Sarah Novak Nesbitt is the Managing Attorney of the Family Law Division of Family Legal Advocacy Group and has focused her professional life on working with children and families. Sarah also practices in the firm’s Education Law Division and occasionally in the Child Welfare Division.
After growing up in Montgomery County, Sarah attended the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She graduated magna cum laude with dual degrees in psychology and sociology. While at Notre Dame, Sarah focused her course work and research on infant and child development and family dynamics. She returned to Maryland after college to work as a full time volunteer teacher at a scholarship school for low-income middle school boys in Baltimore City. Based on her volunteer experiences, Sarah became a lawyer to help children and families navigate the legal system.
Sarah graduated cum laude from the University of Maryland School of Law, where she was a Leadership Scholar. During her first summer, Sarah obtained a grant to intern for Project HEAL, a joint program from the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service and Johns Hopkins Children's Center, where she assisted primarily in family law and special education cases. The following year, Sarah won the Maryland Public Interest Law Project Pro Bono Student of the Year award for her work in starting an ongoing program for law students at University of Maryland to volunteer with Project HEAL. Sarah also volunteered throughout law school with the House of Ruth, providing services to victims of domestic violence. Her academic work included courses such as Domestic Violence and the Law, Children and the Law, Children and Divorce, Mediation in Family Law, and Families, Contracts, and Status. Sarah also focused on alternative dispute resolution options for families and litigation as a Rule 16 attorney in the Juvenile Law Clinic in special education and child protective services cases and as an intern for the Honorable Diane O. Leasure, then the Administrative Judge for the Circuit Court for Howard County. Sarah frequently volunteers in the Family Law Assistance Program in the Circuit Court for Howard County and has appeared in the Circuit Courts for Anne Arundel, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll, Frederick, Howard, Montgomery and Prince George's Counties. Sarah is a member of many professional organizations, including the Howard County Bar Association, the Maryland Collaborative Practice Council, the Howard County Collaborative Practice, the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals, the Divorce Roundtable of Montgomery County, the Maryland State Bar Association, and the Howard County Women’s Bar Association. She is also active with There Goes My Hero, a non-profit that provides bone marrow registration drives to support individuals with lymphoma and other medical conditions.