Arizona Attorney of the Month | Paul Rowley | Divorce Lawyer Mesa ...

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Paul Rowley Rowley Chapman Barney & Buntrock, Ltd. By Paula Hubbs Cohen As a 12-year-old paperboy for The Arizona Republic, little did Paul Rowley know that someday he’d be sitting in a well-appointed corner office overlooking some of the same streets where, every morning about 4 a.m., he could be found throwing newspapers onto driveways. Rowley, managing partner and a founding member of Rowley Chapman Barney & Buntrock, Ltd., remembers those days with great fondness. “We’d meet up with the delivery guy who’d toss a bundle of papers on the corner and we’d have to rubber-band them,” he recalls. “I’d stuff them into the bags on the front of my bike and ride up and down Center Street, Robson, Main and McDonald throwing papers.” © 2011 Andrew Paul Photography After the papers were delivered, he’d head home for swim team practice and then be off to Carson Junior High and, later, Westwood High School. A NATIVE SON When he was just six months old, Rowley’s family moved from Salt Lake City to Mesa, where his father was a well-known obstetrician, delivering more than 15,000 babies. Essentially a native of this East Valley city, it seems everywhere he goes, he meets people he knows and all are treated as a friend. After a year at Brigham Young University (BYU), he left college to go on a two-year mission for The Church of Latter-Day Saints. “I was sent to Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and after I returned, I got married to my wife, Robin, and started school at ASU,” he says. Shortly after graduating in 1980 with a degree in general business, Rowley decided to go to law school, receiving his J.D. from Southwestern University School of Law in California where he was a Dean’s Scholar, on the Southwestern Law Review and graduated at the top of his class.
With his newly minted law degree in hand, Rowley, his wife and three young sons (two daughters would be born in the coming years) returned to Arizona. “After I passed the bar exam, I went to work for a small, three-attorney office in Mesa.” BUILDING A BUSINESS In 1987, Rowley started his own firm where he, along with good partners, has established a ten-attorney, full-service law firm with a solid reputation for providing excellent legal services in a wide variety of practice areas. During the early years, Rowley took every opportunity to go to court. “I took some personal injury cases to trial and did some family law cases, and decided that litigation and family law was where I wanted to be.” Family law can be an emotional minefield, but Rowley learned to compartmentalize things in order to keep the emotional challenges at bay. “I don’t take the emotional part of work home with me,” he says. “I prefer to think of what I do as helping a family through a crisis because I can analyze issues and solve problems so they can get on with their lives. I’m also good at protecting my clients, most of whom become friends.” SIGNIFICANT CASES Along with his family law practice, Rowley’s firm has handled first-degree murder cases as well as sophisticated death and injury cases involving mass disasters, including commercial airline crashes. He has submitted three cases to the United States Supreme Court, most notably in 2001, when he appealed the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling in Graville v. Dodge concerning grandparent’s rights. “We litigated for four years all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and we won,” he says with well-deserved pride. “We established that a fit parent has priority rights over grandparents when it comes to raising their children.” PHILANTHROPY IMPORTANT Giving back is a huge part of Rowley’s psyche and he embodies the true spirit of community service. To wit: He serves as a Maricopa County Superior Court judge pro tem and as a justice of the peace pro tem in Maricopa County. Since 1986, he has been a member and Commander of the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Divers Posse, an all-volunteer group that assists with recovering drowning victims in the state’s numerous lakes and rivers. “I am certified as a master scuba diver and as a rescue diver,” he says. “It’s always been something I really enjoy and I’ve been fortunate to be able to use those skills to help our community as well.” When Rowley gets a diving call, he grabs his gear and heads to the lake or river where he’s needed. “We’ll usually deploy in one of the Sheriff ’s Office airboats or helicopters and they’ll drop us off where they think the search should be started.” Rowley notes that diving in Arizona means you’re pretty much in black water all the time. “At 100-feet, it’s completely dark and you have to feel around for a body,” he says. “I’ve recovered about fifty bodies, and you have to learn how to deal with it or it will really get to you. Getting a body back is important to help families find closure, and it helps me a lot knowing that at least I could return their loved one’s body to them.” A PILOT AS WELL AS A RESCUE DIVER But it’s not just being under water that intrigues Rowley; it’s also being high in the sky. “I’ve always wanted to be a pilot, and when I turned 50, I decided it was time to get my license. Now I own a Piper Dakota high performance plane,” he says. “It’s a true workhorse and has a lot of fancy GPS navigation systems on board that help with weather and traffic avoidance.” © 2011 Andrew Paul Photography
Page 1: August 2011 Edition Paul S. Rowley,
Page 5 and 6: ABOUT THE FIRM EXPERIENCE We are At
Page 7 and 8: OUR ATTORNEYS Paul S. Rowley Managi

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