Meet: Wills Clinic Coordinator Christian Cahill

where home recipients were provided free wills drafted by NSL students and executed under the supervision of licensed attorneys.

Once he was licensed, he continued working with the collaboration as one of the licensed attorneys. And in 2021, he joined NSL as the instructor for the yearlong Wills Clinic.

planning and civil litigation. Helping clients with estate planning is one of the most important aspects of his practice.

“Far and away, the most important thing to me is my family,” he said. “I look at estate planning as though it’s an opportunity to protect your family even after you’re gone.” It’s human nature to bury your head in the sand and not want to deal with something that makes you uncomfortable, Cahill said.

And thinking about death tends to make many people uncomfortable. “But when you can shift that paradigm and make them see it’s an opportunity to give one more gift to your family, to protect them one more time … It’s amazing how the conversation changes when people look at it through that lens.”

During his third and fourth years at NSL, Cahill participated in a collaboration with Habitat for Humanity led by instructor John Lewis

In addition to helping his students learn the subject matter, Cahill hopes they learn that kindness and compassion with clients are just as important in estate planning. “You need to establish trust with your clients, or you won’t be able to effectively help them. If we were in the medical field, you would call it our bedside manner.”

Cahill has also led a campaign since 2016 to provide a free one-page document with very specific instructions on how to draft a holographic will. “I want everybody in Tennessee who needs a will to have one. This is so important for everyone with minor children, because they don’t realize if they don’t put their wishes down in writing, it’s the State of Tennessee or the court system who decides where their children will go.”

A University of Mississippi graduate and former professional soccer player who has completed seven Ironman Triathlons, Cahill said his family will always come first. He and his wife, Gena, have two children: Lindzi Tilghman, an NSL graduate and attorney in Franklin, Tennessee, and son Yale, a sophomore pre-law student at Ole Miss.