Tom Downs Plans Ahead

Long-Time Local Lawyer Reflects on a Full Career and His Own Next Steps

(Photo courtesy of Tom Downs)

When first meeting Tom Downs, he hardly seems like the type of person who talks often about death. Jovial and light-hearted though he may be, he possesses decades of experience planning for our inevitable end. Downs Law Firm, which specializes in estate planning, has been a fixture in Laurel since 2002.

Raised in Greenbelt, Downs graduated a year early from high school. Without overly specific plans for his future, he enrolled in Prince George’s Community College with an idea of going into social work. His grades at community college were higher than he anticipated, so he decided to become a lawyer, feeling that practicing law would be a type of social work in itself.

Upon graduation, Downs clerked for a judge for a year (a common practice for newly graduated law school students). A lawyer friend of his became ill, and the secretary of this friend began calling Downs regularly for legal advice. Downs eventually realized that the secretary was doing the majority of legal work for that office, regularly taking papers to the hospital to be signed by the ill lawyer. Upon the death of that lawyer, Downs took over the firm in 1982, embarking on the unusual path of owning a firm directly after a year of clerking.

He recalls the experience as a course in the importance of organization. The inherited law firm often had files with limited information, costing him hours in tracking down what, if anything, he needed to do with them. Downs noted that even among lawyers, there’s often a lack of planning for succession in their own firms.

However, Downs didn’t immediately focus solely on estate planning. A year after taking over the firm, Downs joined it with another established firm and found himself practicing primarily divorce law. Because lawyers often have to sell the house of a divorcing couple for them, Downs was selling 40 to 50 houses a year and was not emotionally satisfied with his legal focus.

Eventually, Downs shifted to estate planning, a subset of law with far higher job satisfaction than divorce law. He looks at what he does now as “scaring somebody in a nice way,” or taking the unpleasant thing we avoid thinking about (death) and making someone look at it long enough to plan for the future dispersal of his or her belongings. He officially limited his practice to this focus in 1995.

After moving his firm to Main Street in 2002, Downs noticed that he wasn’t attracting the older generation of Laurel residents; he credits the influence of Laurel resident Jim McCeney for eventually attracting that demographic to the firm. Downs and his wife, Margie, moved their family to Laurel in 2004. The Downs have three children—who are now adults—and attend St. Mary of the Mills Catholic Church.

Downs enjoys estate law and used to be a frequent public speaker on the topic. Musing on what he’s learned over the years, Downs explained that childhood sibling rivalries tend to reemerge after the death of a parent. Often there’s the need for a neutral party to assist with decision-making and move the family out of entrenched opposing ideas. He often tells the clients who come to him for estate planning, “It’s not for you,” explaining that estate planning is for those left to sort out another person’s affairs after death. Downs also sees it as important that his firm not only helps with the initial planning (making wills, establishing a trust, etc.), but also continues to see the distribution process through after the client dies.

When asked if any particular cases from his career stood out in his mind, he laughed and said that the ones he remembers most are the difficult cases. He relayed a particular case involving an elderly lady who decided to put both her children (a son and a daughter) in charge of her estate. (Downs does not recommend doing this.) The daughter decided that her own daughter, who was mentally ill, should live with Downs’ elderly client (the young lady’s grandmother). The son didn’t like this, but the granddaughter moved in anyway. Eventually, the granddaughter killed her grandmother, leaving her children at odds about the use of inheritance: the son didn’t want his mother’s money used to defend her killer; the daughter wanted to keep her child out of jail.

After over forty years of practicing law, Tom Downs is now putting in place a succession plan of his own. While not fully retiring, he’s transitioning to working three days a week and training two younger lawyers, Stephen Wallace and Justin Wedgewood. Downs plans to retire completely in a few years. For now, though, he’s preparing his firm for when he fully steps into the next phase of life. His decision to prepare for a smooth transition is indicative of a life spent helping others leave their affairs in order. After all, planning ahead is what he does.

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Caitlin Lewis holds a Master’s Degree in Education from Covenant College. She worked as a high school English teacher both in the U.S. and Greece, but currently works at home raising her four children and writing her column.