The Graves Law Firm

Pasadena

Family Law

Demetria Graves wasn't sure what sort of practice she wanted when she got out of law school. She found a job with a small firm, but after a few months, she grew dissatisfied, although she enjoyed the family law cases she'd worked on.

Then, a friend suggested that she could simply open up her firm. So that's just what she did, focusing exclusively on family law matters.

Now, almost two decades later, she is a highly respected family law attorney with offices in Hollywood and Pasadena who counts entertainment and sports figures among her clients. Just two months ago, she concluded a yearlong stint as chair of the family law executive committee of the California Lawyers Association.

A new addition to her firm is an associate, Briahna Chuvac, who came aboard just in April this year. "But Ms. Graves has been my mentor for 10 years now," she said. "I met her my 1L year, and I've always stayed connected to her."

Chuvac joined Graves in time to assist with a years-long dispute between a reality show celebrity and a professional football player that seems unlikely to be resolved soon. For some people, "the fighting is what they're looking for," Chuvac said. "And there's nothing that we can do to help that."

Graves has had much better success with other cases, including at least three in which one parent wanted to move far away from the other parent and take their children along. In two of the cases, she helped fathers keep custody when the mothers moved away. One father even retained full custody after the mother moved back from Chicago to L.A. after only a year.

In the other, the mother assumed she would be able to have custody after she moved because the father was a music business executive who traveled often. "The court understood that we all work," Graves said. "But that was not a hindrance to [the father] retaining custody while mom moved away."

She represented a former NBA player in a dissolution from his recording artist wife. While the pair were separated but not yet divorced, the wife had a baby. That required Graves to make sure the divorce record indicated her client was not the father of the new baby to forestall any request for child support or similar issues, she said.

In another interesting case, Graves represented a firefighter who wanted her to finalize his divorce quickly because he had become engaged to another woman. Cases like that one can be tricky, she said, when the clients "start rushing us because clearly, they've made these plans without running it by me first," she said.

And she represented a TV writer and showrunner whose ex-husband applied for spousal support. Graves was able to block the request because her client had previously had to obtain a domestic violence restraining order against the man.

More recently, the firm has worked on two matters where the opposing party passed away, throwing the cases into probate court. She refers the probate issues to other attorneys, but she tries to remain in contact to answer questions and to "bridge the gap as much as possible."

A former president of the Black Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, Graves said she is taking a "gap year" from bar activity to focus on her son and on the practice. Bringing on Chuvac showed her that there are many young lawyers who want to learn family law. "As many women as I can inspire that want to be in this field, I will do that," she said.

-- Don DeBenedictis