Sharon, S Dove

Ms. Dove has been a practicing attorney since 1998. Over the years, she has focused on immigration and bankruptcy law. Ms. Dove's clients typically find her at times of great difficulty in their lives. She prides herself on having the intellect and tenacity to get her clients to the other side of these difficulties, whether that means securing lawful status or relief from the harassment of debt collectors.

Prior to joining the Planer Law Firm, Ms. Dove spent the majority of her legal career at North Carolina public interest law firms where she has held management positions. Most recently, she served for five years as the Director of the Immigrant Justice Program for the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy (“CCLA”), where she grew a small immigration group into a top-rate humanitarian-based immigration practice employing nine attorneys. Before CCLA, she was the Managing Attorney of Legal Aid of North Carolina's (“Legal Aid”) Gastonia office.

Ms. Dove's love for the practice of immigration law grew out of her tenure at Legal Aid, which she began in the early 2000s. At the time, North Carolina's immigrant population was woefully underserved by the legal services community, in part due to the absence of Spanish-speaking public interest attorneys. Ms. Dove vastly expanded her Gastonia office's reach into the immigrant community by undertaking Spanish language study on her own and ultimately acquiring Spanish fluency.

Ms. Dove's passion for the practice of bankruptcy law, likewise, developed while she was at Legal Aid. There, she discovered the life-changing power that a bankruptcy filing can provide to families in financial crisis trying to get back on their feet. Since that time, Ms. Dove's bankruptcy practice has been greatly enriched by the time she spent working for a chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee. Ms. Dove successfully represented the trustee in clawing back preferences and recovering fraudulent transfers from the creditors of business debtors. Her time with the trustee has also given her a window into how trustees administer debtors' bankruptcy estates. This perspective has proven very useful as she advises her debtor-clients on successfully navigating the bankruptcy process.