Women-Led Law Firms 2023: The Law Offices of Joan M. Swartz

St. Louis
Joan Swartz, founder

Joan M. Swartz considers it “a gift” to know from an early age what you want to do when you grow up.

“I always wanted to be a lawyer,” she said. “Always.”

Swartz isn’t just any lawyer. A member of the Missouri Bar Association Board of Governors, she is a former president of both BAMSL and the St. Louis Bar Foundation. She has served as a member of the House of Delegates for the ABA and previously taught civil practice at SLU. Most recently, she was named Lawyer of the Year for 2023 by Missouri Lawyers Media.

Swartz, a St. Louis native who practices plaintiff’s side employment law and has litigated issues right up through the state supreme court, hung out her own shingle in 2000 after 13 years of practice with a medium-sized firm doing public interest work like representing school districts.

“I just made a decision that I was going to control what kind of work I did and that’s why I went out on my own instead of being beholden to folks to feed me work,” she said.

She said she was comfortable in the entrepreneurial space since her husband also owned his own business.

“The biggest challenge at the time was that you are jumping without a parachute,” she said. “You don’t know if it is going to work leaving a safe job and deciding you are going to chart your own course. You think you can do it but you don’t know.”

She thinks the challenges of creating your own firm are the same today as they were at that time.

“You are always generating work,” she said. “It is part of the reality of being in your own firm.”

The 60-year-old said the key is to always craft answers that meet the need of the people you serve.

“What I think I am is a problem solver for my clients,” Swartz said. “I’m trying to solve their legal problems. My approach and what I’m doing on a particular file has to match what’s going on in the file, what’s going on with the client.”