Carla Alston

When Tom died, I had everything an estate planning attorney is supposed to have. A trust. A will. A medical power of attorney. A financial power of attorney. What I did not have was a way to access the digital assets my husband had quietly built over the years, because crypto does not have a beneficiary designation, and there is no institution to call.

"No beneficiary designation. No institution to call. An estate planning attorney, locked out of her own husband's estate."

That experience rewrote how I practice. Today I am one of the few Texas attorneys who plans seriously for digital assets, and the only one I know of who has lived through the gap herself. If you hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, a hardware wallet, or even a Coinbase account, your family has a problem you may not know about. I can fix it before they have to find out the way I did.

For 22 years I have been Christian's mother. Christian has Down syndrome and autism, and raising him has shaped my practice as much as my law degree. Families who walk into my office with a child on the spectrum, or a newly diagnosed grandchild, or a sibling about to turn 18, are not getting an attorney who read a CLE last month. They are getting a mother who filed the guardianship, fought the Medicaid letter, wrote the Letter of Intent, and sat in the IEP meeting. I know what is coming, because I have already lived it.

I earned my Bachelor of Accountancy and my J.D. at the University of Mississippi, then a Master of Laws in Taxation from New York University School of Law in 1985 — the most respected tax LLM in the country. I practiced as an in-house tax attorney at Alcon Laboratories from 1985 to 1989, then at Eckert Seamans from 1989 to 1993. I have been admitted to the State Bar of Texas since 1986. When my children were young, I opened my own firm so I could practice the kind of law my family needed me to practice.

Today I focus on three kinds of Texas families: families raising a child with special needs, families with meaningful crypto or digital assets, and families whose estates are large enough that tax planning is not optional. If you are one of them, I would like to meet you.