Attorney and counselor at law
Luke A. Barry
Founder of Dogwood Estate Planning, and a Tuscaloosa native who thinks good legal work should be something normal families can actually afford.
He practices alongside Charles Lane Jones, who is Of Counsel to the firm.
Of Counsel
Charles Lane Jones
Charles handles the business side of the firm’s work: forming entities, drafting and negotiating contracts, and the questions that arrive when the family being planned for and the company paying the bills are the same people.
He also serves as fractional general counsel for businesses that need a lawyer on call rather than one on the payroll, on a subscription instead of an hourly bill. That is the same idea as the flat fee on the planning side. Knowing what the answer costs is most of what stops people from asking the question.
He earned his B.S. at Auburn University at Montgomery and his law degree at Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, and he has been admitted to practice in Alabama since 2012.
Why this firm exists
Estate planning was built for people preparing to die, not for families still building something.
The traditional version of this work was designed around retirees settling their affairs. That is a real need, and it is well served. What was never built was a version for the family in the middle of everything: young children, a mortgage, a business that is finally working, aging parents, and no time. Those families get told to come back later, or they get sold a template.
The other half of the problem is money. Serious planning has long been priced as though only wealthy people deserve it, which quietly tells everyone else that their family is not complicated enough to be worth protecting. That is backwards. The families with the least margin for error are the ones a failed plan hurts most.
So the firm was built the other way around: flat fees quoted before the work starts, plain English instead of jargon, and processes that make professional-grade wills, trusts, and powers of attorney genuinely available to middle-income families and small businesses in Alabama.
Where we are
From here, still here
Luke grew up here. He earned his undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Alabama and his law degree at Birmingham School of Law, and he practices a few hundred feet from a street that has been the middle of this town for a century. He and his wife Andrea live in Tuscaloosa with their daughter.
That matters more than it sounds like it should. Estate planning is the rare kind of law where the work is not finished when the documents are signed. Somebody has to still be here in fifteen years, when the plan is needed and the person who made it cannot explain it. Being from a place, and staying in it, is part of the service.
Who we work with
Families at every stage of it
- Parents, married or single, who want their children provided for and protected
- Unmarried couples formalizing what they have built together
- Blended families working out expectations that do not automatically align
- Families with enough at stake that estate and income tax planning matters
- Family business owners deciding how and when the next generation takes over
- Executors and beneficiaries working through probate
- Families carrying out a legacy through a trust administration
- Executors, trustees, and beneficiaries trying to resolve a conflict
- Families giving back to the community they came from
Alongside the planning practice, Luke works in probate and trust administration, estate and real estate litigation, real property, and business law, and he is a real estate investor himself. In practice that means the person drafting your deed has also been on the other side of one.
Come talk it through.
Fifteen minutes on the phone, no charge, and no obligation afterward.