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Michelle May O'Neil

Frisco, TX Directions
recognized lawyers icon Recognized in Best Lawyers since 2016
Awarded Practice Areas
Appellate Practice Family Law
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214-506-0704
MO
Michelle May O'Neil
Frisco, TX
Visit Website
214-506-0704
Works at
Concierra Legal PLLC

1 Best Lawyers award

Visit Firm Profile

Biography

Michelle May O'Neil is a board-certified family law attorney and appellate advocate in Frisco, Texas, and the founder of Concierra Legal. She has been recognized in The Best Lawyers in America for both Family Law and Appellate Practice for eleven consecutive years, including the 2027 edition.

O'Neil built her career on a conviction that appellate work is its own discipline. A trial is about persuading a fact-finder; an appeal is about persuading a court that the law itself was misapplied — a different craft requiring different instincts, and one that begins long before anyone loses. Much of her most consequential work happens at the trial level, preserving the record so that an appeal remains possible at all. Known as "the lawyer's lawyer", many lawyers call her when a case has gone wrong, and increasingly they call her before it does.

O'Neil has been licensed to practice law in Texas since 1992 and Board Certified in Family Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization since 1997, passing the certification examination on her first attempt. She has been admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1999. Across more than three decades she has tried more than thirty-seven jury trials, served as counsel of record in over 195 appellate matters before the Texas Courts of Appeals, and handled 55 matters before the Supreme Court of Texas, where she has also presented oral argument.

At Concierra Legal, O'Neil practices in three areas: family law appeals; prenuptial and marital property agreements for founders, executives, athletes, and individuals with complex assets; and strategic legal counsel for clients whose circumstances span more than one matter at once. Her clients tend to arrive with problems that are too complex, too consequential, or too personal to be handled like a commodity.

O'Neil earned her J.D. from Baylor University School of Law and her B.B.A. from Baylor's Hankamer School of Business. In 2021 she completed a post-doctoral certification in Women's Leadership at Harvard Law School, formalizing work she had already been doing for years with the group Hell-on-Heels she co-founded as a mentorship and leadership community that now numbers more than 1,800 women lawyers. She has also taught the next generation directly, founding and teaching the Family Law Trial Skills Bootcamp at Baylor University School of Law and authoring more than sixty accredited continuing legal education courses for Texas attorneys.

O'Neil is a recurring guest editor of the case digests for the Family Law Section Report of the State Bar of Texas. She writes and speaks nationally on artificial intelligence and legal ethics, and on the emerging law of identity — the ownership and governance of name, image, and likeness — work she introduced at SXSW 2026 as the Identity Stack™ framework, now taught in curriculum at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Works at
Concierra Legal PLLC

1 Best Lawyers award

Visit Firm Profile

Locations

Frisco, Texas
214-506-0704
5 Cowboys Way, Suite 300
Frisco, TX 75034

Education

  • Harvard University, Certification, Post-Doctoral, Women's Leadership, graduated 2021
  • Baylor University, B.B.A., graduated 1989
  • Baylor University, J.D., graduated 1991

Bar Admissions

  • Texas, State Bar of Texas, 1992

Court Admissions

  • United States Supreme Court

Client Testimonials

Ms. O'Neil has passionately advocated for my case, for which I am eternally grateful. The legal process for divorce came with many unique hurdles for me, but she has handled them all so that I can focus on taking care of myself and my son during this difficult time. I know I can trust her to do what is best for my case and trust her to advocate for me. Her expertise and skill in the legal arena are unsurpassed by any attorney I know. And she does it all with whole-hearted energy.

Awards & Focus

Recognized in The Best Lawyers in America® 2027 for work in:
  • Appellate Practice
  • Family Law
Additional Areas of Practice:
  • Artificial Intelligence Law
  • Closely Held Companies and Family Businesses Law
  • Civil Rights Law
  • Constitutional Law
  • First Amendment Law
  • Appellate

News & Media

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Additional Information

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Case History

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Q&A

I practice family law from the appellate end first. At Concierra Legal in Frisco, Texas, my work runs in three lanes — family law appeals, prenuptial and marital property agreements, and strategic counsel for clients whose situations don't fit in a single box.

