Editor-in-chief

Claire Lefèvre.

I am a dual-qualified lawyer — admitted to the Paris Bar in 2009, to the New York Bar in 2013 — and, since 2021, the editor-in-chief of WinderWeedle Law. I write, edit and sign every guide on this site.

The short version

I studied law at the Sorbonne, took my LL.M. at NYU, and spent twelve years in practice: first as a notaire clerk handling estates and real-estate closings on the Right Bank, then in New York on the family-law and trust side of a Madison Avenue firm. I split my time between Paris and Boston — two cities where I have argued with a lot of clerks about filing deadlines.

In 2021 I stopped billing by the hour. I had become very tired of explaining the same twelve concepts — community property, probate, earnest money, alimony recalculations — to one person at a time, at 450 € an hour, when those twelve concepts could be written down once, clearly, and read for free. WinderWeedle Law is that writing-down.

What I actually do here

I pick the subjects, interview the practitioners, read the statutes, draft the guides, and edit every word before publication. When a guide touches a jurisdiction I have not personally practiced in — Florida probate, Texas community-property rules, Louisiana's civil-code oddities — I run the draft past a locally-licensed attorney before publishing. Those reviewers are credited at the foot of the article.

I do not accept ghost-written submissions. I do not repurpose press releases. If you read a sentence on this site, a human lawyer wrote it, and that human is me or someone I asked.

Why the French-and-English thing

Because the questions are the same — "am I going to lose the house?", "can I write this will by hand?", "what happens if my spouse won't sign?" — and the answers are completely different depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on. Running the site in both languages forces me to keep the distinction sharp. And, frankly, because I am bilingual and it would be silly not to.

My editorial rules, in five lines

1. Cite primary sources. Statutes, court opinions, official filings. Not other blog posts.
2. Update rather than abandon. When the law changes, the guide changes — or it gets unpublished.
3. Write for the person signing the paperwork, not the lawyer drafting it.
4. Name the uncertainty. If a rule is unsettled, say so. Do not pretend.
5. Decline briefs I would not want my mother to read.

The personal bit

I grew up in the 13e arrondissement, the daughter of a Parisian magistrate who insisted I read every letter from the mairie out loud at the dinner table. I run long distances badly and drink too much coffee. I have two children, a French husband, a Boston mortgage and an opinion about indivision successorale that I will not inflict on you here.

Comments on the articles themselves are closed — moderation is more work than I can give — but you can always write to me. I reply to everything, eventually.