wife, Allie – and the family dogs.
Jansen Sutton, her parents and her brother all have goldendoodles from the same litter. Jansen Sutton and her husband have a doodle named Ruby after Ruby Falls. Her parents have one named Finley after Finley Stadium, and her brother and his wife named their dog Eleanor. “They didn’t stick with the Chattanooga theme,” Jansen Sutton says.
When Jansen Sutton isn’t on the lake, she can be found outside – running, biking or walking Ruby – or inside, hosting parties or watching “Jeopardy” with her husband, Tucker. “He admittedly knows way more answers than I do,” she smiles, “just a wealth of random, esoteric knowledge.” And on Tuesdays, Jansen Sutton and her husband play trivia with a curated team of lawyers and engineers.
Finally at her dream job, Jansen Sutton says she hopes to start emulating the people who inspired her. “I think now is my opportunity to recognize the community that got me to where I am today and reinvest back into that community.”
Abigail Jansen Sutton is a family person through and through.
Her signature dish is her great-grandmother’s chocolate cake. At the request of her grandmother, she published a children’s book in 2017. Although she feels she may never retire from estate planning, Jansen Sutton says that if she does, she hopes to recreate a long family RV trip from Chattanooga to Alaska. She jokes that if her law career doesn’t work out, she will reopen Snickerdoodles, her mother’s long-closed coffee shop.
“Families will fight over everything from Tupperware to lamps to silverware to pets.
“I think of my own family. There’s this table that I used to sit at with my great-grandmother. We would sit at the same oak table every Tuesday night and watch ‘Jeopardy’ or cut cucumbers from her garden and finish off a whole pie together. I think about that particular table – it was so special to me but not to anybody else in my family. When she gave me that table, I remember that being such a big moment.
“It’s the importance of recognizing that just because you might not find it interesting, or you don’t understand why somebody would fight over plates, sometimes those very simple items have a breadth of emotion and history attached to them. I try to bring that recognition when I meet with clients. I might get a sliver of their life, but really, they have this entire life span of finding meaning in sometimes simple objects.”