Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 4, 2009
Local attorney stays busy with work, play, family
Samara Litvack
On the first floor of University Tower, attorney Hannah Stokes sits with her husband, Pete, scanning pictures from a recent family vacation. The husband/wife team smiles from ear to ear in each photo. Their daughter, 12-year-old Abby, smiles as well. It’s obvious they had a wonderful time.
But this was no ordinary vacation. The Stokes family is fresh back from a trip to Canada, where Hannah killed her first bear, which will soon be one of two huge rugs in her home.
Pete pulls up picture after picture, bragging – rightfully so – about his wife. She says she’d never hunted before, but Pete just laughs. And according to her background, she’s a natural.
The second of five children, Hannah grew up in South America. Her parents worked as missionaries and when she was 8 years old, the family relocated to Cuzko, Peru, where they worked with a handful of other American families to start a church and witness to the
community.
“We had a bunch of animals,” she says. “We had two turkeys at one time that we raised for our Thanksgiving turkey. We mostly had rabbits. At one time I think we had 70 rabbits.
“My dad would kill them, but I helped skin and gut them. So I can skin a rabbit.”
At age 15, Hannah returned to the States with her older sister to finish high school at a boarding school in Iowa. Upon graduation, she moved to Chattanooga, where she began classes at Covenant College. During her senior year, while studying natural science, she also began taking EMT courses at Northwestern Technical College.
“I just went there because one of my friends at Covenant went there and it sounded like something cool to do,” she says. “I always thought I would do something related to medicine, but didn’t ever really plan on becoming a nurse. It just sort of happened, and it’s been a good thing.”
After receiving her EMT license, she started work at Hutcheson Hospital in Fort Oglethorpe. There, she met Pete, who has worked as a respiratory therapist for 20 years. After they married, she got her nursing license.
“But she didn’t actually go to nursing school,” Pete says. “She challenged the nursing boards and finished her registered nursing degree in less than a year, without ever going to nursing school.
“She won’t beat her own drum, but I’ll beat it for her.”
Some years later, when the couple faced a personal issue that required legal representation, they couldn’t find any. They needed someone who understood the medical background involved who also didn’t require an up-front, astronomical fee. It was then that Hannah decided to become an attorney.
“I had been considering an advanced degree anyway,” Hannah says, so she began shopping around for a law school.
“At that time, being married and having a child, I was limited,” she says. “I was working, and so it had to be a program that I could drive to or go locally and still work.”
She selected Georgia State, and began classes in the fall of 2001. Still working at the hospital – a combination of full-time and part-time hours – she drove to Atlanta at least three nights a week for four and a half years.
“Everything fell into place,” she says. “It’s not something that growing up I would have ever imagined myself doing, but it’s been really neat.”
“I’m going to toot her horn again,” says Pete. “They say in law school you’re not even supposed to work part-time, let alone full-time and commute a hundred miles one way or 200 miles a night, three nights a week.”
On top of that, Hannah also became certified in cardiac research, risk management and hospital corporate compliance, all while earning her law degree.
After talking with several law firms about possible positions, with no appealing options, Hannah and Pete decided she should open her own practice. Upon advice from contacts within the local legal community, she wedged her way into the industry by introducing herself, asking questions and finding “go-to” people she could contact when needed.
“Everybody’s been very welcoming,” Hannah says. “Even when you’re on the other side of a civil matter or a custody matter, the case is over and you might still call that attorney for a question.”
“Our biggest advice to anybody who wants to achieve anything in life is find somebody who’s done it and listen to them,” says Pete. “You can bypass a lot of pitfalls of learning on your own. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve listened.”
While she doesn’t have a specialty, per se, Hannah has worked a variety of cases, including medical, domestic custody, divorce and criminal. Licensed in both Tennessee and Georgia, she’s “done a little bit of everything” in two-and-a-half years of practice.
While her law career is keeping her busy, she says she hasn’t really had the chance to miss nursing.
“I still work in the hospital maybe a shift a week,” she says. “I’m a nurse in the ER.”
And once Pete finishes his undergrad in legal studies at UTC, he will begin law school and join his wife with an “official” role at the firm.
“Right now, he’s my office staff, office thug, client control, investigator, researcher,” she says.
And even when they aren’t working, or getting more degrees, Hannah and Pete keep a packed schedule. Besides hunting, they hike, ride bikes, sail, work out and more – all as a family. They’ve completed one triathlon and are training for another in October. Also, adds Pete, they love riding motorcycles.
“We went on a cross-country motorcycle trip the year she got out of law school,” he says. “We rode to California.”
“I studied for the bar on the back of a motorcycle with my little CDs and my headphones,” she says. “We went 7,000 miles. We got back two weeks before the bar.”
The Stokes family also has a horse, and Abby loves to ride. Abby is also first year saxophone in the band at Lakeview Middle School, pitches on the school softball team and is on the swim team.
“We work hard but we play hard too,” says Hannah, and perhaps that’s the key to their happiness. Between the three of them, there’s never a dull moment, and they all seem to like it that way. But even while balancing playtime, ER work and her new law firm, Hannah never stops appreciating how she got here.
“I’m only here by the grace of God,” she says. “He definitely opened all the right doors.”
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