Already with broad experience in family law, Ciara Miller is emerging as one of Northern Virginia’s more effective young divorce lawyers. She practices today at the McLean firm of Masterman Krogmann, PC, itself one of the DC area’s best known and most respected divorce-law boutiques. She joined David Masterman and Carole Krogmann just last year. According to her colleagues Ciara (pronounced “Kiera”) possesses those traits of reliability, maturity and competence that often define a successful legal career; she “has already had a big and positive impact, especially with our clients,” says Masterman.

Miller’s early years were spent in bucolic suburban Chicago - where “neighbors chatted over white picket fences” - until her father, an accountant, took a position in Northern Virginia, and moved the family to fast-growing Burke, Virginia, in western Fairfax County. There Miller and her older sister attended Lake Braddock High School, with approximately 600 students in a graduating class. “It was a place of a lot of change every year, something you had to get used to,” she says. With military families coming and going to new postings, “it was a community known for transience and constant new faces.” That, she says, had a big impact on her - on her views on community, family and even personal attitudes. “It’s tempting to react to change with a bad attitude - but that’s not going to get you anywhere.”

She considered some obvious choices for college, prominent and prestigious state schools like Virginia Tech - but University of South Florida offered a scholarship. “The only catch was I had to re-apply for it every year. That was a pretty strong incentive for keeping up your grades. And that taught me how to study.” She majored in criminology, with an eye on a possible career in criminal justice. For a time she interned in the Tampa, Fla., office of the US Secret Service. “It was all intriguing and fascinating.” Returning to the DC area she had an eye on law school right away, in part because a JD was a leg-up at many federal agencies, including the FBI. In many respects George Mason University Law School (now the Antonin Scalia Law School) was a perfect fit for Miller, who strived for and earned everything she got, and was never far removed from the real world. GM Law professors are often adjuncts and practicing lawyers; Miller says her legal education re-oriented her: “No one was spoon-feeding the work to you. They taught you how to think like a practical lawyer - that is to say, they posed more questions than they provided answers. It wasn’t about black and white, but about all the gray areas, about which arguments best suited your client, based on the framework of the law. You learned that there can be a lot of discretion within that framework.”

While still in law school, she worked as a law clerk with a small civil litigation firm in Old Town Alexandria; that firm hired her when she graduated. Remarkably, she spent 18 years at the four-lawyer firm, first assisting in civil trial cases, and later developing a domestic-relations practice. For a decade she built her own caseload in family law, often working with military families - the kind she got to know well growing up in Burke. Since then Miller has represented military and Pentagon personnel and their spouses, building something of a sub-specialty with clients who’ve earned substantial government benefits and pensions.

In 2018 Miller joined the Masterman firm, passing on other opportunities, in part, she says, “to maintain some work-life balance, and David and Carolé understood that.” She adds, “I just wasn’t ready to run my own firm.” Since joining Masterman Krogmann, Miller continues to handle her own cases, and collaborates on major trials, those high-profile successes that David Masterman is long known for. Adds Masterman: “Ciara’s positive nature inspires confidence - I think she has a great future.” Outside of the office Miller “loves the outdoors” with her husband Jeff, a US Army veteran and today an IT Operations Manager, and their 13-year-old sons. They live in Woodbridge, not a small commute for Miller (despite the Covid-19 pandemic), and she structures her drives by making phone calls and scooting through EZ Pass toll lanes. Such a routine could easily discourage the less stout-hearted, but Miller is characteristically upbeat about it. “The fact is, if you can find something positive, sometimes that can change your whole perspective on things.”