Cristi practices the family law that happens before anyone sees a courtroom.

Most of Cristi's work happens before anyone sees the inside of a courtroom. She listens for the situation underneath the situation: the financial picture, the family dynamics, the ownership someone has of a business, the schedule that two parents are going to have to live inside on the other side of all this. Then she designs a path that fits.

That path is usually collaborative or a negotiated divorce run between counsel — sometimes with formal mediation as the move that gets the matter settled. Occasionally it's contested litigation, when the other side has forced it or when temporary orders are needed before any conversation about resolution can happen. Cristi has tried cases for nearly three decades. She is prepared to. She would prefer not to need to.

The reason for the preference is not philosophical squeamishness about court. It's that decades of evidence point the same direction: contested litigation is the most expensive way to resolve a family matter, the most damaging to the relationships that have to keep functioning afterward, and the path with the least client control over the outcome. A judge with thirty other cases that week is going to make a decision based on the worst day each spouse had in front of them. That is rarely the decision a client would have made for themselves.

Cristi runs the firm on that observation. The four-phase practice — Clarify, Chart the path, Resolve, Forward — is the structure she's built around it.

Cristi took her first collaborative training in 2002, more than a decade before the Texas Family Code was amended to formally recognize the practice. She began handling collaborative matters almost immediately and has continued to handle them, consistently, ever since.

By 2017, when she earned her Master Credential from Collaborative Divorce Texas, she had completed more than three hundred collaborative matters. The Master Credential is the highest tier the organization confers; it requires advanced interdisciplinary training plus peer review of sustained case experience. She co-founded Collaborative Divorce Austin during that same arc and has held leadership roles in the practice through several iterations.

That depth matters because collaborative is a craft. The protocols have specific shapes. The team dynamics have failure modes. The moments when a matter stalls have characteristic patterns, and the moves that restart them are specific. Reading a textbook does not produce fluency. Handling several hundred matters does.

Cristi is among the most experienced collaborative attorneys in Central Texas by case volume. She is not a generalist who added collaborative as a service line. The practice was built around it.

There are situations where contested litigation is the right tool. When the other side has filed first and is moving aggressively. When emergency temporary orders are needed to protect a child or a financial interest before any conversation about a settled outcome is possible. When the facts of the case require a judge's findings rather than a private agreement — which happens, and is real, and is not a failure of the resolution-first approach.

For those situations, the same firm that designed the collaborative process is also the firm prepared to take the matter into a Travis County or Williamson County courtroom. Cristi has tried family-law cases for nearly three decades. She knows the local benches. She knows what a judge can and cannot do for a client. She knows when to fight a temporary orders hearing and when to use the time before it for productive negotiation.

The site says it plainly elsewhere and it bears repeating here: court is the backup, not the plan. The firm goes when the other side forces it, and is prepared when it does. The preference for resolution is not about avoiding court. It's about using court only when it is genuinely the best instrument available for the particular family in front of us.

Cristi grew up in Texas and lives in Austin with her husband, her children, and two huskies who do not understand that they are huskies in Austin. She earned her Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as an Administrative Editor at The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. She is licensed to practice in Texas, Colorado, Utah, and Maryland.

Outside the practice she rides bikes, hikes long trails, and skis when the season allows. She has written practical guides on the divorce process — the kind that exist because clients kept asking for the same questions to be answered without legalese.

She has been recognized by Austin Monthly Magazine as a top attorney in Austin and named to the Texas Super Lawyers list by Texas Monthly. The recognitions are pleasant; the practice is the point.

Austin Monthly · Texas Super Lawyers · Texas Academy of Family Law Specialists · International Academy of Collaborative Professionals · Collaborative Divorce Austin (co-founder).