When Russ, now 35, joined the firm in 2007,
the duo set a precedent as the city’s first mother-
daughter private practice team. “She’s more of
a warrior at this point. I think she’s more willing
to take on the battles, and I’m probably more
conservative,” Moses says. “She has somewhat of
a Don Quixote spirit about her.”
Russ has shaken things up in other ways
too. When she joined the firm, she talked her
mom into moving the office from its longtime
downtown location to Elliston Place in Midtown.
It was no longer necessary to be near the
courthouse on a daily basis for hearings, she
insisted, and Moses agreed.
“Thinking about what kind of environment I
wanted, I thought, ‘There’s no better environment
than to have a home-like feeling for family law,’”
Moses says, motioning around her spacious,
second-floor office in a restored 1911 Victorian
house. “I didn’t want an institutional building. I
wanted a home. … It was in terrible shape, but I
liked the bones of this building.”
MOSES BELIEVES IN MAKING HERSELF
available to clients as often as they need her.
She’d much rather answer a cellphone call at an
inconvenient time than have a stressed spouse
make a wrong decision, like moving out of the
marital home in a huff.
She’s also a master at staying calm, says
Chancellor Carol McCoy of Chancery Court in
Nashville and Davidson County. She and Moses
became friends in the mid-1980s while they were
appointed co-conservators for a husband and
wife in a lengthy conservatorship. “She assigns
stress to a back seat while she is efficiently
organizing a resolution for her clients’ concerns.
There are few people who can handle numerous
stressful cases in domestic relations with such
calmness and assuredness. It throws other people
off, how steady she is.”
Yoga helps Moses stay relaxed and gives
her a balanced perspective on life. So does
volunteering for Family & Children’s Service,
where she currently serves as a co-chair of the
capital campaign. She has also campaigned for
several Nashville judges, including McCoy.
But it is her family that inspires her most.
Her children—Russ; Caroline Moses Sprouse, a
marketing manager at Nissan; and Ryan Manuel
Moses, who works in the family spirits business—
and three grandchildren live nearby. “I’m just so
lucky,” Moses says. “We all get along really well
and enjoy being with each other. Nothing pleases
me more than to be with family and friends.”
Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers starting in
2015 for two years and is one of approximately
100 members selected as a diplomate of the
American College of Family Trial Lawyers. U.S.
News & World Report ranked MTR among its
“Best Law Firms” in 2014.
“She has a remarkable ability, perhaps rare
among lawyers, to put other people first, to
really listen to others and to understand their
concerns, needs and objectives,” says Andrée
Blumstein of Sherrard & Roe in Nashville, who
has collaborated with Moses on several litigation
matters. “Most important of all, Marlene is a
wonderful, unstintingly generous, genuinely kind
and caringly supportive person.”
A FIFTH-GENERATION NASHVILLIAN AND THE
oldest of three children, Moses hails from a close-knit family. Her mom was a community volunteer,
and her father, a wholesale wine and liquor
distributor, developed software applications for the
liquor business in the late 1960s, “when [computers]
had to have their own separate buildings with air
conditioning under the floor and they were huge
units that had punch cards,” Moses recalls.
But it was a cousin and an aunt, both social
workers, who influenced her first career choice.
After earning her master’s degree in social work
from Tulane University, Moses returned to Nashville
to counsel clients in the drug and alcohol treatment
program at the Dede Wallace Center, now part
of Centerstone. “I have always been interested
in people and caring about people, having good
relationships with people and wanting to assist,”
Moses says. “So it really was a great fit.”
During trips to criminal court to testify on behalf
of clients in recovery, it occurred to her that she
might make an even bigger impact as a lawyer.
But, she says, “I had no intention of leaving my
roots because of my values about family. I mean,
that’s just the most important thing.”
So important, in fact, that she talked her
husband, Robert—who worked in the family
wholesale company her grandfather started at
the close of Prohibition—into taking night classes
with her at Nashville School of Law so they could
spend time together.
“My fear was that I wasn’t going to see him in
the daytime and I wasn’t going to see him in the
nighttime either, and that I needed to study on
the weekends,” Moses says. “I thought, ‘Well, if
we don’t see each other for the next four years,
that probably isn’t going to be very good.’” Robert
reluctantly agreed to sign up for one month, then
another, until they both ended up with law degrees
in 1980, though he never practiced full time.
In her fourth year, she gave birth to their first
daughter, Marissa Moses Russ, now a partner in
the firm. “We tease her about having gone to law
school already,” Moses says. During study groups,
“we’d be in our living room and I’d hide behind
the piano bench and nurse her while we were
studying. The guys were great sports about it.”
In 1981, Moses went to work in an association
of attorneys. Years later she opened her own
downtown firm, Moses & Townsend, with then-
partner Beth Townsend. She initially represented
clients in criminal and probate court.
Eventually, family law—from divorce and
juvenile cases to prenuptial agreements and
enforcement issues—eclipsed everything
else. Along the way, Moses began doing
more mediation, arbitration and settlement
conferences, and even helped fathers win
custody of their children at a time when few were
successful in doing so.
These days, Moses is just as likely to handle
same-sex parenting issues, cohabitation
agreements, surrogacy adoptions, grandparents’
rights and, in conjunction with co-counsel in
France, England and other countries, abductions
and parental conflicts for international clients. Like
many attorneys, she spends less time than she
once did in court, although a few years ago she
began representing a client in an ongoing case
with a rare 12-day complex divorce trial involving
alimony, property division and custody issues.
In 2009, 15 years after becoming a fellow
in the American Academy of Matrimonial
Lawyers, Moses was elected president and was
instantly catapulted into the public spotlight as
media outlets sought comments on trending
relationship topics like divorce insurance and
Facebook cheating. Despite noteworthy coverage
by The Washington Post, USA Today and other
publications, she is especially proud of What
Should We Tell the Children?, a booklet she
produced for separating and divorcing parents
that the AAML distributes in the U.S. and the
IAML distributes internationally.
Practical and precise, Moses says that by listening
she is able to help clients identify goals they didn’t
even know they had. “I try to be prepared and I try to
do everything perfectly,” she says. “I don’t say that I
always achieve it, but I can say that whatever I take
on, I really want to do it well.”
Greg Smith, a Nashville attorney with Stites &
Harbison, has handled dozens of cases as Moses’
opposing counsel over the last two decades.
“She and her office make a tremendous effort
to get to know their clients and the background
of their clients and the details of the cases,” he
says. “Marlene’s the kind of lawyer that comes
to mediation or trial knowing where her client
went to high school, probably knowing where the
clients’ parents went to high school.”
