For years a somewhat under-the-radar practitioner with a reputation for securing very good results for clients, Julie Hottle Day is today one of the more respected divorce lawyers in Northern Virginia. That’s according to legal peers, partners and even a few judges, who’ve observed Day’s steady rise in family law over the last 25 years. Now in her 50s, Day and her Fairfax-based practice stand out for many reasons: She is widely known for deftly handling complex cases, many of those involving valuation of closely held businesses and professional practices. Moreover, peers say she possesses that can’t-be-intimidated poise typical of the best independent practitioners – a confidence based not simply on legal experience, but on overcoming early-life setbacks as well. She’s a skilled lawyer who doesn’t take herself too seriously; even competitors like and respect her. She has practiced at the well-connected firm of Culin Sharp Autry & Day and its antecedents her entire career. A stable career path is especially rare in the ultra-competitive legal profession nowadays; that Day has built her practice at a small (7-lawyer) multi-discipline firm is extraordinary as well, as such firms are an anomaly in today’s competitive legal marketplace.

Julie Hottle grew up in Springfield, Va., the daughter of the president of Alexandria-based United Masonry, Inc.; Douglas Hottle encouraged his daughters to compete and excel. By Julie’s own estimation, her younger sister (who went on to get a PhD from Princeton) was the early scholar, while “I was that kid, you know, who was smart, full of potential, but not living up to it.” Still, Day, who in high school made the varsity swim team and played club rugby, had her ambitions: “I wanted to be the first woman police chief in Fairfax County,” she says. She was taken by, she says, the “solving-the-public’s-problems nature of law enforcement.” She joined the Law Enforcement Explorers, a Boy Scouts-sponsored program operating with the Fairfax County Police Department. From high school (West Springfield HS Class of 1984: 624 graduates) she went on to tiny Lycoming College (graduating class: 300) in Williamsport, Pa., where she majored in criminal justice and political science (“Not much anxiety for me – I knew what I wanted to do”) and played violin for the Williamsport Symphony. When she began Washington & Lee Law School – four hours, and truly a world away, from Northern Virginia – she had an eye on fulfilling her father’s desire to have her join his business as a construction lawyer. But fate had other plans: In October 1989, in her second year of law school, Doug Hottle took up a 6-seat Beech Baron out of Manassas Regional Airport, and the plane crashed shortly after takeoff. He perished, age 51. The cause, it was learned later, was a mechanic’s repair error. “It was a lot to process.” It all changed, too, her career options, which were dwindling in the face of a severe recession in 1991 – the year she graduated from law school. “It was brutal – very few of us were finding full-time positions.”

Remarkably, she “did what I had to” – she made a deal with Fairfax lawyer John Ritzert in which she would work in exchange for developing a legal writing sample, a key for any young lawyer to land a full-time position. Only months later she was hired, to focus on construction law, by the Fairfax commercial-litigation firm of Dixon Smith & Stahl. But the firm “had the same problem – not enough work for too many lawyers” and the firm abruptly closed its doors while she was on maternity leave. From there, though, two of that firm’s partners, divorce lawyer Robert G. Culin, Jr., and former Fairfax City Prosecutor Mark E. Sharp teamed up to launch what today is the Culin Sharp firm; Day says the firm’s founding lawyers (Culin passed away in 2018) have been “career-long mentors” who “taught me that it wasn’t what you know that makes you a great lawyer – it’s who you are, as a person, that defines you.” In the early years Day sat second chair on major trials with Culin, and prepared and organized complex litigation, all along building her own case load. In 2002 she was named a partner, becoming a name partner two years later, and her practice – and stature – have grown accordingly. She went out and landed the work – publishing articles, making public speaking engagements, tried-and-true forms of promotion in the law. More significantly, as a mother of young children while building her career, she consulted with a professional coach who specialized in woman lawyers’ professional development. The key question shaping her practice development: Who would be your ideal client? Day – herself independent and industrious – found the answer fairly simple: “Hard-working people who don’t have to have a Harvard MBA - naturally intelligent people who earned their opportunities. I could relate to that.”

Clients will find her to be an engaging combination of sensitivity and bemused detachment, someone with a keen eye, candor and sense of efficiency. And she’s naturally curious: Recently she took it upon herself to memorize species of trees by their bark - “it annoyed me that I didn’t know which was which.” Her biggest successes for clients are of course never publicized, but some are lore in Northern Virginia family law circles – ask her about “The Mongolian Pony Story” in which she cheerfully engaged with a high-profile rival at the conclusion of a highly contested case. Away from the office, she and her husband, Edward, continue to focus on their now-college-age children. (Her mother is “still rockin” in her hometown of Springfield.) Their son is a club hockey player at the University of Vermont. And their daughter, a competitive swimmer, attends Skidmore College this fall, where she will major in business management and French: “Today I tell my daughter and all girls what my parents always used to tell me: You can do anything you want. Go do it.”