Sara Marler • Trauma-Informed Lawyer

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Sara Marler • Trauma-Informed Lawyer I am a compassionate advocate, having been the voice of children, victims of abuse, and people that are simply trying to hold on to what’s most dear to them.

A respected attorney once told me that “caring makes this job hard, but caring is what makes you good at what you do.” I've remembered those words over the years. I'm the Managing Partner of Marler Law Partners, where we are advocating for a trauma-informed approach to family law. I attended law school in Boston and returned to Missouri after attending New England University Law School, where I graduated cm laude and finished in the top 10% of my class. When not practicing law, I can be found trying to keep up with my two daughters or chasing after my three dogs.

Some days this work is a legal strategy. Some days it's just reminding someone they're still capable of building a life ...
10/20/2026

Some days this work is a legal strategy.

Some days it's just reminding someone they're still capable of building a life they actually want.

Both matter.

Follow to watch me build my trauma-informed & client-first law firm. 🙋🏻‍♀️

I worked in toxic law firms before I built this one, so I know exactly what I didn't want to repeat.Overworked, underpai...
10/16/2026

I worked in toxic law firms before I built this one, so I know exactly what I didn't want to repeat.

Overworked, underpaid, and expected to leave whatever was going on in my personal life at the door. Trained just enough to do the job, not enough to feel confident doing it well. That environment doesn't just burn out attorneys, it shows up in how clients get treated too.

So at Marler Law Partners, we do things differently. We're trauma-informed, which means we're paying attention to your nervous system and your legal case at the same time. That shows up in small ways: a warm office instead of a cold conference room, a team that's actually trained to recognize what stress does to memory and communication, and a genuine investment in how you're doing as a whole person, not just how your filing is progressing.

We want you to walk out of this process feeling more stable than when you walked in. That's the standard we hold ourselves to.

Follow to watch me build my trauma-informed & client-first law firm. 📲 marlerlawpartners.com

This firm wasn't built in a boardroom by people who'd only ever read about divorce in a textbook.It was built by women w...
10/14/2026

This firm wasn't built in a boardroom by people who'd only ever read about divorce in a textbook.

It was built by women who lived this. Some of us sat in the client chair ourselves. Some of us are children of divorce; some of us are step-parents. We have lived through the divorce process personally.

Different seats, same understanding: what it feels like to have your hands shake filling out paperwork, to forget what you walked into a room to say, to feel like the whole system is speaking a language you were never taught.

Follow to see what this looks like in practice.

It's kinda chic to do things differently. 💁🏻‍♀️
10/13/2026

It's kinda chic to do things differently. 💁🏻‍♀️

Today we pause to honor the history, resilience, and living cultures of Indigenous peoples across this country.Indigenou...
10/12/2026

Today we pause to honor the history, resilience, and living cultures of Indigenous peoples across this country.

Indigenous Peoples' Day is a chance to recognize the strength of communities who have endured generations of hardship and injustice, and who continue to preserve their traditions, languages, and identities today. That resilience deserves to be seen and honored, not folded into a single day and forgotten.

At Marler Law Partners, we believe every family and every community carries its own story worth respecting. Today, we're listening and learning alongside everyone taking time to recognize the history and the people this day is truly about.

Mental health awareness usually gets talked about like it's separate from legal problems. In our world, it rarely is.Div...
10/10/2026

Mental health awareness usually gets talked about like it's separate from legal problems. In our world, it rarely is.

Divorce, custody battles, and family conflict take a real toll, not just emotionally but on the nervous system itself. Trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, feeling hypervigilant or completely numb, these are common responses to genuinely hard circumstances, not signs that something is wrong with you.

That's part of why we built our practice the way we did. Our in-house therapist works alongside our legal team, because we believe people navigating a legal crisis deserve support for the whole picture, not just the paperwork.

On World Mental Health Day, we want to say plainly: if you're in the middle of something hard right now, taking care of your mental health isn't separate from taking care of your case. It's part of it.

At Marler Law Partners, we see you as a whole person first. If you need support, we're here.

Nine years ago, Marler Law Partners started with an idea that felt a little unconventional at the time: what if a family...
10/09/2026

Nine years ago, Marler Law Partners started with an idea that felt a little unconventional at the time: what if a family law firm actually treated people like people, not case files.

Nine years later, that idea is still the whole point. It's shown up in over a hundred trials, in the therapist who sits in on first meetings, in the late nights and hard conversations, and in every client who walked in overwhelmed and walked out feeling like someone actually had their back.

None of that happens without the people who trusted us to handle some of the hardest moments of their lives. That trust is not something we take lightly, and it's the reason this team shows up the way it does, year after year.

Here's to nine years, and to everyone who made them mean something. Thank you.

I opened the doors on this firm without knowing if it would actually work.I doubted whether a family law firm could run ...
10/08/2026

I opened the doors on this firm without knowing if it would actually work.

I doubted whether a family law firm could run on compassion and still hold its own in a courtroom. Whether clients would trust a different approach instead of the traditional, adversarial one. Whether "trauma-informed" would mean something real or just sound good on a website.

I have my answer now.

I've sat with clients through the worst weeks of their lives and watched what happens when someone finally feels believed instead of processed. I've built a team that treats people like people, in the office and in the courtroom. I turned down the version of law practice I walked away from and built the one I actually wanted to exist.

It's working beautifully. Here's to what's next. 🥂

When I graduated law school, I thought I knew exactly what practicing law would look like.What I found instead was a ver...
09/30/2026

When I graduated law school, I thought I knew exactly what practicing law would look like.

What I found instead was a version of the profession that asked me to leave my compassion at the door. Cases treated like transactions. Clients handled like files. A system built for legal efficiency with almost no room for the fact that most people walking through that door are in the middle of the worst chapter of their life.

I could have kept doing it that way. A lot of good lawyers do, because it's what they were trained into and nobody taught them another option.

I chose to build something different instead.

A firm where fierce advocacy and genuine compassion aren't in competition with each other. Where clients get real legal strategy and someone who actually understands what trauma does to memory, decision-making, and communication. Where the goal isn't just winning the case, it's protecting the whole person in front of us.

That's the firm I set out to build. That's the firm we are.

Follow along to keep watching me build the anti-law firm law firm.
📲 marlerlawpartners.com

09/28/2026

After law school, I hit a wall I wasn't prepared for. No more grades. No more clear measuring stick telling me how I was doing. Just this open-ended question of whether I was actually good at this, with nothing concrete to point to.

I didn't have language for how disorienting that was.

A therapist eventually gave me that language. Big T trauma, little t trauma. The idea that trauma isn't only the catastrophic, obvious events. It's also the accumulation of smaller moments that shape how we see ourselves and move through the world. That single conversation changed how I understood my own struggle, and it didn't stop there.

I've been in therapy and doing my own work ever since. Learning things about myself, unpacking patterns, growing in ways that had nothing to do with case law. And somewhere along the way I realized something I didn't expect: the work I was doing on myself and the work I was doing as an attorney weren't separate. They were the same work.

That's where trauma-informed lawyering actually comes from. Not a certification. My own path to understanding what trauma does to a person, and bringing every bit of that into how I show up for my clients.

Watch me build the anti-law firm law firm.
📲 marlerlawpartners.com

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123 Main St.
St. Louis, MO
63136

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