Meet Our Team
David C. Cook, Esquire
Cook Law Firm, LLC
Cook Law Firm was started over 18 years ago, on July 4th, and has provided legal services in all parts of South Carolina during that time. We are a single-attorney law firm with two wonderful paralegals and a diligent bookkeeper. David Cook comes from a family of attorneys going three generations back. He is the tenth attorney in his family, beginning with his grandfather, who was a state senator and went to law school on the GI Bill after World War II. His great uncle was the Attorney General of Florida during his time and prosecuted the controversial Sunshine State Laws that his grandfather helped pass. David joked that those laws approached violating the search and seizure provisions in the Constitution even as a young child. He has an uncle that just retired as a circuit court judge and another uncle was a Magistrate. David jokes that he was the black sheep of the family because he just wanted to be a lawyer and never ran for office. He could have walked into Stetson Law School as his family was on the Board of Trustees and then had a very cozy practice representing rich people in Florida just waiting for him.
Instead, David attended Clemson University and graduated with a double major in History and Spanish. He then got married and had a daughter and taught public schools for a few years as a Spanish teacher before he got his Masters in History from UNC Charlotte. He taught at a few local universities in the Charlotte area for a few more years while he tried very unsuccessfully to make it as a Bluegrass guitarist. He was scheduled to take his LSAT the same weekend he welcomed his second daughter into the world. He then went to USC School of Law in Columbia and has the distinction of being the student with the lowest under-graduate grade point average to ever be accepted into that fine university, our law school, as we say. He did fine while in law school and clerked under Doug Strickler in the Public Defender’s office in Columbia as well as worked for a Real Estate transactor, the venerable Bill Booth, who is still practicing in that area.
After law school David worked in the York County Public Defender’s Office for a brief stint until he won his first big 30-year jury trial. He hung a shingle soon after that in the upstate and has had decades of trial experience including a shaken baby homicide trial, an attempted murder trial with an attempt at a “not guilty by reason of insanity defense”, several first-degree burglary trials, several drug trafficking trials, probably around 50 DUI trials and hundreds of Domestic Violence trials, as he was the head of the DV division at the PD office. This is not to mention somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 other criminal cases that he resolved with plea bargains all over South Carolina. He has some federal experience and got a mule for a Sinaloan cartel moving five kilos of powder a week only four years’ incarceration with a proffer agreement, but prefers state practice after the death threats he received.
David also has close to 20 years’ experience in Family Court and has handled every type of case possible, from adoptions to DSS cases, from intense custody battles and high value alimony and equitable division of marital property cases to contempt actions, Orders of Protection cases, and anything else you can come up with, including Intervention actions, Special Immigrant Juvenile Status cases, and domestication of foreign orders. He also has around 2,000 family court cases under his belt.
David has extensive experience in Probate Court as well as Common Pleas and Magistrate civil litigation. He likes taking Partition actions. He has done immigration and understands that system well having appeared in federal bond and cancellation of removal proceedings in final hearings in Charlotte, Atlanta, Stewart Correctional in Georgia, and Dallas, but prefers to refer those cases to good friends and stay home and golf and fish on the weekends. He also has extensive experience in personal injury and would be glad to take your case. He does not handle bankruptcy or worker’s compensation cases but can always give a good referral.
We can take cases all over the state of South Carolina and do not have the space or your attention to list all of the counties in which David has appeared. Have gun, will travel. He survived the pandemic. He survived a divorce after the kids went off to college. He claims that makes him a better Family Court lawyer. He even spent the night in jail once in Dillon, South Carolina, back in the 90s. But that was a misunderstanding over a traffic ticket that has since been cleared up. And he and his Spades partner, Ishmael, won big that night at the card table anyway.
The takeaway is that David has plenty of experience in the courtroom where the cases are won and on the courthouse steps where the deals are made. He has a very affordable retainer of $1,000 but can guarantee your case will be more than that. He works at $250 an hour, like most of the other good trial attorneys in the area. He is glad to give you a detailed bill upon request, or on a monthly basis, and has never in his life billed a penny that he did not earn sitting at that desk or arguing to a judge. And he is giving free consultations at the moment. Feel free to call our office and set up a talk over the phone or in person. We are fluent in Spanish with the attorney and a paralegal and would be glad to take your case. We also speak English pretty good too.
Taylor graduated from USC in Columbia with a degree in Public Health. She started clerking at Cook Law Firm while in college and became a paralegal after she graduated. Taylor started at Cook Law four years ago. She worked with David while he was in the upstate in Beaufort and York Counties and then moved to the Low Country with us. Taylor’s grandmother, Sheila Cole, was David’s first paralegal. Sheila had 30 years’ experience and David had 30 days’ experience. She taught him more about the actual practice of law than any professor he ever had. Sheila was David’s paralegal and a translator at the Public Defender’s Office and convinced David to start his practice. She worked with David for 20 more years until she claims she retired. But she still handles cases with him all the time. This is a family law firm. We are so much more than employees at Cook Law.
Taylor will go to hospitals to witness for Health Care Powers of Attorney. She will go to a house and stay by the bedside of a dying lady to witness a Will. She has been to a trailer with law enforcement in the back woods in a Probate Conservatorship case to literally save the life of an elderly lady being abused by her own family. Taylor has worked as a Guardian ad Litem for very sensitive DSS actions with traumatized children in complex physical and sexual abuse cases. She has spent countless hours in the courtroom with David on criminal and family cases as a paralegal. She has also worked as a title abstractor for a private company and knows her way around the Register of Deeds in all the counties. Taylor has done complex Probate and Civil litigation with David including boundary disputes and Partition actions. She knows how to use the Probate portal and can e-file in Common Pleas cases. Taylor goes down into the jails and prisons with David. She walks fast and she talks fast. She thinks even faster. She is one of the few people on Earth that can type faster than David. David says she is the love child of Radar from MASH and Della Street who was Perry Mason’s secretary. She is always three steps ahead of you and patiently waiting for you to catch up. She is always carrying around a stack of papers to sign. She will get up abruptly from the supper table and randomly say, “I am going to the office for a while.” Her taste, style, poise and phone manners are impeccable. We will convince her to go to Law School one day.
Taylor Licea, Paralegal
Kenneth Cook, Probate Paralegal
Ken handles estate administration and probate cases for the firm. He helped start the law firm in
Lancaster, SC in 2007after a long career in the IT industry developing and installing major software
application systems. Ken attended Brevard College in the 60’s, joined the U.S.A.F. thereafter, is a
Vietnam Veteran, an Air Force Commendation Medal recipient, and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business
from UNC-Charlotte. He has over 10 years experience handing probate cases in both NC and SC.
Ken enjoys assisting the firm’s clients in every aspect of the estate administration process with an emphasis
on precision and timeliness. He accepts the challenge of completing the probate process in sometimes
contentious family situations where agreements are difficult to obtain and cooperation is important. On
a personal note, Ken is attorney David Cook’s father; he is a Master Gardener in his spare time and finds
creative ways of beating his son on the golf course.
