American journalist Sydney J. Harris once said, “Happiness is a direction, not a place.”
I turn the line over in my mind as I sit in Christie Tournet’s office, preparing to interview one of the Northshore’s more respected estate attorneys. Her reputation proceeds her, but so does my preparation.
A week’s worth of questions fills the binder on my lap. Tabs. Notes. Arrows. I’ve marshalled enough material to cross-examine the future itself.
But this is not the attorney’s office I expected.
Near the window, a warm lamp illuminates a caramel-leather chair. Behind me, a white pelican opens its wings across a sweep of cream, blue, and brushed gold. Beneath it, family photographs line woven-wood cabinets. Christie’s husband and daughters smile from the frames. A nearby tissue box reads God Bless You, and above a glass shelf of flowers and artwork hangs Christie’s Pro Bono Century Award.
The office is already answering questions I have not yet asked.
The walls are wrapped in a soft, smoky green.
“What paint color is this?” I ask.
“Stony Brook,” Christie says without missing a beat.
The answer comes so quickly, so decisively, that it catches me off guard. I close the binder and abandon a week’s worth of carefully preloaded questions. Clearly, the attorney sitting across from me is far too quick, candid, and fully alive to be interviewed in bullet points.
The Questions We Avoid
“What do people feel when they first sit where I’m sitting?” I ask.
“They don’t really want to be here,” Christie says. “They don’t want to be talking about a will, or a trust, or when they pass. People put that off for a long time.”
She’s right. When I think about estate planning, I picture paperwork, uncomfortable decisions, and a future I would rather leave unopened. It is easy to postpone the conversation until life becomes less busy, the business settles down, the children grow older, or the family finally learns to survive Thanksgiving without incident.
Mortality, Christie reminds me, rarely checks the calendar.
“People definitely need to get things off their chest when they’re talking about their estate,” she says. “They need to vent. They need to get it out.”
That may be the first surprise of estate planning. The most important document in the room is not always the will. Sometimes it can be the family story nobody has yet said aloud.
Who can be trusted? Who needs protection? Which child should make decisions? What happens to the business? Where will a dependent adult live? And what happens when love is real, but the family is complicated?
Christie hears some version of these questions every day.
“’I have two kids that hate each other, but I want to name them both co-executors,’” she says, describing a dilemma that clients often bring her. “I have to guide them through that. I tell people, ‘You can blame it on me. Let them know your estate-planning attorney said you cannot do that.’”
She smiles, but the warning is serious. A legal document cannot repair a fractured relationship. In the wrong hands, it may formalize the fracture and give it a checking account.
That is why Christie is willing to be the unpopular voice in the room. Her job is not simply to record what a client requests, but rather to look ahead, anticipate where the plan might fail, and help a family avoid inheriting a conflict along with the house, the business, and the silver.
Built from the Ground Up
“How did you become an estate attorney?” I ask.
The answer begins, unexpectedly, beneath a concrete slab.
Christie’s father was a plumber who became a contractor and developer. While other college students were learning business from textbooks, Christie was helping run the machinery behind his ventures: payroll, accounting, employer taxes, financing, business plans, layered LLCs, construction companies, and Northshore developments.
“My dad ate that up,” she says. “He put me to work.”
At Loyola University, Christie studied international business and economics. She was fascinated by the human side of systems: how ordinary people and business owners respond to taxes, regulation, incentives, and pressure. For a time, she planned to earn a doctorate in economics.
Then she arrived in Missouri.
“I hated it,” she says. “It was so much math.”
The social questions she loved had vanished beneath a small mountain of calculus, so Christie returned to Louisiana and chose another notoriously difficult route. In 2007, she passed one of the state’s first statewide notary examinations on her first attempt.
Louisiana notaries do considerably more than watch someone sign a document. They may draft wills, powers of attorney, donations, affidavits, and certain business instruments. By the time Christie entered law school, she was already preparing legal documents for real people.
“I was in law school, and I was doing powers of attorney,” she says.
The documents traveled with her in a teal briefcase from Office Depot. Not exactly Louis Vuitton, but it carried the beginnings of a career.
At the same time, Christie continued running her father’s companies. Her classmates were clerking for judges and studying case law. Christie was dealing with payroll, banks, human resources, financing, and the daily consequences of decisions made outside the classroom.
“I’m glad I did it the way I did it,” she says. “I had so much real-world experience.”
After graduating from law school in 2010, Christie joined Galloway Johnson, where she practiced construction and workers’ compensation defense. But estate planning and successions kept finding her. When a client needed a will, or a family needed help after a death, Christie was the attorney who stepped in.
Then Christie left the established firm, the benefits, and the predictable ladder to open her own firm.
“Was that the scariest thing you’ve ever done?” I ask.
“Absolutely,” she says. “Leaving an established job where you’re working up the ranks, cashing in my little retirement account and my savings. I had just become a mom.”
During the first year, Christie paid the rent, her paralegal, and every other expense before paying herself.
