The law has a place in building stronger communities.

An enduring commitment to opportunity

Layne spent years in higher education, where much of her work involved making education and opportunity accessible to everyday people. That experience shaped her understanding of how institutions can help people build more stable lives.

When she entered private practice, she anticipated focusing primarily on small business law: helping entrepreneurs, working people, and small organizations build sustainable businesses and livelihoods.

A practice shaped by the needs around it

The practice developed during a period when West Virginia, including the Eastern Panhandle, was experiencing a profound child welfare crisis associated in significant part with the opioid crisis.

Families were struggling. Grandparents and relatives were unexpectedly raising children. Parents were entering treatment, incarceration, or the child welfare system. Courts and social service agencies were responding to large numbers of children whose families were in crisis.

Through this work, child welfare became a significant part of Diehl Law. It brought the firm’s concern for opportunity and community into the lives of children and families facing urgent, deeply personal questions.

A child’s world is more than a home

A child removed from a home may lose far more than physical proximity to a parent. That child may simultaneously lose siblings, grandparents, extended family, pets, school, friends, neighbors, activities, routines, and a familiar community.

Safety is essential. At the same time, existing relationships and attachments deserve careful attention. The question is not only how to keep a child safe, but also:

“How much of this child’s world can we safely preserve?”

Safety and preservation belong in the same conversation

There are circumstances in which removal and foster care are necessary to protect a child. Foster parents and others in the child welfare system serve important roles when a child cannot safely remain at home and an appropriate family or kinship placement is not available.

Foster care should be used when necessary, rather than simply because it is available. Grandparents, relatives, and other appropriate caregivers with meaningful connections to a child should be identified and considered early.

Family crisis does not automatically mean that every family relationship should be severed. Careful attention to due process, kinship care, and safe family connections can help minimize unnecessary disruption while supporting permanency and stability.

A child’s time matters

Prolonged ICPC and interstate placement processes can leave children waiting while possible family placements remain unresolved. Delay can affect relationships, attachments, and a child’s sense of where they belong.

Thoughtful advocacy keeps those consequences in view. It recognizes the duties of courts and agencies while asking how the system can preserve appropriate relationships and move children toward stable arrangements.

Families do not thrive in isolation

Strong families also need educational opportunity, economic stability, healthy community institutions, viable small businesses, and people with the resources to help one another when a crisis occurs.

That is the connection between the firm’s child welfare work and its continuing commitment to entrepreneurs, freelancers, small businesses, family planning, guardianship, trusts and estates, and other selected legal services.

Strong children need strong families. Strong families need strong communities. Each area of the practice contributes to that shared purpose.