Attorney Profiles

E. Parker Herring is a board certified specialist in family law and also practices adoption law. She is the founding member of the law firm of Herring McBennett Mills & Kratt; PLLC. She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1975 and her Juris Doctor degree from the Wake Forest University School of Law in 1985.

She was a member of the Moot Court Board at Wake Forest Law School and elected to the Order of the Barristers. She was winner of the Craven Competition for Appellate Advocacy and was a member of Wake Forest Law School's National Appellate Team.

After law school Herring clerked for the North Carolina Court of Appeals for the Honorable Eugene A. Phillips and has been in private practice in North Carolina since 1986. She is a past President of the Wake County Family Lawyer's Association and is a frequent speaker at continuing education programs and programs on family law.

She is founder and co-director of A Child's Hope, a North Carolina licensed adoption agency, which focuses on placing North Carolina children with prospective adoptive parents in North Carolina. A Child's Hope provides a wide range of adoption services including home studies (preplacement assessments) and placement services of newborns with North Carolina adoptive parents. She also formed the nonprofit, Friends of Adoption, to provide funds and direction for lobbying in the North Carolina legislature on adoption issues. She has successfully lobbied in the North Carolina legislature to effect major changes in the state's adoption laws.

Her divorce practice focuses on all the aspects of family law including marriage, divorce, spousal support (alimony) child custody and child support, and property division (Equitable Distribution). Her domestic practice also includes domestic violence as well as nuptial agreements.

Her adoption practice includes independent and agency adoptions, as well as stepparent and relative adoptions and interstate adoptions and termination of parental rights. She also handles interstate and international adoptions as well as surrogacy contracts.

Herring is a Raleigh native who is active in the community and has served on numerous nonprofit Boards including Wake Mediation Services, the Women's Center of Wake County, The Lucy Daniels Preschool, and Hopeful Parents. She was past President of Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition of Wake County and is active in her church, St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Raleigh, and has served on the church's Board of Trustees and Finance Committees.

She is trained as a family law mediator and is also trained in Collaborative law.