In their 23 years together, the husband and husband duo of lawyers Carl Minster and David Facciolo have garnered a wealth of insight on the legal profession and the challenges and benefits of running a business together — Minster & Facciolo, LLC.
When Minster first met Facciolo in the early ’90s, Minster was not a lawyer and had yet to attend law school; he had been fired from a high-level management position at the IRS for being gay, he said.
After taking a series of jobs that were below his experience and education level, Minster said Facciolo encouraged him to attend law school.
“I went to Widener University, and during my first year in Harrisburg, David would drive out to see me every weekend,” Minster said.
But after Minster’s first year, seeing each other on weekends only was no longer enough. Minster asked to transfer to Widener’s Wilmington location to be closer to Facciolo.
Minster graduated in 1997 and said it was difficult at first to land the type of job he wanted.
“I worked for a personal-injury firm for about a year because I had friends that worked there, but otherwise no one wanted to hire someone as old as I was,” Minster said.
After a year at the small personal-injury firm, Minster began his own practice and started working from home.
In September 1999, Facciolo started working in an “of counsel” role with Minster, meaning he would review the status of cases on a weekly or biweekly basis — but was still working full-time as a senior public defender in Wilmington.
Minster opened his first office in Philadelphia and later a second office in Wilmington.
After a 28-year tenure as a public defender, Facciolo — who among other accomplishments, created a name for himself as a chief proponent of incarceration alternatives — was able to “retire” and start working full-time with Minster.
While the pair expressed how thankful they were to spend more time together, Minster joked, “we keep two separate offices for a reason.”
“With two offices we can argue about a case over the phone, hang up, then call each other again in a few minutes,” Minster added.
Which seems to work just fine for the two, who, according to Facciolo, have very different but complementary approaches to a case.
“The best and worst part is that my husband is a former efficiency expert for the IRS,” Facciolo said. “He likes to laser-in on the issue, whereas I want to know all the information before I focus in. It keeps us both on our toes.”
“I have my cases and he has his cases, but we do discuss them with each other,” Minster said. “I will ask his opinion on something I am doing and vice versa.”
Facciolo credits his difference in approach to his background as a public defender.
“Many of my cases were won not in the courtroom per se, but what I could come up with when a prosecutor was offering me a bad deal,” Facciolo said.
But it also could have something to do with Facciolo’s upbringing. His parents once placed him in a speech contest so he would not be afraid of juries, and then in the eighth grade bought him the entire Dale Carnegie series of books to teach him how to be persuasive.
“My family was very supportive of civil-rights issues, and luckily the path they chose for me as a lawyer was one that I very much wanted for myself as well.”
Facciolo’s father was best friends with James Gallow, who was the first Italian-American judge in Delaware, according to Facciolo. Gallow, considered an uncle by Facciolo, had ties to Louis L. Redding, a Wilmington native, who was on the NAACP team in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
Regardless of their approach, the lawyer-couple’s small firm has become a leading go-to for LGBTs in the area, especially for estate planning.
“About 80 percent of our estate work is with the LGBT community,” Minster said. “People who have been married for 20, 30-plus years want to know what the benefit is to getting married now.”
One such perk to tying the knot is avoiding the 15-percent inheritance tax in Pennsylvania, Minster said.
“If you are married, then you do not have to pay the inheritance tax.”
Health and Social Security benefits are additional reasons, according to Minster, but are by no means the only ones, he said.
Another area the practice specializes in is family law, which besides divorce and custody issues also includes prenuptial agreements, which Minster says he has been doing a lot more work with since gay marriage became legal in Pennsylvania.
The Delaware office also handles criminal and traffic-law cases.
“We even do a surprising amount of Supreme Court cases, probably five-10 each year, “ said Facciolo.
For more information on the duo’s practice, visit www.minsterandfacciolo.com.