If I can get through the first year, then I’ve got this, she remembers thinking. Then it became, If I can get through three years, I can do it.
The practice grew into Christie Tournet & Associates, concentrating in estate planning, estate administration, and elder law.
The teal briefcase had become a firm, and the young woman studying systems became the attorney families call when their own lives need stronger foundations.
The Questions Love Must Answer
The conversation grows quieter when we discuss parents caring for children with special needs.
“You are everything for them right now,” Christie tells them. “But what happens if you’re not here? What does it look like with your current situation with your child? Who else knows it? Where is your child going to live? Have you talked to other people?”
Love may be fierce, intuitive, and inexhaustible, but love is not an instruction manual. Someone else must know the routines, relationships, promises, medications, preferences, and a thousand practical details living inside one parent’s head before life changes.
“Estate planning is one way we continue treating people we love well,” Christie says, “even when we are no longer here to answer the questions, make the decisions, or guide them forward.”
For business owners, the same question arrives.
A veterinarian, chiropractor, contractor, or other professional may build a thriving company whose pulse depends almost entirely upon one person.
“The doors open because you arrive,” Christie says. “The clients remain because you answer. The business works because you do. But if you have no strategy for what happens next, how can your business sustain itself?”
That desire explains the teamwork around which Christie built her firm.
“I really want people to understand that they’re coming in and working with a team of professionals,” she says. “We’re all equipped to work on estate plans, successions, and trust administration.”
I witnessed this firsthand while waiting in the lobby before the interview. Morgan, the receptionist, answered a worried caller on the phone. I knew nothing about the situation, but I heard the precise moment her voice changed. It softened around whatever grief, fear, or confusion had entered the line.
“Our team is able to help people navigate difficult moments in life,” Christie says. “We’re able to hold your hand through this.”
That reassurance is supported by specialization. Christie completes continuing education, teaches attorneys, and studies with elder-law mentors because the work changes and the stakes remain.
“There are not a whole lot of people doing estate planning, administration, and elder law on a daily basis,” Christie says. “I’m hungry to learn. I do not stop.”
A Direction Forward
“What’s next for Christie Tournet?” I ask.
Something ambitious, naturally.
“I don’t want this business to vanish when I do,” she says.
Christie is preparing to take her fifty-year-old office building nearly down to the studs. The aging electrical system and HVAC need replacing. The roofline will rise. The exterior may be reimagined. For someone raised around construction and now practicing estate law, the metaphor practically writes itself.
Renovation is never merely cosmetic. It is a decision about what can be preserved, what must be replaced, and what should remain standing for the people who come next.
So is estate planning.
Every will asks us to imagine an absence. Every trust, succession, power of attorney, and difficult family conversation attempts to translate love into structure before time makes the decisions for us.
“What does the pelican mean to you?” I ask, turning in my chair to see it more fully.
“I’ve always loved our state bird,” Christie says.
She leaves it there, but the image continues speaking. The white pelican is an emblem of divine protection: wings opened over what is fragile, a graceful presence between one season of life and the next. In Christian art, the pelican became a picture of Christ pouring out his sacrificial love, promising protection, nourishment, and resurrection.
By Quiet Waters
Before heading out for a photoshoot, I have one final, unscripted question.
“When you renovate this building,” I say, “will you keep the color of the walls?”
Christie glances around the room and smiles, which was answer enough.
Stony Brook.
Life is filled with stony passages. Families fracture. Health changes. Businesses falter. People we love disappear from rooms where we expected them always to remain.
But embedded within Christie’s firm is also a brook, and brooks find their way forward. Brooks do not argue with stones; they bend around what cannot be moved, pass through narrow places, and carry us gently from one season into the next.
My mind returns to the ancient Psalm, whose words seem to hold Christie and her work in a single image:
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside quiet waters” (Psalm 23).
“Everything I have is a blessing from God,” Christie tells me. “I want everything I do in my daily life to make God proud, to make my family proud, to make me proud.”
The inscription on the tissue box carries new meaning now: God Bless You.
In another office, the words might feel decorative, but here, they feel load-bearing.
Christie cannot remove grief, uncertainty, or the difficult passages every family must eventually cross. No attorney can. But she can help us prepare the way, protect the people we love, and make certain all of us enter those waters with guidance.
Sydney J. Harris was right. Happiness is a direction, not a place.
Christie Tournet and her team make the journey ahead feel less like a stony road and more like a gentle brook—a safe passage into all that happens next.
---
To begin the conversation with Christie Tournet at Christie Tournet & Associates, call 985-951-2177, email christie@tournetlaw.com, or visit tournetlaw.com. The firm is located at 4040 Desoto Street in Mandeville and serves families throughout St. Tammany Parish and the Greater New Orleans area with estate planning, successions and probate, elder law, special-needs planning, trusts, and related services.
“Our team is able to help people navigate difficult moments in life. We’re able to hold your hand through this.”
“Estate planning is one way we continue treating people we love well, even when we are no longer here to answer the questions, make the decisions, or guide them forward.”