Cassie Felder was working at a boutique corporate law firm in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. The firm closed after losing most of its clients, and she and her husband ended up in Austin.
A lot of young professionals from Louisiana end up in Austin. But after three years, the lure of Felder’s home state was too strong to resist, and she came back to New Orleans.
“We loved Austin,” she says. “But we missed our families, and we missed the culture.”
Felder says she loves New Orleans, too. But after practicing law for about eight years, it was time to open her own law firm, and she decided Baton Rouge was the place to be.
“Baton Rouge and Lafayette are really where business is happening,” she says. “As much as I love New Orleans, there’s a lot of red tape for businesses, and it’s a fairly closed circle of opportunity.”
She opened her firm in 2010. But apparently, one business wasn’t enough. Felder says she has always done real estate work, and when she was approached by someone in the title business who already had a large book of business, a partnership seemed to make sense. Felder and Angel Montero opened Regal Title last year.
“Montero really was interested in going into business with a female lawyer,” she says. “She had some not-great experiences with male lawyers, and so she wanted to give a woman a try.”
On top of running two businesses and her pro bono work, Felder spends some of what’s left of her time advocating for better public transit. When she and her husband were discussing coming to Baton Rouge, she says, traffic was one of the most significant downsides.
She participated in last year’s Blue Ribbon Commission and serves on the Baton Rouge Transit Coalition. Going forward, she says the priorities are implementing new standards for CATS board members, removing the Metro Council’s veto authority over the board’s decisions, and making sure the new dedicated tax stream for CATS is spent appropriately.
The city’s transit woes are an anchor on its efforts to attract and retain the best and brightest, she says.
“I think it hinders our ability to bring young people to the city by not having an [effective] public transportation system,” she says. “People don’t want to sit in traffic the way that we sit in traffic here in Baton Rouge.”
I pretty much knew I wanted to be a lawyer, starting in about the fourth grade. I remember approaching my parents in the fourth grade and saying that I had made a decision that I either wanted to be an actress or a lawyer, and after thinking about it really hard, I realized that being an actress was a path where you never knew if you were going to make it or not.
A physician or a dentist. I’m very social, good with people. I’ve often thought I should have gone to medical school rather than law school.
Honesty and perseverance. It’s pretty easy in business to take the easy way, which isn’t always the honest way or the best way, but it always comes to bite you in the end if don’t do what’s best for the client.
I think it’s our focus on the entrepreneur community.
Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s. I think if I said anything else, anyone that read the article would know that I was lying.
I would have a bustling transportation system here. I think it’s one of the reasons we have such a major DWI problem here.
Time management. While running two businesses, and also trying to market my businesses, and being involved in the community, trying to find the work/home balance is pretty difficult.
Baton Rouge, for sure. Hopefully, with two very successful businesses.
