April 2025 | Evan Williams
The Attorney: Elizabeth Schwartz
The Niche: LGBTQ+
After earning her law degree from the University of Miami in the late 1990s, Elizabeth Schwartz launched her career at mainstream law practices — but she yearned to serve the gay community and recalls demanding a job at a Miami Beach firm run by two gay men, even though they were not officially hiring. She got the job.
The firm focused on estate planning and probate, then among the only means of legally legitimizing a committed same-sex relationship. Those skills along with family formation work such as surrogacy and adoption, and divorce, remain central parts of Schwartz’s family law practice.
After the U.S. legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, Schwartz noticed that the pent-up demand left some marriage-mad lovers racing towards their vows like a teenage couple in a midnight ceremony with no one to object — or at least advise them to get a prenup, which Schwartz recommends. When the dissolutions came, she was around to take those cases, too.
Schwartz remembers one client who married his husband on a trip to New York. During the divorce, when she sat down with him to do the math — who gets what — he said it wasn’t “that kind of marriage.”
Schwartz didn’t understand. “There’s only one kind of marriage — the legal kind,” she said.
He clarified: “I just meant it to be like, you know —” he told her, putting his fist in the air like a protest symbol. “I meant it to be like that kind of marriage.”
“And I was like, ‘Oh dear,’” Schwartz says, adding, “This ignorance is not the exclusive province of LGBTQ (couples).”
Schwartz has since made efforts to educate people on the basics, including writing books on the subject. “I try to come to it from a collaborative place,” she says, referencing a divorce model that insists on cooperation rather than legal battles.
In more recent years she has observed lawyers who don’t really focus on LGBTQ+ family law jumping on the bandwagon, exploiting a niche that has become a mainstream idea, even if couples are a statistical minority.
Clients benefit from her experience, she says, even if it’s only personal. “Sometimes the LGBTQ piece of it doesn’t play much of a role except that they like to feel like the lawyer knows and understands them. You know, they like to feel that they’re not judged. And if (being gay or queer) feels irrelevant to them, you know, so should it be treated as irrelevant in the dissolution process.”
Schwartz has been an attorney now for nearly 28 years and lives close enough to walk to her downtown Miami firm.
“I’m embarrassed to say I am not the poster child for a work-life balance,” she admits, though she keeps stress at bay with mindful meditation. She’s also a certified yoga instructor and a big fan of the New York Times crossword puzzle. Most of all, Schwartz loves her wife and dog.
“They keep me so centered,” she says. “Thank heavens for them.”