AV rated, Leslie Van Frank has almost three decades experience practicing general real property law, title insurance defense, and outdoor advertising law. She has litigated at administrative, trial, and appellate levels, and counseled clients ranging from residential neighbors with boundary line disputes to Fortune 500 companies defending multi-million dollar lawsuits.
Leslie has extensive experience resolving liens and title defects, as well as escrow disputes, through negotiation, mediation, and litigation. She has defended local agents and title underwriters against fiduciary, contract, bad faith and tort claims, and assertions of statutory liability. The outdoor advertising law she practices involves a cross-section of contract, tort, real property, constitutional, and local and state governmental legislation and regulatory matters. Her expertise in this area is such that adversaries periodically refer clients to her.
Leslie served as a judge pro tem in the Third District Court, Salt Lake Small Claims Division, for more than 20 years. During that time, the jurisdictional level of the Small Claims Court was raised tenfold, from $1,000 to $10,000. She presided over thousands of civil matters involving almost any dispute imaginable, including ones between landlords and tenants, contractors and property owners, automobile owners and dealerships or repairmen—even shoving matches between neighbors. Through this experience, she has developed a keen sense of how and why judges rule as they do.
In 2014, Leslie’s peers in the Real Property Section of the Utah State Bar named her the Distinguished Real Property Practitioner of the Year. The section is one of the largest and most active sections of the Bar. (Leslie is the section’s first female recipient of that award.) Leslie has also been nominated by her peers to Utah Business Magazine’s Legal Elite, and was recently featured in the Greater Salt Lake edition of Attorney at Law Magazine. Leslie has been a lecturer with the National Business Institute and the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.
Leslie was admitted to the Utah State Bar in 1986. She received her BA from the University of Utah in 1979 and her J.D. from that same illustrious institution in 1986.