Mary Grace Knapp graduated cum laude from State University of New York in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and English. She then settled in Mandeville, Louisiana and attended Loyola Law School. While still in Law School, Mary Grace was a founding law student of the former Capital Defense Division of Loyola Law Clinic, who were instrumental in having a death sentence reduced to life imprisonment for an Angola inmate who was believed to be innocent of the crime with which he was charged.
In 1985, she graduated from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law with a Juris Doctor degree. After initially passing the Louisiana State Bar Examination, Mary Grace practiced for several years with Attorney Rykert Toledano in a general civil and criminal trial practice. She also served as City Attorney and appeared for the city in the Mayor’s Court in Covington. In 1995, Mary Grace started her own firm in Mandeville, Louisiana.
Mary Grace is admitted to the Louisiana State Bar and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. She is a licensed Notary Public and a member of the Louisiana State Bar Association and the American Bar Association.
Mary Grace’s practice is plaintiff-based. It strives to facilitate the highest possible recoveries in personal injury and insurance cases as well as wrongful death, products liability, and general tort claims. Mary Grace has handled litigation in hundreds of judge and jury trials, with several cases resulting in recoveries in excess of millions of dollars for her clients. Her focus is justice, and she is dedicated to guiding her clients through the uncertainties of the legal process with dignity, respect, and compassion while fighting aggressively to meet their goals.
Mary Grace has decades of experience in family law and mediation, and she continues to mediate family law cases and handle family law matters. She has been named a Certified Lecturer by the Louisiana Bar Association for multiple years and established annual mediation seminars, at which she lectured on mediation and family law topics with the group Conflict Resolutions, LLC, including psychologists and family therapists. She has taught several paralegal courses on family law and legal writing. Notably, Mary Grace has drafted current litigation and saw it through the legislation process, which revamped La. Rev. Stat. § 9:374E1 to permit a spouse to gain use of funds and assets to be allocated to them pending the formal partition, enabling a spouse to leave an abusive home contemporaneously with their seeking a divorce. She served as a guest lecturer at Domestic Mediation in Spetses, Greece, in a program created by Thanassi Yiannopoulos, considered by many to be the father of the modern-day Louisiana Civil Code. She further served as a lecturer on Domestic Law issues in the entertainment community at the North American Law Summit in 2022 in Costa Rica, addressing the management of media coverage as it pertains to high profile divorce.
Mary Grace was featured on local news stations as well in a front-page article in “The Advocate” addressing her involvement in the constitutional challenge to the immunity statute, La. R.S 29:771(B)(2)(c), utilized to preclude recovery for medical malpractice victims through providing civil immunity to health care providers. The statute was activated by the Louisiana Governor in 2020 due to the pandemic and was kept in place for 2 years despite its clear inequity, and the fact that it is so broad as to immunize health care providers in non-health care settings, and situations wholly unrelated to COVID. Mary Grace has challenged the statute in Baton Rouge and Orleans Parish and continues to attempt to eradicate its negative impact on those injured during that period.
Mary Grace is quite proficient in estate planning. She conducts “life-checks” for her clients. These checks include a comprehensive review of a person’s estate, including reviewing his or her insurance policies to assure that their Estate planning goals are attained, and that legal affairs are in order. She facilitates drafting powers of attorney as well as wills, living wills and tutorship documents to assure that her clients have peace of mind as to having their life planning goals completed.
For several years, Mary Grace has served as a member of the Alliance for Good Government, and she was a member of the Professional Women of St. Tammany. From 2010 to 2015, she served as Captain of the North Shore Mardi Gras Krewe of Lyra, which forged an alliance with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and is an active member and proponent of NAMI. She is also well-known in the local songwriting community. She is a Founding Board Director and incorporator of Ozone Music and Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing educational opportunities and providing instruments through a scholarship program, which further established an annual songwriting festival on the North Shore at the Mandeville Trailhead in 2018, and she served on the Board for several years.
She also became involved in the “no-call” litigation against the NFL and was a named Plaintiff in that action which was widely covered locally and nationally, and has also lectured at the North American Law Summit on entertainment law, covering the New Orleans Saints No-Call case, explaining the intricacies of Louisiana law based on its Napoleonic Code, which uniquely enabled the Plaintiffs to state a cause of action, with the case being maintained through the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal for the State of Louisiana.
Mary Grace is the proud mother of three college-educated sons, and has five grandchildren, with her youngest son, Aaron Dylan Knapp having graduated as a legacy graduate from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in May 2018: now sworn in as a practicing Attorney, and an associate of The Knapp Law Firm.
She was further a lecturer at the North American Law Summit in Cancun Mexico in 2020, on the subject of professionalism; and is dedicated to maintaining professionalism and integrity in her own practice, as well as encouraging the value of professionalism throughout the legal community.
Mary Grace carries her integrity from the legal arena to the community, and in both places is dedicated to “making a positive difference” for not only her clients, but the lives of those enhanced by her charitable endeavors.
Throughout her 36 years of practice, Mary Grace has primarily focused her attention on the North Shore and, consequently, is well-recognized in the 22nd Judicial District Court for the Parish of St. Tammany. Her aggressive yet compassionate litigation experience has led to a successful client-based, result-oriented legal practice designed to meet the unique needs of each client.