In 2020, Inna Materese was a newly minted law firm partner with a three-year-old and a one-year-old at home. She was also, suddenly, a lot of other things at once. She acted as a crisis counselor for domestic violence clients quarantined with their abusers. She provided a financial lifeline to parents who’d lost jobs and couldn’t make support payments.She served as a referee in custody disputes over whether a child should be vaccinated. And she took calls and ran Zoom hearings while bouncing her one-year-old on her hip, having just finished “homeschooling” a preschooler. 

Looking back on that season, she describes herself as depleted. What she didn’t know yet was that the very things breaking her down, like the impersonal, arm’s-length way family law is typically practiced, were about to become the reason she started her own firm.

Today, as owner and founder of Materese Family Law, PC, Inna leads an all-female team of three attorneys and two paralegals. Her team serves families across Philadelphia, the Main Line, the western suburbs, and Bucks County. She’s rebuilt the practice of family law around a simple idea: people going through divorce, custody, and support deserve to make their own decisions, not have decisions made for them.

Inna Materese is a 2026 Philadelphia Family Women of Influence Award Winner

Philadelphia Family’s Women of Influence Awards celebrate exceptional women making significant impacts in our community. Inna was nominated by a colleague and selected based on her achievements and dedication to creating positive change. Each Women of Influence Award Winner has committed to support Family Focus Media’s core values. Together, we are committed to fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment for all families. All backgrounds, races, genders, and sexual orientations are welcome and safe with us.

Beyond the awards, our Women of Influence Luncheon and Speed Networking Night attendees come together as our Women of Influence Network, a community fostering connections, collaboration, and mutual support.

The Class That Changed Everything

Inna didn’t set out to become a family lawyer. A lifelong reader and book enthusiast, she went to law school expecting to end up in intellectual property or publishing. But when a class she’d registered for fell through, she needed another credit. She signed up for a family law practical clinic almost by accident. “What I got was so much more,” she says. 

Working inside the family court system showed her a different kind of legal work. It was centered around what people lose and rebuild when a family unit comes apart. She never forgot that initial spark, and it’s guided every step of her career since, including the decision to start her own firm four years ago.

Starting the firm wasn’t her idea, at least not at first. Her husband, also a Philadelphia-area attorney, was the one who pushed her. “I joke that he bullied me into this,” Inna notes, “because I had never in my wildest thoughts or dreams considered starting a business.” 

At the time, her kids were young and she was juggling a full-time legal career. She didn’t feel she had the bandwidth to learn payroll, hiring, and everything else that comes with owning a practice. It took the better part of a year of planning, much of it done at night, before she felt ready to launch. Even then, she wasn’t sure her clients would follow her out the door. They did. All of them, plus a few whose cases she’d barely touched at her old firm.

Putting Control Back in Her Clients’ Hands

Ask Inna what separates her practice from a traditional family law firm, and she doesn’t start with legal strategy. She starts with client education. 

A significant number of Materese’s clients, she explains, never handled the finances in their household. Some have never written a check or looked at a bank statement. Often, they come to her scared, unsure if they even have access to their own money. Rather than simply making decisions for them, Inna and her team teach clients how to budget, connect them with financial planners, and walk them through basics like tax filing status. 

“I don’t want people making decisions that impact the rest of their lives from a place of fear, from a place of concern, and from a place of ignorance,” she says. “I want my clients to feel like they’ve got this.”

That philosophy extends into the alternative paths Inna offers beyond the courtroom. She completed 60 hours of training to become a certified family law mediator. This taught her how to help people who aren’t so much in disagreement as talking past each other under stress. “No two families are the same,” she says. “It’s hard to come up with a solution through the court system that really is tailor-made to your family. But you can do that in mediation.” 

She’s also a court-approved parenting coordinator. In this role, she is appointed in custody cases to help separated parents resolve the day-to-day disputes that a courtroom is too big and too slow to touch. This includes issues such as cell phone timing, sleepovers, and which sports a child plays.

Building a Firm Around How Women Actually Work

Before starting her own practice, Inna was one of two women in a sixteen-attorney firm, and the youngest female in the room. She remembers being asked to take meeting notes simply because she was the woman present. She watched an all-female administrative staff get passed over for the growth opportunities the attorneys received. When she built Materese Family Law, she created the opposite of that environment on purpose.

Every attorney and paralegal at the firm is given room to define what work-life balance looks like for them. Employees receive an annual wellness stipend to spend on whatever helps them feel like themselves, whether that’s therapy, a gym membership, a hobby, or something else. Inna noted that not everyone’s paycheck stretches to cover their own care, especially if they’re supporting aging parents or adult children. At each annual review, she asks her team one question: “What else would you like to try?” Then the firm invests in helping them do it.

The client experience got the same rethink at Materese Family Law. Clients can upload documents through a portal instead of chasing down email threads. They are able to text the office instead of calling. They work through big, overwhelming problems one small task at a time. “It’s just making things easier,” Inna says. “I don’t want to make your life harder.”

Beyond the Firm

Inna’s influence reaches past her own client roster. She’s the former chairperson of the Montgomery County Bar Association’s Family Law Section. She remains active in reviving the county’s Friend of the Court program, which connects attorney volunteers with people navigating divorce and custody cases inside domestic violence protection proceedings who can’t afford a lawyer of their own. 

At the state level, she serves on the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s parentage committee. She helps draft new statute language to address how Pennsylvania law defines parentage amid assisted reproduction, same-sex marriage and adoption, and kinship adoption.

Home, Reading, and Recharging

Outside the office, Inna is quick to credit the team behind her. She identifies the support she received from her mother and mother-in-law, who helped with childcare in the firm’s early days. Inna recognizes her husband as being her biggest supporter and advocate.

As a mom, Inna makes a point of being home to get her two young sons off the school bus and hear about their day. She volunteers at their school, and works out in the early mornings before the day starts. A self-described “book nerd,” she still reads, almost entirely through audiobooks these days. She gravitates toward fiction as an escape from the case files she reads all day for work.

Advice for the Woman Sitting on an Idea

Inna offers this advice to a woman hesitating with her own business idea: it’s not a bad idea, and you don’t have to see the whole path before you take the first step. “It took me probably over a year to really actualize starting this firm,” she notes. “One step forward, and all of a sudden you have a business. You take one little task at a time, one little stepping stone at a time, but it all starts with the idea that it’s possible. It doesn’t have to be fast.” 

With her own clients, she often turns their fear of the future into a different question. When they ask her what’s the worst that could happen, she asks them to consider something else instead. “I ask them what’s the best that can happen to you? Setbacks are lessons in disguise.”

What’s Next

Inna isn’t interested in scaling Materese Family Law into something impersonal. Instead, she envisions a boutique firm where the attorneys she’s mentoring grow their own thriving practices, supported by the same client-centered culture she built the firm around. 

Asked what being recognized as a Woman of Influence means to her, she’s quick to redirect the credit. “It would be foolhardy for me to say that this is a solo effort,” she shares, naming the paralegals and attorneys who make her work possible. “There are incredibly brilliant, amazing women that are behind me. I would not be me without them.”

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