Heather Fann is an associate in the firm and a native of Piedmont, Alabama. She graduated cum laude from The University of Alabama School of Law in 2006.
Heather was selected by her peers as a Rising Star for Superlawyers 2011 and 2012 and among the Top Attorneys for Family Law for Birmingham Magazine’s 2011 edition. The Birmingham Bar Association named her Volunteer Attorney of the Year for 2011 and selected her for its 2011 Future Leaders Forum.
Heather has been active in the Family Section of the Alabama State Bar Association since she was in law school. She is Director of the Section’s annual Continuing Legal Education Seminar (“Divorce on the Beach”) for 2012, and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Section and chairs several committees including Alternative Families and the “Kids and the Law” Publication Task Force. She has contributed to the publication of Rick Fernambucq’s Family Law in Alabama: Practice and Procedure (Fourth Edition), published by Lexis-Nexis, and also to West’s Alabama Family Law, and she publishes and speaks on various family law issues including relocation and grandparent visitation. Heather is a member of the Birmingham Volunteer Lawyers Program and serves as a mentor for the Birmingham Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Pro Bono Divorce Clinic. She also serves as a cooperating attorney for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Heather’s practice is devoted entirely to family law, including divorce and post-divorce issues such as custody, child support, alimony, and relocation; adoption; prenuptial/postnuptial and cohabitation agreements and estate planning; and family court issues such as paternity and abuse and neglect cases. Heather seeks to settle matters wherever possible but stands ready to litigate where necessary. She practices primarily in Jefferson, Shelby, and St. Clair counties.
In addition to her legal work, Heather is active in the community, serving as the 2012 Vice Chair of the Executive Board of Birmingham AIDS Outreach as well as judging both graduate and undergraduate mock trial competitions.
While in law school, Heather served as Vice-President of the Public Interest Institute Student Board and competed nationally with the trial advocacy team for two years. After publishing an article entitled “Desperately Clinging to the Cleavers: What Family Law Courts are Doing About Homosexual Parents, and What Some are Refusing to See” in the Law & Psychology Review, Heather served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal during her last year of law school. She was awarded Best Paper in her family law class and received awards from both the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and the Alabama State Bar Association Family Law Section, and also received the Wythe W. Holt Civil Rights Award and the Jerome A. Hoffman Student Leadership Award. Heather co-founded and served as Vice-President of OutLaw, the University of Alabama School of Law’s first gay/straight alliance, and was recognized for those efforts through two consecutive awards from the ACLU of Alabama.
At her induction into the state bar, Heather was among five new lawyers who received the Volunteer Lawyer’s Program Award, for her work as a volunteer with the Legal Aid Society of Alabama in both the Birmingham and Bessemer family courts.
Heather clerked for Alabama Supreme Court Justice Patti Smith during her last term as Shelby County juvenile court judge and for Boyd, Fernambucq, Vincent & Dunn as a law student. Prior to law school, she worked for Hoover City Schools, at both Hoover and Spain Park High Schools, teaching ninth grade English and coaching the debate team. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Alabama in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and again in 2000 with a Master’s in Secondary Education.
