Lori Ashmore Peters

Lori Ashmore Peters

Dallas, TX Directions
recognized lawyers icon Recognized in Best Lawyers since 2025
Awarded Practice Areas
Trusts and Estates
Visit Website
214-559-7202
Lori Ashmore Peters
Lori Ashmore Peters
Dallas, TX
Visit Website
214-559-7202
Works at
The Ashmore Law Firm PC

1 Best Lawyers award

Visit Firm Profile
The Ashmore Law Firm PC logo

Biography

Lori Ashmore Peters is Managing Attorney and Head of Estate Planning and Probate at The Ashmore Law Firm, P.C. in Dallas, Texas. She is recognized in The Best Lawyers in America for Trusts and Estates for three consecutive years, 2025 through 2027, a distinction based on an exhaustive peer-review survey reflecting the esteem in which she is held by other leading lawyers in her practice area and region.

Licensed to practice in Texas since 1996, Lori assists individuals, fiduciaries, families, and business owners with estate planning, wealth preservation, wills, revocable and irrevocable trusts, probate administration, will contests, probate litigation, fiduciary disputes, contested guardianships, business succession planning, and high-value estate matters. She has served as Special Probate Judge for Dallas County Probate Court No. 3 and as Master over Probable Cause Hearings, and is certified to serve as Attorney Ad Litem and Guardian Ad Litem in the Probate Courts of Texas.

Lori practices at the intersection of family law and family legacy. Working alongside her brother, Gary Ashmore, who leads the firm's Family Law practice, she regularly advises clients on the estate-planning consequences of divorce, remarriage, and blended families, so that a change in family circumstances is reflected in a client's plan rather than left to statute or a probate court.

She is the daughter of the firm's founder, The Honorable Joseph E. Ashmore, Jr., who served as judge of Dallas County Probate Court No. 3 and spent more than a decade on the Texas probate bench. She and Gary carry forward the firm he founded in 1987 as its Managing Attorneys.

In addition to her Best Lawyers recognition, Lori has been named to Super Lawyers in Texas for Estate Planning & Probate every year from 2012 through 2026, holds the Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent rating in Estate Planning and Probate, and maintains an Avvo 10.0 rating and a 5.0 out of 5.0 rating on Lawyers.com. She was named to Modern Luxury's Dynamic Women in Dallas in 2024 and received the Elite News Women of Excellence Award. She is a member of the Dallas Bar Association and the State Bar of Texas, and has co-authored articles for Headnotes, the official publication of the Dallas Bar Association, on the intersection of family law and probate.

Active in the Dallas community, Lori serves as President of Friends of Reverchon Park, a board on which her father also served, and as a board member of Treasure Street, the annual benefit for Scottish Rite for Children. She and her husband, Rick Peters, chaired the 2014 Treasure Street event, for which her parents, Janie and Judge Joe Ashmore, served as honorary chairs.


Works at
The Ashmore Law Firm PC

1 Best Lawyers award

Visit Firm Profile
The Ashmore Law Firm PC logo

Locations

Dallas, Texas
214-559-7202
3636 Maple Avenue
Dallas, TX 75219

Education

  • Texas A&M University, B.A., graduated 1991
  • Texas Wesleyan University, J.D., graduated 1996

Bar Admissions

  • Texas, State Bar of Texas, 1996

Court Admissions

  • Master over Probable Cause Hearings
  • Special Probate Judge, Probate Court No. 3, Dallas County
  • Certified Attorney Ad Litem and Guardian Ad Litem in the Probate Courts of Texas.
  • United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
  • United States Supreme Court

Affiliations

  • Elite News — Women of Excellence Award - Member
  • Modern Luxury — Dynamic Women in Dallas, 2024 - Member
  • Dallas Association of Young Lawyers Foundation Fellow - Member
  • Dallas Bar Foundation Fellow - Member
  • Maurine F. Bailey Cultural Foundation - Board Member
  • Treasure Street - Board Member
  • Friends of Reverchon Park - President
  • Women in Business — Lakewood, Dallas, and Park Cities chapters - Member
  • Junior League of Dallas - Member
  • Texas Aggie Bar Association - Member
  • American Bar Association - Member
  • Dallas Women Lawyers Association - Member
  • Dallas Estate Planning Council - Member
  • Dallas County Bar Association - Member
  • College of the State Bar of Texas - Member

