Emily Sabo, Esquire: An Attorney You Can Trust to Help You Get It Done

             Admitted to practice law in the states of Florida, New York and Michigan as well as the territory of the United States Virgin Islands, Emily Sabo founded her St. Thomas law firm in October of 2008, providing a wide variety of legal services, spanning from general civil litigation and bankruptcy litigation, to estate planning, probate, commercial contracts, and general business and transactional law as well as some family law—Emily even acted as a legislative consultant to a USVI Senator working to craft legislation in various fields, including without limitation, renewable energy law.  As part of her diverse practice, and before she engaged in consulting work for the Senator, Emily was incredibly happy to gain experience in the field of renewable energy when she was hired by an off-island private power company to act as legal counsel for all transactional, regulatory and litigation work necessary to complete a ground breaking renewable energy project on the island of St. Thomas, pursuant to which the client would construct wind turbines to be used in a sale/leaseback program by large power users to supplement power to such large power users during rolling brown outs that otherwise occur and to then net meter excess power back to the public utility in a win/win relationship that helped to fill the power shortage on the island.                

          Prior to starting her practice in St. Thomas, USVI, Emily was employed by Merrill Lynch in New York City and thereafter worked at Thacher Proffitt & Wood, LLP—a large New York City law firm established in 1848.  At Merrill Lynch, Emily worked in the State Regulation, Legislation and Government Affairs Department researching, nation-wide state securities laws, drafting responses for securities litigation and compliance matters and participating in industry committee conference regarding pending state legislation of industry-wide concern. At Thacher Proffitt & Wood, Emily represented issuers, underwriters, sellers and servicers in mortgage-backed securities transactions (including public and private offerings of residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities); she also represented large investment and commercial banks and other financial institutions in their capacities as lenders, borrowers, issuers and purchasers in structured finance transactions and in connection with asset-based and other secured lending transactions covering a variety of industries. In connection with the foregoing, she prepared various disclosure documents, including registration statements, prospectus supplements and various types of free writing prospectuses, as well as all necessary operative agreements for client-sponsored transactions, including underwriting agreements, pooling and servicing agreements, credit agreements, security agreements, repurchase agreements, intercreditor and co-lending agreements and more.  In the securities law and transactional law industry, Emily drafted complex contracts, papered complex structured finance agreements, and created bankruptcy remote entities—which experience she parlayed into a bankruptcy civil litigation practice in St. Thomas, USVI, representing investment banks seeking relief from the automatic stay imposed in bankruptcy cases to allow the investment banks to foreclose on the assets constituting their security interests for the loan made to the individual or commercial debtor in the bankruptcy proceeding.  From there, Emily’s segway into general civil litigation, as an accompaniment to her transactional and finance practice, soon followed.         

           After leaving St. Thomas and moving to Florida, Emily was admitted to practice law in Florida and started her Florida firm, Emily Sabo Esquire, LLC, seeking to focus on all aspects of business and transactional law, including, without limitation, business structuring, contract drafting, construction contracts/sub-contracts, estate planning (including uncontested summary probates), gun trusts and, even conducting high level legal research, writing and litigation strategy for other lawyers on a contract basis.  Wanting to make the courts more accessible to pro se litigants (e.g. parties without lawyers), Emily also decided to focus her broad skills and database of documents she has produced into forms for purchase by people seeking to use the legal system to resolve disputes or to accomplish certain necessary tasks (i.e. obtaining a divorce in cases of irreconcilable differences or probating assets of a deceased loved one that were not included in a trust agreement or estate plan).  These tasks that require the courts to complete can be completed without the significant cost of an attorney utilizing Emily’s virtual law firm and the forms and instructions available through this website, and/or by utilizing Emily’s mediation services and third-party neutral services described in the paragraph to follow.

                Looking to focus on dispute resolution, rather than litigating, starting in 2018, Emily also completed over 120 hours of Florida Supreme Court Certified Mediation Training for both Civil Court and Family Court and established her mediation practice, utilizing her dispute resolution training and skills to help parties to resolve disputes in mutually beneficial ways through both pre-litigation (aka “pre-suit” mediation) and through mediation during ongoing litigation.  Committed to helping parties avoid or end the stress and cost of litigation, Emily is skilled at finding common ground and capitalizing on mutually beneficial arrangements that parties do not always have the capacity to see and move toward themselves when immersed in the thralls of a legal battle or dispute.  Emily is committed to the idea that a strong, successful mediation practice provides a public service by pointing parties toward a viable and less expensive path forward.  Mediation, and especially pre-suit mediation, can help to avoid costly litigation altogether, leaving the parties with a signed settlement agreement, a mutually agreeable resolution, and a lot less stress overall in many different contexts.  From completing a cost-effective divorce and parenting plan to settling disputes in business relationships, foreclosure and bankruptcy settings, mediation can help both parties to emerge from a variety of confrontational or stressful situations happy with the outcome, instead of anxious about the future and wondering if there will ever be an acceptable resolution.  Parties are often too close to a situation to see that there are many avenues to settlement, which do NOT include the age-old concept that compromise should mean that both parties walk away from the negotiating table unhappy. To the contrary, Emily believes fervently that parties can leave the negotiating table better off and happier than they came to it, if they are willing to be creative in the negotiating process.  In this vein, Emily helps parties to tap into their full negotiating potential to draw out true goals and end-game focused reasoning.  Mutually beneficial relationships and contracts may be hard for the parties to find their way to when they are intricately intertwined in a situation, whether business or personal, but an outside perspective, with an eye toward creative solutions and finding ways parties can provide a benefit to each other at—what each party perceives to be little or no cost to himself or herself—is central to Emily's style of mediation and conflict resolution.  In this realm, Emily provides mediation services coupled with third party neutral contract drafting services to prepare settlement agreements memorializing the mediated settlement terms reached, and, if contracted to do so ahead of time, Emily can also prepare transactional business formation documents, applications and even provide pro se litigation assistance in the form of assisting parties in completing the Florida Supreme Court Approved Forms that must be filed to complete a divorce, divide assets and/or establish a parenting plan in a cost effective manner.    Contact Emily Sabo, Esq. to schedule a free 30 minute consult today.