What makes it unusual is the loop between the first two. I have served as counsel of record in more than 195 appellate matters, including 55 before the Supreme Court of Texas, and a significant share has involved marital agreements: challenging them, defending them, and arguing about what makes one enforceable. So when I draft a premarital agreement, I draft it against the standards I know Texas appellate courts actually apply, because I have argued them. Most agreements are drafted by lawyers who will never see one attacked. Mine are drafted by someone who attacks them for a living.

The third lane is where the harder questions land. Strategic counsel, in my practice, means the matters that don't have a settled answer yet — and in family law those are increasingly constitutional. I have briefed due process and Establishment Clause challenges to an order compelling a woman into religious arbitration of her divorce, argued the constitutional presumption protecting fit parents, litigated the limits on a court's authority to prioritize religious practice in a possession order, and applied to the Supreme Court of the United States for review of a parental-rights judgment. Family law is where constitutional questions about autonomy, parenthood, and religious liberty tend to arrive first, because they arrive attached to somebody's actual family.

Lately they also arrive attached to technology no one had a framework for a year ago. Who owns your name and likeness. What happens when evidence can be manufactured. What duties a lawyer owes a client when artificial intelligence enters the practice. I write and speak on these questions nationally and founded an institute to study them, and they reach my clients through strategic counsel rather than as a separate service line — because that is honestly what they are: new problems arriving inside old relationships.

I have been Board Certified in Family Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization since 1997 and have tried more than thirty-seven jury trials, which means I know what a trial record looks like from the inside — where error is preserved and where it quietly gets lost. The practice is deliberately small. I take matters complex, consequential, or personal enough that they should not be handled like a commodity.

How long do I have to appeal a family law ruling in Texas?
Not long, and the deadlines are unforgiving. In most Texas civil cases, including family law, the notice of appeal is generally due within 30 days after the trial court signs the final judgment — extended to 90 days if a qualifying post-judgment motion, such as a motion for new trial, is timely filed. These deadlines function jurisdictionally. Miss one and the appellate court cannot reach the merits no matter how strong they are. If you have received an adverse ruling, call appellate counsel that week, not next month.

Do I need a different lawyer for my appeal than the one who handled my trial?

Often, yes. Appellate work rewards a different skill set than trial work — close reading of a cold record, legal research, and written advocacy rather than reacting to a witness in real time. A fresh appellate lawyer also brings something your trial lawyer structurally cannot, which is distance and a willingness to identify errors your trial lawyer may have participated in. Many good trial lawyers refer their own clients out for appeal precisely for that reason, and many bring appellate counsel in during trial.

Is an appeal just a second trial?

No, and this is the single most common misunderstanding I encounter. An appeal is not a do-over. No new evidence, no new witnesses, no second chance to tell your story better. The appellate court reviews the record that already exists and decides whether the trial court applied the law correctly. If the disappointment is with how the judge weighed the evidence, that is a much harder appeal than one where the judge got the law wrong.

What is "preserving error," and why does it matter before I've lost?

Preserving error means making the right objection, offer of proof, or request on the record at the moment the issue comes up at trial — so that an appellate court later has authority to review it. An appellate court generally cannot fix a mistake that was never properly raised below. That means a case can be lost on appeal not because the trial court was right, but because no one objected at the moment that mattered. It is why appellate strategy belongs in a case while the trial is still happening.

Can a prenuptial agreement be set aside in Texas?

Yes, though Texas law makes it difficult. Under the Texas Family Code, a premarital agreement is unenforceable if the party challenging it proves either that they did not sign it voluntarily, or that it was unconscionable when signed and they did not receive adequate disclosure of the other party's assets and obligations. Involuntary execution — signing under duress, or without a real opportunity to read it or consult a lawyer — is among the most heavily litigated grounds, and Texas appellate courts have set agreements aside on that basis.

What happens to my business in a Texas divorce?

A closely held business is usually the hardest asset in the case. The analysis covers characterization — whether the company and its growth are separate or community property — plus valuation, tracing of contributed funds, treatment of goodwill, and the very practical question of how the business keeps running while the divorce proceeds. Valuation methodology itself is frequently the central dispute, and business-owner divorces are among the most commonly appealed family law matters.

My former spouse moved out of state and stopped paying alimony. Can the order still be enforced?

