Amy Dilbeck Kiesewetter ('02, JD '09) Featured in Southern California Super Lawyers Article, "Survivor"

Pepperdine Caruso Law and Seaver College alumna Amy Dilbeck Kiesewetter ('02, JD '09) is featured in the Southern California Super Lawyers 2020 Rising Stars article, "Survivor." Amy specializes in estate planning, California probate, trust administration, and litigation at ADK Heritage Law in Santa Paula. Amy has been selected as a Southern California Rising Star from 2017 to 2020.

Excerpt from "Survivor"

Then, at the age of 15, Kiesewetter, an active member of the swim and cheerleading teams, began to experience pain in her knee. Assuming it was an athletic injury, she tried to play through it. But on her third doctor's visit, her GP took an X-ray and sent her to the children's hospital, where she was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma, a type of bone cancer. She started chemotherapy almost immediately.

"It was just a completely world-changing week," she says, "where you go from cheerleading and being at school, trying to hitchhike home with your friends and get money for lunch ... to basically being deathly ill—with your life at risk and having to come to terms with a lot of the frailty of humanity."

For the next nine months, Kiesewetter spent three out of every four weeks at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). It was her community back home, she says, that got her and her family through the difficult time.

For Kiesewetter's 16th birthday, the high school marching band played on her front lawn, and a local pilot flew a plane pulling a "Happy Birthday" banner. On Fridays, whenever possible, her mother drove her home from the hospital so she could cheer for the football team, sitting on a barstool her teammates set up. Kiesewetter's aunt placed change jars around town to offset the cost of the gas.

"We were really blessed to be part of a small community that came together to support us," she says.

After graduating from Pepperdine University, Kiesewetter took a job at CureSearch, a fundraising arm of Children's Oncology Group, and eventually moved east to work in its Washington, D.C., office. She soon realized two things: "The people who were in charge and made the rules were lawyers" and "I needed to be in charge."

The compete article may be found here, and the complete online version of the magazine may be found here