Better Divorce Austin is the consumer-facing brand of Trusler Legal PLLC, a settlement-first family law firm in Austin, Texas. The legal entity on the retainer, the engagement letter, the pleadings, and the courthouse appearance is Trusler Legal PLLC. Better Divorce Austin is how the firm shows up online, in plain English, for families who are trying to make a clear-eyed decision under hard conditions.
The Texas professional limited liability company. Founded by Cristi Trusler in 2001. The name on every retainer, every notice of appearance, every pleading, every order. Bee Caves office. Seven counties. Family law, exclusively.
The consumer-facing brand and website. The same firm, the same lawyers, written for the person at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night who is trying to decide what to do next. Same phone number. Same intake. Same engagement letter.
The conviction that organizes the practice is unfashionable in family law: no family situation has ever improved at the courthouse. The courthouse is excellent at assigning consequences. It is poorly suited to designing futures. A judge, constrained by rules of evidence and the finite minutes of a docket, can decide who is at fault and how the consequences get allocated. That is the work the courthouse was built to do.
A courtroom is an indifferent venue for designing a parenting plan. It is a worse venue for reconciling two careers, three bank accounts, a house with a mortgage, and a pair of children who need both parents to remain present in their lives. So the firm is built around keeping work out of the place that was not built for it. We do not avoid court because we cannot try cases. Cristi is Board Certified in Family Law, and the firm has tried cases in Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties for over two decades. We work to keep matters out of the courthouse because most families do better when they decide their own future.
— Better Divorce Austin · est. 2001
Years, counties, credentials. The kind of numbers that hold up to a State Bar audit. We do not publish a settlement rate or an overall case count, because nobody outside the firm can verify them and we will not ask you to take our word. The one case figure we do cite — the collaborative caseload behind Cristi's Master Credential — is the credential's own published threshold, verifiable through Collaborative Divorce Texas.
"Settlement is not a compromise.
It is a discipline."
The firm runs every matter through the same four phases. The work in each phase changes with the case; the structure does not.
What is actually true before anything is filed.
Collaborative, mediated negotiation, or trial.
The structured work of producing the decree.
The thirty days after, and the decade after that.
The office is at 3701 Bee Caves Road, Suite 102, in west Austin. Most of our matters are heard at the Travis County Civil and Family Courts Facility at 1700 Guadalupe Street downtown. We file regularly across Travis and the surrounding Central Texas counties: Hays, Williamson, Bastrop, Caldwell, Blanco, and Burnet. Seven counties is the working footprint of a Central Texas family-law practice with roots in the early collaborative-divorce community.
We do not market ourselves as a statewide firm or a multi-jurisdictional practice. Family law is local in a specific way: the judges, the standing orders, the local rules, the mediators, the financial neutrals, the child specialists. Knowing these counties well is a different kind of knowing than knowing forty of them passably.
Cristi Trusler founded Trusler Legal PLLC in 2001 and has practiced family law in Travis County since 2001. She is Board Certified in Family Law and in Child Welfare Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, and Master Credentialed in Collaborative Divorce by Collaborative Divorce Texas. Three credentials, two boards, one practice.
She was an early practitioner of collaborative divorce in Central Texas, at a time when the institutional muscle for resolving a marriage outside a courtroom did not yet exist in Travis County. More than two decades later, she is one of only a handful — roughly three to five — of Master Credentialed collaborative-divorce attorneys in Austin. The credential requires at least fifty completed collaborative cases; Cristi had completed close to three hundred. She is also one of the small handful in Texas to hold the TBLS Family Law and Child Welfare Law dual specialization.
$250 for the first hour, prepaid, on the phone or at our Bee Caves Road office. It is actual legal advice from Cristi, not a sales pitch. No homework before, no follow-up pressure after. We will tell you what we would do, what it would cost, and whether you even need a firm like ours.