After a Career Protecting Children and Families, Stacy Reid Swain Is Building a Different Kind of Practice

For more than two decades, Stacy Reid Swain spent her career stepping into difficult situations with solutions. Today, she runs Axion Legal Strategy to continue and build upon that work.

Stacy worked on child abuse and neglect cases. She handled anti-human trafficking matters. She worked with the FBI, the State of Maryland, and Montgomery County Public Schools, where she served for six years as Legal Director for Special Education in the Office of General Counsel.

Again and again, the work placed her in the middle of families’ most painful and complicated moments.

“Not everyone is able to manage and deal with the trauma of this work,” she said. “You have to be hardwired for it.”

Now, after a long career in public service, Swain has launched a new venture, Axion Legal Strategy. Axion is a practice that brings together the many strands of her experience: law, advocacy, care coordination, education, disability, crisis support, and family transition planning.

Its tagline captures the approach: Legal and Strategic Solutions for Public Good.

Rather than focusing narrowly on one area of law, Swain has created a practice designed to help people navigate systems that can feel overwhelming, especially when they and their families are already under stress.

“I realized this is the culmination of everything I’ve done in my career,” she said. “People call me all the time asking, ‘How do I do this? How do I navigate this? Who do I talk to?’ And I realized that helping families through those moments is what brings me joy.”

A Lifetime of Service

Swain traces that capacity for managing through crisis back to childhood. Growing up in Baltimore, she watched her parents open their home again and again to support people in crisis, from children in need to neighbors who needed help.

“There were always children in our home,” she said. “Children from social services, neighborhood children whose families were struggling. My parents helped support and raise them when their families could not.”

That early example shaped the course of her life.

After attending the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and then American University Washington College of Law in DC, Swain built a career that spanned child welfare, education, government, and family services.

Along the way, she worked on cases involving abused children, missing youth, and families struggling to access the systems meant to help them.

At one point, she said, she drifted away from that kind of work to try something else.

“I tried the corporate piece, but that wasn’t me,” she said. “I needed humans. I needed to be able to serve.”

A mentor eventually challenged her to stop running from the work she was naturally drawn to. “He said, ‘Why do you keep running away? You always come back,’” Swain recalled.

Building a Bridge for Families

That realization became the foundation for Axion Legal Strategy.

Today, Swain describes herself not only as an attorney, but as a patient advocate, care coordinator, strategist, and guide.

Her clients are often people in the “sandwich generation,” adults who are caring for aging parents while also supporting children or other family members. Most are dealing with unfamiliar and anxiety-causing situations: a parent leaving the hospital, a special education dispute, a disability diagnosis, a difficult conversation with doctors, or the need to make legal and care decisions quickly.

In those moments, people often do not know what kind of help they need, only that they are overwhelmed.

“Sometimes they need legal advice,” Swain said. “Sometimes they need someone to help them understand the system and communicate with providers. Sometimes they need both.”

Her work can involve helping a family navigate healthcare and insurance, pulling critical information from a hospital social worker, supporting parents through the special education process, or helping adult children make workable plans for ill or aging parents.

What makes the practice different is that Swain approaches those situations with both professional expertise and lived experience.

She has also spent years as a caregiver herself, supporting her parents, her in-laws, and other family members.

“People are often discharged from a hospital and don’t even know the right questions to ask,” she said. “Sometimes I can say, from experience, ‘No, your mom doesn’t need this piece of equipment, she needs something different.’ Those little things matter.”

That practical knowledge, combined with her legal background, allows her to serve as a bridge between families and the institutions they must navigate.

Rooted in Montgomery County

Swain and her husband moved to Montgomery County from D.C. more than 20 years ago after the birth of their first child.

The couple, who met as teenagers and have now been together for more than three decades, chose the county because they wanted strong schools and a supportive environment in which to raise their family. Today, they live in Burtonsville, a community Swain describes as “small” and “sleepy,” situated between Silver Spring and Columbia.

It is also the place where she has chosen to build the next chapter of her work. She is a participant in the current cohort of the Montgomery County Black Collective’s AMBER Fellowship Program. 

Although Axion Legal Strategy is still new, the practice reflects something that has remained constant throughout Swain’s career: a belief that people are well served by someone who can help them move through difficult systems with clarity, compassion, and dignity.

“This is the work I’m supposed to do,” she said. “It’s what I’ve been doing all along.”