The Attorney
Derek R. Haake
Founder of Haake Law Group, PC. Admitted to the Missouri Bar in 2011, following a career in telecommunications and software that began in 2000.
Derek Haake practices on both sides of the same documents. He drafts the wills, trusts, operating agreements and contracts, and he litigates them when they fail. Most attorneys choose one side of that work and remain there, and the difference shows in the drafting and in the courtroom alike. Before law school he spent a decade building the software and telecommunications systems that a great deal of modern law now concerns itself with, which is why the technology practice is grounded in engineering rather than description.
Areas of practice
Where the work is concentrated.
Estate planning
Wills, powers of attorney, transfer-on-death deeds and revocable trusts, through the taxable estate and the irrevocable structures above it. Charitable remainder and lead trusts, and the tax planning that supports them.
Estate settlement
Probate, trust administration, contested estates, and complex or multi-jurisdictional administrations. Locating unidentified assets, resolving mineral and business interests, and coordinating with the Internal Revenue Service.
Guardianship & conservatorship
Guardianship of the person, conservatorship of the estate, guardianship of minors, and contested or removal proceedings.
Business law
Formation, governance, mergers and acquisitions, business sales, and succession planning. Contract drafting and negotiation, and the disputes that follow when agreements are unclear.
Real estate
Residential and commercial transactions, title and boundary matters, landlord and tenant disputes, foreclosure defense, and mechanic’s liens.
Technology & data privacy
Artificial intelligence governance, HIPAA, data privacy and security, and the contract and regulatory work surrounding technology-driven companies.
Civil rights litigation
Claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against police and other government actors, with particular attention to Fourth Amendment questions and digital evidence.
Civil litigation
Breach of contract, adverse possession, wrongful termination, personal injury, and property disputes, prosecuted and defended.
Criminal defense
Traffic and municipal matters, misdemeanors and felonies, and expungements, across all three tiers of Missouri’s system.
Experience
What he has worked through.
Derek has sat on most sides of the matters his clients now bring him. He has been the institution, administering estates for a national bank. He has been the operating company, negotiating acquisitions and building the products being acquired. He has been the firm partner, prosecuting and defending civil claims for eight years. And he was the engineer who designed the data systems that a good deal of privacy and surveillance law is now written about.
That range is the point rather than a curiosity. A house is the largest asset in most estates, the premises a business operates from, and frequently the central asset in a divorce. A closely held company is a business matter, an estate asset and a tax question at the same time. Advice that addresses one of those in isolation is how families and business owners are harmed.
Estate administration at a national bank
As a Vice President and Estate Settlement Officer with Bank of America from 2022 to 2025, Derek administered estates for high-net-worth families — interpreting trust and will documents, coordinating with tax and investment professionals, transferring real property to heirs, researching and transferring mineral rights and oil and gas leases, and managing outside vendors from law firms to appraisers. He communicated directly with beneficiaries throughout, which is where he learned what unclear drafting actually costs a family.
Law firm partner
From 2014 to 2022, Derek was a partner at a Missouri firm, managing associate attorneys and support staff and establishing the processes and templates that kept the work consistent. He handled probate and challenges to wills and trusts; drafted wills, trusts, deeds and powers of attorney; advised on trust administration; and prosecuted and defended civil matters including breach of contract, adverse possession, wrongful termination and personal injury.
Software and product leadership
As Vice President of Development at Campus Shift in Youngstown, Ohio from 2010 to 2013, Derek built a pricing engine that reduced students’ textbook costs by an average of ninety-five percent, developed the company’s web and mobile applications and public API, negotiated its technical vendor agreements, and was instrumental in securing seed funding and the company’s acceptance into the Youngstown Business Incubator.
Fiber optic network infrastructure
As Vice President of Development at OptiCon Systems in Dallas from 2005 to 2007, Derek assisted in the negotiations and due diligence for the acquisition of intellectual property from a business unit of Corning Cable Systems, then oversaw the rebranding and redevelopment of OptiCon’s fiber optic network management system. The technology his team developed could locate a break in a fiber optic cable to within five feet, against an industry standard of roughly thirty-three percent accuracy — a tolerance that was acceptable for copper telephone lines and operationally useless for long-haul fiber. The company went public during Derek’s first year of law school.
Telecommunications and data
As a business analyst with ALLTEL Communications, Derek served on the account team that supported a start-up’s acquisition of 750,000 telephone lines from GTE, now Verizon — an operation that became Valor Telecom and later merged into Windstream Communications. He initiated collections on the acquired customers that generated an additional ten million dollars in monthly revenue, developed a method of detecting and identifying dark fiber rings that added more than one million dollars in monthly revenue, advised the company’s senior executives, and worked with the public utility commissions of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas to draft and seek approval of publicly filed tariffs. He also developed and taught training in DB2, COBOL, Fortran and Oracle.
Education
Law, business, and a thesis written early.
Juris Doctor
University of Akron School of Law. Admitted to the Missouri Bar on 27 September 2011.
Master of Business Administration
University of Akron College of Business Administration. The reason business matters are analysed as businesses rather than only as legal problems.
Bachelor of Arts, Political Science
University of Texas at Arlington.
Scholarship. While at Akron, Derek wrote a substantial work titled Personal Data Collection, Data Mining, Privacy, Fairness and National Security, examining how the federal privacy framework, the Fourth Amendment, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Stored Communications Act, HIPAA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act interact — and fail to interact — with large-scale data collection by private companies and government actors. It addressed behavioural targeting, predictive profiling, national security letters, cellular surveillance and smart-grid privacy. It was written in 2010, and the questions it identified now define an entire field of practice.
Approach
How the practice is run.
Honest counsel over billable hours
Telling a client that they do not need to file suit, or that their position is weak, is worth more than fees earned on a matter that should not proceed. Clients are told what is actually likely to happen.
Technical literacy is part of competence
An attorney who does not understand the technology a client uses cannot competently advise on the contracts, compliance or risk surrounding it. Derek reads source code, evaluates security architecture and reviews data flows directly.
Modern delivery is not a compromise
Encrypted document exchange, electronic signature, secure video conferencing and flat-fee pricing where the work can be defined. These are not shortcuts; they are how careful work is delivered without overhead the client funds.
Outside the practice
Family, and why this work is not abstract.
Derek has been married since 2004 and is the father of four children. He lives in the greater St. Louis area, and his family is part of the firm’s daily life rather than separate from it. Away from the office he golfs, and spends as much time outdoors as the calendar allows.
That is relevant to the work in a way that is easy to state and easy to underestimate. Estate planning, guardianship and business succession are not theoretical exercises here. The questions clients bring — who would raise the children, who would manage the money, what happens to the business, whether the people left behind will be arguing with one another — are questions Derek has had to answer for his own family. Plans drafted by someone who has genuinely sat with those decisions tend to be built for the moment they are actually needed.
Contact
Consultations are free for most matters.
Bring the documents, the deadline, or simply the question. You will speak with the attorney who would handle the matter.
Schedule a Free Consultation(314) 732-1547
Email derek@haakelawgroup.com · Offices in Wildwood, MO & St. Louis, MO (by appointment)
The information on this page is general information about the firm and its attorney. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome in any future matter.