Dana Sherins Stutman has emerged as one of Manhattan's leading young matrimonial lawyers, whose strong background in finance and accounting sets her apart from most of her peers. Still in her early 40s, Stutman is already well-known in New York's divorce bar, having worked with some of the field's most renowned attorneys. Today she is a founding partner in the firm of Preston Stutman & Partners, P.C., a matrimonial and family law firm whose partners are respected for handling a broad range of cases across the region.

Growing up in Potomac, Maryland, the daughter of a prominent endocrinologist and infertility expert affiliated with National Institutes of Health, Stutman says, "I was supposed to become a doctor, like the rest of my family." (A sister today is a psychiatrist; one brother-in-law is a nephrologist, another is an ophthalmologist.) But the law, with its focus on synthesizing and analyzing large amounts of information, "is better suited to me." Briefly a pre-med at Tulane, she opted for a business and accounting focus, and found herself recruited by every major accounting firm in New York City. ("Eight firms, eight flights, eight interviews.") She chose Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and for a few years worked atop One World Trade. Although accounting "came easily to me", she was immersed in corporate audits that lasted for months and "they didn't fulfill me." By her mid 20s she decided on law school, attending Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Greenwich Village, with an eye on becoming a tax or trust lawyer. But she got a taste of litigation in a moot court competition, and pursued a clerkship with Justice David B. Saxe (now appellate judge), after her first year, and thereafter litigated as a law student for the New York State Attorney General's office. While at Cardozo, she also worked on "The Innocence Project," the now famously effective legal initiative that examines DNA evidence to reverse wrongful criminal convictions.

Initially, as an attorney, Dana worked with well-known New York litigator Michael Dowd, an expert on battered-women's cases; she also clerked for now appellate judge Richard T. Andrias in the matrimonial part of the State Supreme Court. A year after law school she joined the firm of Sheresky, Mayefsky & Aronson (Now Mayefsky Aronson & Sloan), one of New York's top divorce firms, where within seven years - light-speed by law-career standards -- she was named a partner. With regards to working with several of the areas top attorneys, Stutman agrees, "I've worked with the best people in the practice throughout my career" while being exposed to high-stakes, high-asset cases that called for her financial expertise.

In 2011, Dana Stutman teamed with Robert Preston and several other attorneys to form Preston Stutman & Partners, based in Manhattan with additional offices in Mineola. Stutman and her husband Michael Stutman, also a well known divorce lawyer, have two young children; they live on Manhattan's Lower East Side.