Principal
Ancestry Research and Citizenship Advisory
Leads engagements end to end: eligibility analysis, research direction, and the judgment calls in between. The person a family speaks with first, and last.
About
A small firm with a specific focus.
Ancestry research, heritage citizenship, and the family situations that sit underneath both. Nothing else.
Origins
How the practice came to be
Descent Legal grew out of years of independent genealogical and legal work across Latin American and European civil registries — researchers who knew the archives, investigators who knew the ground, and citizenship counsel who knew the consulates, each solving pieces of the same families’ questions without quite working together.
The practice was established to coordinate what had long overlapped: one engagement, one standard of care, one thread for a family to hold. It has been kept deliberately small ever since, because the work is personal and does not scale gracefully — and because we have never wanted it to.
Philosophy
How we think about the work
Every family history is unique, and every jurisdictional path is different; the same surname can mean an open door in one country and a closed one next door. So every conversation begins with listening — to what the family knows, half-knows, and hopes — and only then with law.
We do not run advertising campaigns. We do not offer package deals. We do not process applications on a factory model, because files handled by the hundred are read by no one, and these files deserve reading.
Instead we work with a limited number of families each year, with patience, precision, and privacy. Some engagements finish in months; some take years and cross three registries and two alphabets. Both kinds get the same attention, because the measure of this practice is not volume but whether the work would satisfy the grandparent it began with.
Team
The people behind the files
The practice is small enough to describe by hand. In keeping with how we work — and with the discretion we promise the families whose matters we hold — we introduce colleagues by name personally, once a conversation begins, rather than in public biographies.
Senior Researcher
Latin American Practice
Works the civil registries, parish books, and immigration archives of the Río de la Plata and beyond — the craft of finding what a century mislaid.
Consular Filings Coordinator
Applications and Follow-through
Owns the procedural last mile: filings prepared to each consulate’s standard, requisitions answered, and identity documents seen through to issuance.
Working languages across the practice include Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and English.
Where we work
Coordinated, not headquartered
The firm is organized around the archives and consulates it serves, not around an office. Correspondence is coordinated through associated correspondents in hubs including Dubai, London, and Buenos Aires, with research and filings carried out in the jurisdictions where each family’s records live. This is intentional: families meet us where they are, and the work happens where it must.
Ethical commitments
Lines we hold
- We do not accept engagements where the applicant does not have a genuine documented — or reasonable-to-establish — descent claim.
- We do not advertise the firm publicly beyond this website.
- We hold client information in strict confidence.
- We work with a small, vetted network of local investigators and counsel.