Yes. A maintenance or contractual alimony obligation does not evaporate because the paying party relocated. Enforcement of an out-of-state decree raises questions of jurisdiction, registration of the judgment in the new state, and which state's law supplies the available remedies. It is technically demanding work, but out-of-state decrees are regularly enforced across state lines.

What does it mean that a lawyer is "Board Certified in Family Law"?

Board Certification in Family Law comes from the Texas Board of Legal Specialization and is held by a small fraction of Texas attorneys. It requires substantial documented experience in the field, peer and judicial references, and passage of a rigorous specialty examination, with recertification every five years. It is the only credential in Texas a lawyer may advertise as evidence of specialization in a particular area of law.

How are name, image, and likeness rights handled in a prenuptial agreement?
Name, image, and likeness rights have become a real asset for athletes, creators, founders, and public figures, and they raise questions that traditional marital agreements were never drafted to answer: who controls the use of a person's identity, who receives the revenue it produces, and what happens to those rights and that income stream if the marriage ends. Addressing identity rights expressly while the agreement is being drafted — rather than leaving a court to characterize them later — is a developing and increasingly necessary area of marital agreement practice.
 

The case I keep coming back to from this past year is Kausland v. Volek, decided by the Dallas Court of Appeals in April 2026. I represented the husband, and the court affirmed in our favor. It turned on a forfeiture clause in a premarital agreement — a provision stating that if the wife challenged the agreement in any way, she would forfeit the payment it promised her.

What makes it interesting is how the clause was triggered. She was not trying to tear up the agreement. She had filed suit to enforce it. But her motion for temporary orders for interim spousal support and general pleading for attorney's fees, two of the most routine filings in any Texas divorce, were prohibited by the agreement. The court held the forfeiture provision was not limited to a direct attack on validity. By asking for relief inconsistent with the agreement's terms, she came within the clause's express language, and the payment was gone.

I think about that case constantly now when I draft. A forfeiture clause written broadly enough can be triggered by a filing nobody would describe as a challenge, meaning consequential decision in a premarital agreement is often not the number the parties negotiate over. It is the sentence three paragraphs later governing what happens when someone reaches for the ordinary remedies a divorce court provides. Most people never read that sentence closely. Both sides should.

That is the part of this work I find most compelling. A document written in an optimistic moment, years before anyone imagines litigation, ends up deciding everything. Someone drafted that sentence. Someone else did not read it carefully enough. My job sits on both sides of that gap, drafting the agreements, and later arguing about what they meant.

The hardest conversation in my practice is explaining to someone that they may be right and still lose.

People come to appellate work after something has already gone wrong. They arrive certain that if a higher court simply hears what happened, it will be fixed. But an appellate court is not there to re-decide the case. It reviews a written record for legal error, and it can generally only correct errors that were properly raised at the time. So I sometimes have to tell a parent that the ruling was wrong, and that nothing can be done about it — because no one objected at the moment that mattered. That is the hardest sentence in this job, and I have never gotten comfortable saying it.

The second challenge is that family law appeals are unlike any other appellate work in one respect: the subject matter is a person's children, their home, their security. Appellate practice rewards detachment — the ability to read a record coldly and see the structure of the legal argument. Family law demands the opposite. Holding both at once, being clinical about the law while the stakes are somebody's family, is the discipline the work actually requires.

And the field will not sit still. Texas family law changes with every legislative session and every significant appellate decision, which is part of why I write the case digests for the State Bar of Texas Family Law Section Report and have authored more than sixty accredited CLE courses. Teaching is how I stay current. Lately the change has come from an unexpected direction — artificial intelligence is reshaping evidence, identity, and the ethical duties lawyers owe their clients faster than the rules can adapt. Staying genuinely competent now means paying attention to questions that did not exist five years ago.
 

I grew up working the register in my father's record store in Killeen, Texas. Chuck May taught me to place the change directly into every customer's hand — every customer, regardless of who they were or what anyone in town thought of them. He never called it a philosophy. It was just how you treated people. I have thought about that small act more than almost anything else in my career, because it turns out to be the whole of what I believe about the law: everyone gets the same hands.

What inspires me now is the possibility that this might finally be achievable at scale.

