We were lucky to catch up with Sherry Fox recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sherry, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?

The legal industry is hyper-focused on the billable hour and the notion of productivity. However, in my experience, this focus rewards grind culture, churning the file and facetime rather than those who efficiently service their clients, providing timely solutions. I reject outright the notion that spending more time on a client matter is equivalent to more value added for the client. This has been proven by my approach to practicing law for my own firm. My clients want a solution to their problem. And I want to provide that solution as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is why I am a huge proponent of flat fee pricing that acknowledges the value of the expertise offered while reflecting the financial value clients are seeking.

Sherry, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a fertility law and adoption attorney and run my own boutique law firm, Fox Family Formation. In my practice, I help individuals and couples grow their family through surrogacy, genetic material donation and adoption and to protect the families they create through tailored estate planning. My clients are intended parents, gestational carriers, donors, adoptive parents and birth parents.

When you use assisted reproduction to grow your family, there is a required legal component that you must complete whether you are using a surrogate or utilizing donor eggs, sperm or embryos. In either case, I assist my clients by drafting the contracts necessary for the surrogacy or donation arrangement. These contracts are very detailed and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the duties, obligations and rights of all those involved in the process. And once my clients have achieved a pregnancy and are anticipating the arrival of their child, I help them to establish their parental rights by helping them navigate the legal process to obtain a birth certificate reflecting their names as parents and to obtain parentage court orders where necessary. For my same sex clients and opposite sex clients using donor sperm or eggs, the assistance I provide to obtain a parentage order is crucial because of the lack of a genetic connection between both parents and their child and the fact that birth certificates do not have the constitutional protection that court orders do.

I also assist clients pursuing domestic adoptions. This includes situations where the child is being placed by a birth parent or an adoption agency in addition to stepparent adoption, second parent/confirmatory adoption and close relative adoption.

Lastly, my clients rely on me to provide them with estate planning tailored to their family’s unique composition, taking into consideration children yet to be born or adopted, the disposition of unused frozen eggs, sperm or embryos or the complexities of planning for same sex couples.

My practice is a niche one that is focused on helping people to accomplish one of the most significant of life’s milestones – becoming a parent. And my clients are often people who have experienced significant heartache on their journey to parenthood before we ever cross paths. So it is for that reason that I ensure that my clients know how deeply invested I am in their goal of building their family. I demonstrate that by being highly responsive and communicative with my clients. They know that I will always answer the phone, I will always respond to their emails and I will put forth my very best effort to make this process as simple and streamlined as possible. I stand by my values and share them openly with my clients on my website so that when you consider hiring me you know who I am and what is important to me.

I am deeply proud of the work I do and my ability to be inclusive when it comes to the clients I serve. I get to be unabashedly who I am and be rewarded for being myself which felt impossible when I was working in a more corporate law firm environment. If there was something I would want people to know about me is that I am the opposite of a stuffy lawyer – I am friendly and enjoy sharing my knowledge with others. If you are interested in assisted reproduction or adoption, I would love to chat with you!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In the first iteration of my career as a lawyer, I was a civil litigator who billed by the hour. As a result, I spent 15 years accounting for every 6 minutes of every working day and often feeling that I had fallen short of the mark if I had not billed the amount of time I set out to bill for any given day. That sense that if I could not demonstrate that every 6 minutes of my day was spent productively billing a client resulted in an unhealthy notion of what constituted productivity and what equated to a valuable use of time. As a result, for the first 6 months of being on my own, running my own firm, I had to make a concerted effort to redefine what a valuable use of my time was and to let go of the notion of guilt that used to result if I took any time to do things that were important to me outside of work. It was a hard but revolutionary lesson for me. These days I am finding ways to reclaim my time and to take ownership of my use of it without guilt.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Before I started posting on social media, I was terrified of it. While I do not have a particularly large following on social media yet, I am proud of the presence I have built because I have shown up authentically. I think that is key. And it’s so hard to get started because you may find yourself in the perfectionism trap – you want your post to be perfect, you want to be shiny and glossy with perfect hair and makeup, but for me that’s not real. I have found that letting go of perfectionism has been key to showing up consistently.

My advice to anyone considering utilizing social media, particularly for business purposes, is to start by identifying your target audience, deciding what your content pillars and goals are and to focus on being consistent on one social media channel for starters. And be kind to yourself. Don’t worry about the likes – just keep showing up!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://foxfamilyformation.com
• Instagram: @fox_family_formation
• Facebook: Fox Family Formation
• Linkedin: Sherry A. Fox, Esq.
• Other: TikTok: @fox_family_formation