Elizabeth (Beth) Smith
Beth came to the practice of law in 2004 after working with families in crisis as a social worker for nearly 15 years. With this background, her focus as an attorney is two-fold. Her first objective is to assist clients in defining their needs and goals for themselves and their families before, during and after a divorce. The second is to work with persistence and professionalism to assist clients in divorcing in a manner that closely aligns with their needs and goals while minimizing the difficulty of the divorce experience. A client recently recommended Beth as follows:
"Beth Smith is the best advocate you could ever have. Advocate - someone to fight for you, someone to support you, someone to argue for you, your champion. She was highly recommended and far exceeded my expectation of what working with an attorney on a divorce could be like.
She is highly professional, incredibly smart, resourceful, tenacious, tireless and caring. Let me say more about caring. Divorce is a stressful process and Beth helps you to make the best of it - she is calm, supportive, empathetic and when appropriate, humorous. She will help you work through your priorities, financial and emotional, give you all the options, assist you to make the best decisions, develop a strategy and work until she achieves your goals. She is also strong, and tough and aggressive if that's what the situation calls for."
In practice, Beth focuses primarily on family law issues: divorce, custody, domestic violence and DCP&P. She is as adept at complex litigation as she at trying to find the most economical way to resolve your matter. Beth is a qualified Parenting Coordinator, maintaining a parenting coordination practice, assisting parents working through custody and parenting time issues in high conflict divorces. In addition to her family law focus, she is an experienced mediator in divorce and custody matters and serves as a court appointed Guardian Ad Litem.
Beth graduated from Hartwick College with a BA in political science and Spanish, followed by a Master's degree in social work from Fordham University, magna cum laude. She completed her law degree from the University of San Francisco, earning the Cali Award for excellence, and became licensed in New Jersey and New York in 2004. Prior to joining Dennigan Cahill Smith in 2008 she worked for the New Jersey Attorney General's Office as a Deputy Attorney General as a litigator and handling appeals an attorney representing the Department of Child Planning and Permanency. Beth is a member of the Mercer County Bar Association, New Jersey Bar Association, American Bar Association, Mercer County Domestic Violence Task Force, and vice-chair of the Mid-Jersey Collaborative Law Alliance<https://www.njfriendlydivorce..com/>. Beth serves as a panelist on the Mercer and Middlesex County Early Settlement Panels, and Guardian Ad Litem Task force and was appointed by the Supreme Court of New Jersey to the District VII Ethics Committee where she recently finished her tenure as Committee Chair.