Attorney Linda Gunn is a careful planner. That characteristic led this Michigan native to choose Bedford County as her home when she decided to open a private practice after years of working for the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare. "After 11 years running the state's child support collection program I had been in all the state's counties and I knew what things appealed to me. I developed a list of the characteristics I wanted for a new home," she says. After extensive research Linda narrowed her search to five counties - with Bedford finally winning the contest after she visited each county and met with the president judge. "Bedford has everything. It's beautiful here, we have cultural opportunities - music, art. The people are great and after 10 years everybody seems to know my name," she says.

Building a practice in a new community from the ground-up wasn't easy. "When I first came here I did everything - a lot of the painful stuff like family law. Now I'm able to specialize in real estate, wills and estates and some municipal law." In the beginning she also kept late hours and had no assistants - now she has several assistants and her hours aren't quite as long. "I can give myself a certain amount of freedom now," she says. Linda believes that the most important characteristics for being a successful lawyer are to be a good listener - learning to understand what the client is saying - and learning to see the big picture and solve puzzles. "Your job is to give people options," she says. "Having a law degree means you've got an education and title that earns you some ability to say what you think - to give your opinion," she says. "The training and skills you develop can translate into many careers because it gives you the ability to look at both sides of a problem and analyze - it makes you a rational, thinking person, which is important in almost any profession."

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