Client Testimonials

Awards & Focus

Recognized in The Best Lawyers in America® 2027 for work in:
  • Trusts and Estates
Additional Areas of Practice:
  • Litigation - Trusts and Estates
Awards:

News & Media

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Insights

When a Divorce Involves a Business or a Trust, Dividing the Property Is Only Half the Work

Tax basis, business valuation, trust structures, and succession documents can make two "equal" settlements produce very different outcomes. Lori Ashmore Peters explains why high-asset divorce needs estate planning judgment before the decree is signed.

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Lori Ashmore

Peters

Divorce Reshapes Your Estate Plan: What Texas Law Changes Automatically, and What It Doesn't

Texas law revokes some provisions favoring a former spouse the day a divorce is granted, but leaves critical gaps. Lori Ashmore Peters explains why estate planning and the divorce itself should move together.

Photo of Lori Ashmore Peters
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Lori Ashmore

Peters

Q&A

I lead the Estate Planning and Probate practice at The Ashmore Law Firm, which my father, Judge Joseph E. Ashmore, Jr., founded in 1987 with my brother Gary. My work covers wills and trusts, probate administration, will contests and fiduciary litigation, contested guardianships, and business succession planning for families and business owners across Dallas and North Texas. What makes the firm unusual is that Gary leads our Family Law practice down the hall. Divorce, remarriage, and blended families are where estate plans most often break, and we handle both sides under one roof, so a client's property settlement, trusts, and beneficiary designations are built from the same facts instead of contradicting each other years later. I enjoy working in a boutique family law firm.

nothing else will work. put in links to articels or our pages

The most common is "Do I really need a trust, or is a will enough?" My answer is that it depends on what you own, who you're protecting, and how much privacy and control you want, and that the cost of getting it wrong is usually paid by your children in probate court. I walk through the differences about trusts and will packages on our firm pages.

The second is "Doesn't my divorce automatically fix my estate plan?" Texas law revokes some provisions favoring a former spouse, but it names no replacement, does not rewrite irrevocable trusts, and does not reliably change life insurance or retirement beneficiaries. I explain what changes and what doesn't HERE

The third is "My parent is declining and refusing help; what can I do?" That conversation usually starts with less-restrictive tools like powers of attorney and ends with a guardianship only when nothing else will work. Here you can find an overview of that process. 

Timing. People plan their estates when things are calm and litigate them when things are not, and the documents have to hold up under conditions no one imagined when they were signed. A will drafted for a first marriage has to survive a second one. A trust has to work after a divorce, a family business sale, or a beneficiary who becomes unable to manage money. The other challenge is that these disputes are between people who love each other, or used to. Having sat as a Special Probate Judge in Dallas County, I have seen how quickly a family can be consumed by a contest over an estate, and much of my planning practice is really an effort to keep my clients' families out of that courtroom.

My father. He spent more than a decade on the Dallas County probate bench and then built a firm around the same work, and I grew up hearing how estates and guardianships actually unfold, not in theory but in the lives of real families in Dallas County. When I joined the firm, practicing probate and estate planning alongside him felt less like a career choice than a continuation. Serving later as Special Probate Judge for Probate Court No. 3, the same court he presided over, was a full-circle moment. Working every day with my brother, Gary Ashmore, in the same building keeps that inspiration close.

Estate planning is not a one-time transaction; it is a relationship that should last through marriages, births, divorces, business changes, and losses. That is why our firm practices both family law and estate planning and probate under one roof, and why my brother Gary and I work as one team. It is the model my father built The Ashmore Law Firm, P.C., on  and the reason our tagline is "Relationships that matter. Experience you can count on." I am proud that many of the families we serve today are the children and grandchildren of clients who first walked into his office.

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