Fisher & Wilsey, P.A.

Six decades of St. Petersburg practice

Robert W. Fisher and George F. Wilsey opened this firm in 1962. Both were attorneys, and the name they chose has stayed on the door ever since. Six decades later, the firm still works out of St. Petersburg, Florida.

George Wilsey's two sons, David and Steven, now hold the primary shareholder roles and practice as attorneys here. George himself remains listed among the firm's attorneys. That gives the roster two generations of the same family working under one name.

The firm describes itself as a multi-generational family business. It covers St. Petersburg and the wider Tampa Bay area of Florida. Six decades in one city gives a firm a particular kind of familiarity with local courts and local property records, and in my opinion that matters more in probate and real estate work than in almost any other field.

Focus and practice areas

Estate planning, probate, and estate and trust administration form the core of what Fisher & Wilsey handles. Around that core the firm also takes real estate law, business law, elder law and civil litigation. The practice areas overlap in useful ways: an estate matter often touches a property title, and a family business often needs both a succession plan and a corporate document review.

Estate planning

The estate planning work covers wills and revocable trusts. It also extends to irrevocable trusts and special needs trusts, which involve more technical drafting than a standard will.

Beyond the trust documents, the firm prepares powers of attorney, advance healthcare directives and beneficiary designations. Beneficiary designations deserve a mention here because they sit outside the will and frequently get overlooked. A firm that names them explicitly on its own site has probably seen the consequences of a stale designation more than once.

Probate and administration

Florida probate comes in several forms, and the firm names three of them: formal administration, summary administration, and disposition without administration. These are genuinely different procedures with different thresholds and different paperwork. Naming all three tells a reader the firm handles the small estate as readily as the large one.

The work happens in Pinellas County Court. The firm represents estate administrators and trustees through the administration itself. It also represents them in disputes, including will contests and trust disputes.

That litigation capacity is worth flagging. Plenty of estate planning firms draft documents and then hand off contested matters to someone else. Fisher & Wilsey lists civil litigation among its practice areas and describes representing fiduciaries in will contests, so a client whose estate matter turns adversarial can stay with the same attorneys.

How the team is built

The site names six attorneys: David F. Wilsey, Steven M. Wilsey, George F. Wilsey, Seymour A. Gordon, Abigail W. Bahr and Chase L. Wilsey. Three of the six share the Wilsey name, which fits a firm that describes itself as a family business.

David F. Wilsey and Steven M. Wilsey are the partners and primary shareholders. Both are sons of co-founder George Wilsey. George F. Wilsey appears on the attorney roster as founder.

Seymour A. Gordon has the most documented background of the group. He earned a B.S. from the University of Florida in 1957 and a J.D. from Stetson University in 1960. His practice covers appeals, banking, probate, real estate, corporate law, wills, government matters and general practice. Stetson is a Florida law school with a long presence in the St. Petersburg area, so Gordon's training and his practice have stayed in the same region.

Abigail W. Bahr and Chase L. Wilsey round out the attorney list. The site names them without publishing individual biographies, so a prospective client will want to ask directly about their areas of concentration.

What the record shows

The strongest verifiable fact here is longevity. A 1962 founding date, confirmed on the firm's own about page, puts Fisher & Wilsey among the older continuously operating law offices in St. Petersburg. Sixty-plus years of continuous operation is a harder thing to manufacture than most marketing claims.

The second is family continuity. The founder's sons run the firm now, and a third Wilsey appears on the attorney list. Succession within a law firm is a real problem, and many practices simply close when the founding generation retires. This one solved it internally.

The third is geographic concentration. The firm works in St. Petersburg and the Tampa Bay area, and its probate work runs through Pinellas County Court. As a reviewer, I read that concentration as a strength for the kind of work the firm does. Probate procedure varies by county in practice if not in statute, and clerks, judges and local filing habits reward repetition.

Who this listing suits

Someone in Pinellas County who needs a will drafted, a trust set up, or an estate administered will find the relevant work described in plain terms on the firm's own pages. The three named probate procedures give a reader a way to place their own situation before they call.

Property owners and small business owners in the Tampa Bay area have a second reason to look. Real estate law and business law appear alongside the estate work, which suits a client whose personal planning and commercial interests are tangled together. Elder law appears on the list too, and it connects naturally to the powers of attorney and healthcare directives the firm drafts.

The gaps in the public record are ordinary ones. Law school and admission details aren't published for most of the attorneys, and three of the six have no individual biography online. A prospective client can cover that ground in a first conversation.

Fisher & Wilsey, P.A. presents itself as a family firm doing estate, property and business work in one Florida metro area since 1962. The attorney roster, the practice area list and the founding date all appear on the firm's own website and line up with each other.