ABOUT WENDY
ABOUT WENDY
Hi! I’m Wendy Sare Meadows, an attorney, coach, and consultant. For over two decades, law has been my career. For most of that time, coaching other lawyers has quietly become my calling. I’m a mama to two kiddos. I’ve weathered a lot of turbulence and change in my life. Each time something hard knocked me sideways, I found the silver lining, changed my path, and grew my perspective. That’s the work I now help other lawyers do too.
I help lawyers who are stuck, burned out, or ready to own their own practice, literally or figuratively. While I specialize in helping fellow attorneys, especially women navigating the grind of this profession, the work applies to anyone ready to stop surviving and start owning their career.
I’ve spent 21 years practicing family law, the last several years focused on mediation, parenting coordination, and representing children. I always had that twinge in my gut that I was headed toward “something” else too. Turns out, that something else was helping other lawyers find their own way through.
My Path as a Lawyer
I started off with a small boutique family law firm in Towson, Maryland and was honored to become an equity partner there in just 5 years. I quickly became managing partner there and learned the ropes on how to run a business and became adept at time management and efficiency. After 13 years, I decided to branch out and “go solo.” I was able to pay off all of my startup costs in my first 6 months of solo practice and was able to almost double my take home salary while on my own in my first full year of practice.
At present, my legal career focuses on mediation, parent coordination, and representing children. I have had the opportunity to guide hundreds upon hundreds of clients through the absolute worst periods of their life as their divorce attorney. From wealthy CEO’s to children as young as 8 months old, I have represented a wide range of individuals with different needs and goals.
What set me apart as a family law lawyer was that I was always laser focused on my client’s goals and desired outcome. Instead of allowing my clients to fight for the sake of fighting, I would keep them focused on the big picture. Oftentimes my clients would have no idea what they actually wanted from their divorce and together we would set their goals, focus on what they could get from their divorce, and most importantly concentrate on how these goals and outcomes would inure to their benefit in their life after divorce.
My Path as a Coach & Consultant
By year thirteen of practicing law, I was good at my job and quietly running on empty, the kind of tired that doesn’t show up in your billable hours. In 2016, I stumbled into health and wellness coaching, not because I had a plan, but because I needed something that made me feel like myself again. What I found instead was a different way of helping people. Litigation could get someone a result. Coaching could help someone rebuild, and that hit me in the heart in a way I couldn’t ignore.
I followed it. Wellness coaching opened the door to life coaching, and life coaching is where sparkle & GRIT came from, my book, and eventually the brand and the coaching practice built around it. Today all of that lives under Lawfully Lean, the umbrella for everything I’ve built since that first accidental step in 2016.
The flagship of that work is Going Solo, built for lawyers standing exactly where I stood at thirteen years in, done building someone else’s vision, unsure how to build their own. I also consult inside law firms on culture and associate development, because the exhaustion I felt as an associate isn’t rare, it’s the norm this profession runs on.
Along the way, I also fell hard for tech. See it, love it, test it, use it. Every program I build has real systems behind it now, not just good intentions dying in a Notion doc nobody opens again.
Litigation taught me how to win for someone. Coaching and consulting taught me how to help them rebuild. I do both now, on purpose.
Full Circle
My role, no matter which hat I’m wearing, is the same. Listen. Get clear on what you actually want. Build a real plan. Help you go get it.
In 21 + years of doing this work, I keep bumping into the same truth: we, as humans, need encouragement and a LIGHT.
We put everyone else first and land ourselves dead last, and dead last means dead tired, which means no one’s in your corner and the frustration just compounds. We have the ideas. We have the intentions. We just can’t quite get over the hump to the horizon.
I help bring that horizon closer. Whether we’re working through burnout, rebuilding your relationship with your own time, or mapping out the firm you’ve been talking about opening for years, you’ll walk away with an actual plan, not just a good conversation, and the weight off your shoulders that comes from finally moving instead of just thinking about moving.