The legal system speaks a language ordinary people cannot read. That is not anyone's fault — it is what centuries of precision cost — but it means most people cannot use the system without a lawyer to translate it. Our profession has understood this for a long time and worked hard at it. Legal aid, pro bono programs, self-help clinics, and the enormous volunteer hours Texas lawyers put in every year all exist because lawyers know the gap is there and have never accepted it. The trouble has never been will. It has been arithmetic. The number of people who need help has always exceeded what a profession can donate, and in family court the majority of people still stand up without a lawyer, making decisions about their children and their homes in a language nobody has translated for them.

I tried to do something about this early. In 2010 I co-founded DivorceApps.com and became one of the first family lawyers in the country to publish consumer apps, built specifically for people who could not afford full representation. The ambition was right and the technology was not close to ready. It is getting ready now. Artificial intelligence can explain, orient, and translate at three in the morning for someone who has never met a lawyer, and it does not run out of hours the way volunteers do.

What I find genuinely exciting is what that frees us to do. Nothing about this reduces the need for lawyers — it moves us toward the work only we can do. Judgment. Strategy. Reading a courtroom. Standing up and arguing that a settled rule is wrong. Sitting with someone on the worst day of their life and telling them the truth. Those are the things I have spent thirty-four years learning, and no technology is close to them. If software can carry the translation, lawyers get more of their capacity back for the work that actually requires a lawyer — including for the people who could never have afforded us in the first place.

That is what I am building toward, and I think lawyers should be the ones building it. The same technology that could open the courthouse can also fabricate evidence and erode privacy, and I would rather the people who understand due process be shaping it than watching it arrive. I founded the Institute for Constitutional AI Law for that reason. It is the same instinct I learned at that register. Everyone gets the same hands. We may finally have a way to mean it.
 

Mostly I write. Wisdom from Momma collects my mother's anecdotes and euphemisms, and Sandy May's voice runs through it more or less unedited; a revised edition arrives at the end of this year. Three more are underway: The Fifth Move, on business strategy through a litigator's lens; The Prenup Strategist's Playbook, written for professionals; and The Queen's Mindset. I have learned that I think better on paper than anywhere else, which is probably why I found my way into appellate work rather than a career in front of juries.

The question occupying most of my attention right now is what actually makes a lawyer excellent. I am researching and writing on excellence in light of the easy availability of information in the age of AI. Our profession tends to treat excellence as something that either happens to a lawyer or does not, recognized after the fact and rarely examined beforehand. I have come to think it can be designed. There are identifiable conditions under which capable lawyers become excellent ones, and a firm can create those conditions deliberately instead of hoping for them. Thirty-four years in, I am convinced the question is answerable and that very few people are asking it rigorously.

I host The Michelle May O'Neil Show, which received a Webby Award nomination in 2026 for Best Live Podcast Recording. I speak nationally on leadership, strategy, and women's financial independence, and I am a professional member of the National Speakers Association.

The advancement of women in law and in business is the cause I have given the most time to. I co-founded Hell-on-Heels, a mentorship community of more than 1,800 women lawyers, along with its annual retreat, and in 2026 I launched a Personal Board of Directors retreat for women running significant enterprises. In 2021 I completed a post-doctoral certification in Women's Leadership at Harvard Law School. What sits underneath all of it is women's financial independence, which in my experience is what makes every other sort of independence possible.

My husband John opened a wine bar on the Florida coast in 2026, which has given us a second chapter in a place I did not expect to love as much as I do.

My practice is small by design. I take matters that are complex enough, consequential enough, or personal enough that they should not be handled as a commodity, and I decline matters that a larger firm or a lower rate would serve better. Prospective clients are entitled to know that before they call. The people I serve best are facing a problem that will shape the next decade of their lives and want one lawyer holding the whole of it rather than a committee holding pieces of it.

To my colleagues: a substantial part of my appellate practice arrives by referral from trial lawyers, either after an adverse judgment or, far better, while the trial is still underway and the record can still be protected. I regard those referrals as the highest professional compliment available, and the client goes back to the referring lawyer when the appellate work is done. Any trial lawyer weighing whether to call should call early. The most valuable thing I can do for a case usually has to happen before the judgment is signed.

Finally, I am grateful for this recognition. It comes from lawyers I have practiced against as often as alongside, which is what gives it its weight. I do not take it lightly.
 

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