About Darren Cherrington, Esq. — From Engineering to Law

I’m a tax, entity formation, and estate planning attorney. I work with entrepreneurs, business owners, and investors who want a plan that fits together — and who want to actually understand it.

Before law, I was a mechanical engineer. That isn’t a fun fact at the bottom of a bio page. It’s the reason my planning looks the way it does.

Testing cars in the worst places in North America.

I graduated from Brigham Young University–Idaho with a mechanical engineering degree in December 2013. A few weeks later I was working for Hyundai-Kia’s vehicle evaluation group as a thermal systems engineer.

My job was to find out how a vehicle behaves when conditions stop being reasonable. Hot-weather testing in Death Valley in the middle of summer. Cold-weather testing in International Falls, Minnesota in the middle of winter. Humidity testing along the Oregon coast, mild-weather work in Big Bear and Palm Springs, and the occasional trip somewhere further out — Chicago, and even Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. I helped develop the test standards, collected and analyzed the data, and worked with the design teams on what needed to change.

Two habits came out of that work and never left. Assume the system will be pushed to its limits. And design for that at the beginning, instead of patching it after something fails.

Then I spent years protecting other people’s best ideas.

I went to law school at Michigan State and became a registered patent attorney. For years, my job was to protect one of the most valuable things a company owns — its inventions. I drafted and prosecuted patents across automotive systems, HVAC, materials, consumer products, nuclear testing equipment, and advanced manufacturing, for global automakers, Fortune 500 technology companies, and national laboratories.

It’s precise, unglamorous work. A patent claim either holds up under pressure or it doesn’t, and the difference usually traces back to a decision someone made early, when it would have been easier to move fast.

Why I practice the way I do.

For the past several years I’ve focused on tax and estate planning, managing hundreds of client engagements a year — everything from someone’s very first LLC to multi-entity structures for families who have been building for decades.

I kept running into the same thing. Smart, capable people sitting on a stack of documents nobody had ever designed to work together. An entity formed here, a trust drafted there, a tax election someone recommended three years ago, none of it aware of the rest. Every piece was fine on its own. As a system, it leaked.

So that’s what I do now. I design the whole thing on purpose — the entity, the trust, the tax elections — as one system, and then I explain it in plain English until you could explain it back to me. That’s the bar. If you can’t explain your own plan, I haven’t finished my job.

What working with me looks like.

Plain English, every time. No jargon you didn’t ask for and no document you don’t understand.
Flat fees on the work that can be priced flat, quoted before anything starts.
Designed as a system. Your entity, your trust, and your tax elections get built to work together, not one at a time.
Meet me wherever you are. Every consultation happens by video, so there’s no drive across town, no parking garage, and no twenty minutes in a reception area reading a magazine. I’ve had clients join from a job site and from the front seat of a truck between appointments. I work with clients across the country.
No pressure. If you don’t need something, I’ll tell you.

The credentials, briefly.

J.D., Michigan State University College of Law
B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Brigham Young University–Idaho
Licensed attorney in Michigan
USPTO Registered Patent Attorney
Thermal Systems Engineer, Hyundai-Kia America Technical Center (2014–2016)

Let’s talk about what you’re building.

Schedule a consultation and we’ll walk through where you are now, what’s missing, and what it would cost to fix it.

Schedule a Consultation