A practice built around one idea.

Margaret Thornbury has practiced estate planning law for nearly thirty years, and she still measures every plan by a single test: will it hold up on the hardest day a family faces. She founded Thornbury & Finch in 2012 to build a firm around that idea, one where counsel is unhurried, pricing is transparent, and the documents are written to be read by the people who will one day rely on them.

A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Margaret began her career drafting trusts for a large Detroit firm before deciding that the work she cared about most, the long conversations with families about what they truly wanted, deserved a quieter setting. She is known among clients for asking the question behind the question: not simply who inherits, but what a parent hopes a gift will make possible, and what they hope it will never enable.

Margaret is a member of the State Bar of Michigan and its Probate and Estate Planning Section. She lives in Birmingham, tends a stubborn vegetable garden, and believes strongly that a good estate plan is an act of care, not a purchase.

Daniel Finch leads the firm's probate and trust administration practice, the work that begins after a loss, when families are asked to become executors and trustees at the very moment they least want a second job. Daniel's role is to lift that weight: to translate the Michigan probate process into plain steps, keep deadlines from becoming emergencies, and let families grieve without also fearing the mail.

Before joining Margaret to build Thornbury & Finch, Daniel spent a decade representing personal representatives and successor trustees across Oakland and Wayne counties. He has shepherded estates through supervised and unsupervised administration, resolved creditor claims, and untangled the kind of paperwork knots that accumulate when a plan was never made. Clients describe him as the person who answers the phone and makes the problem smaller.

Daniel is a member of the State Bar of Michigan. He coaches his daughter's soccer team, repairs old bicycles he does not need, and keeps a running list of the questions families wish someone had told them to ask sooner.

Priya Raghavan focuses on special-needs planning and the trusts that make it work, the careful architecture that lets a family provide for a loved one with a disability without disturbing the public benefits that loved one depends on. It is exacting work, and Priya is drawn to exactly the parts that intimidate other lawyers: the interplay of a third-party special-needs trust with Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income, and the fine print that decides whether a plan protects or accidentally disqualifies.

Priya joined the firm after several years in a trusts and estates group, where she learned that the best technical plan is worthless if a family cannot understand it. She writes trusts the way she wishes hers had been written for her: readable, annotated, and honest about the trade-offs. She spends real time with parents thinking through who the successor trustee should be, and what that person will actually need to do.

Priya is a member of the State Bar of Michigan. She volunteers with a local disability advocacy group, reads more case law than is strictly healthy, and is the person on the team most likely to catch the detail everyone else missed.

Colleen Dwyer is the reason the firm's files are calm. As senior paralegal, she manages the moving parts of estate and trust administration: the court filings, the inventories, the account transfers, and the dozens of small confirmations that keep a matter from stalling. When a family wonders whether a form was received or a deadline is coming, Colleen usually already knows.

She has spent more than fifteen years in probate and estate practice, long enough to have seen nearly every version of the paperwork and to have built checklists that quietly prevent the mistakes other offices make. Clients meet Colleen early and keep her number, because she is the one who remembers that the funeral home needs certified copies and that the bank will ask for the letters of authority before it will talk to anyone.

Colleen believes that clarity is a form of kindness. She will happily explain the same step three times, in plain words, until it makes sense, and she considers that part of the job, not an interruption to it.

Marcus Bell is usually the first voice a new client hears, and he takes that seriously. As client services coordinator, he manages intake, scheduling, and the steady flow of communication that makes working with a law firm feel human rather than bureaucratic. His job is to make sure no one who reaches out to Thornbury & Finch ever feels like a case number.

Marcus came to the firm from a background in client care and operations, and he brought a simple conviction with him: people navigating estate matters are often anxious, grieving, or both, and the least a firm can do is answer promptly and warmly. He prepares clients for their first meeting so the time with an attorney is spent on what matters, and he follows up afterward so nothing falls through the cracks.

Outside the office, Marcus is a volunteer usher at a community theater and an unrepentant maker of elaborate weekend breakfasts. He is the team's quiet standard-keeper for how a household ought to be treated.