We’re looking forward to introducing you to TANAZ SALEHI. Check out our conversation below.
Hi TANAZ, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: When was the last time you felt true joy?
I recently rang the bell for my cancer treatment. What does it mean to ring the bell? It means I have a chance. It means my cancer treatment has concluded, and it did its job. I was surrounded by my true friends, my family, and my doctors as I walked toward that cancer bell at Miami Cancer Institute.
It is a rare and sacred feeling to be so fully present in a moment that you can sense its edges, touch its center, and know yourself as both within it and carried by it. To see it all unfolding around you while knowing it is also happening to you.
When we were children, joy flowed through us in such an unbroken and pure way. A smile would bloom from our eyes, our hearts, our souls, without thought or hesitation. But as we grow older, our mind’s voice constantly interrupts, and it dims and cracks the surface of that happiness.
Yet this moment was different. This moment was joy returning to me with the innocence of a child’s heart. It was as if I had stepped into heaven and locked eyes with everyone I love, and they were all there to walk with me toward my rebirth. My regeneration. My reincarnation into a healthier, more vibrant spirit.
A second chance. A second heart. A second soul. This was a moment of pure joy.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am the Managing Shareholder of a very creative, unique boutique thinktank law-firm. Our firm was born from curiosity, passion, and a refusal to accept the ordinary. After more than eighteen years in the world of legal defense, I saw that too many firms operated like factories, processing cases in the same predictable way, never questioning, never reaching further. I wanted to build something entirely different — a place where strategy and creativity come alive, where every case is treated as a puzzle worth solving with imagination, rigor, and heart.
That vision became Salehi Boyer Lavigne Lombana, P.A., founded in 2019 with my partners Oscar, Donald, and Scott. What began as late-night conversations over sushi about what law should feel like soon became the blueprint for the firm we lead today. From the very start, we agreed on one guiding principle: curiosity is mandatory. It is the force that pushes us to explore every fact, every precedent, every angle of a case. It is what makes us listen more deeply, think more expansively, and advocate more powerfully.
We specialize in first party property and third party liability insurance claims, coverage recommendations, contract negotiations, and commercial disputes, and we serve individuals, small businesses, and large corporations with equal dedication. Our attorneys have conducted countless jury trials, but what makes us different is not the number of victories, it is the way we arrive at them. We approach every case as new and unrepeatable, seeking out the golden truth that lies hidden in the details.
For me, this work is endlessly fascinating. I have always had a zest for life and a relentless curiosity that fuels both strategy and innovation. My partners share that same spirit, which is why our bond is so strong. We also have fun. A crucial ingredient to winning is fun. We trust one another, we celebrate each other’s successes, and we stand together through losses. That sense of loyalty and connection is the foundation of our practice and the reason I feel blessed to spend my career alongside them.
At its core, our firm is more than a legal practice. It is a living think tank, a place where listening is as important as speaking, where empathy sharpens advocacy, and where passion for the law turns challenges into opportunities. We do not simply defend cases, we defend people, stories, and futures.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
When I heard the words, “It is malignant. It is cancer. I am sorry,” it was the day after Christmas. I was in a rental car on the way to a cabin in the woods with my family, the dogs in the backseat, our bags neatly packed. We had to pull over on a side road. The pull of the heart is too heavy to allow you to drive and digest words like that at the same time. In an instant, the things we take for granted- balance, coordination, the ability to tell the sky from the clouds, even the simple act of breathing-slipped away. That moment felt like a black hole opening in the universe of my life.
How many men and women have felt their lives hijacked by news like this? It is a universal theft, one that bends time and fractures reality. Yet what is taken is often returned, and more often than not it comes back in a form that is richer and more generous.
The week after my diagnosis, I learned it was aggressive, a high grade cancer. I had to absorb the statistics, the narrative that most women do not survive illnesses like this. I had to face my mortality directly, to look it in the eye and see it for what it was. Before that moment, I had felt invincible- vibrant, strong, fearless, unshakable, insatiable for life. My days were stacked with sixty hours of work, one coffee after another, endless meetings, conferences back to back, dinners after nine o’clock to catch up on what the day had left undone, and exercise rarely in sight. Suddenly, that world became unimaginable. Life was now different. I looked back and said, what have I done to myself?
I was told I would need chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, surgeries, and constant appointments. I would lose my hair. I would lose my health in order to save my health. I needed to find a space within myself that was untouchable by fear, a place where the voices of anxiety and mortality could not reach me. I needed to find a way to breathe. I wasn’t safe inside myself at the time.
So I set out to find it. It began with long walks, often ending with me bent over in tears. I could not listen to music; it moved me too deeply. I needed something neutral to rest my eyes on. I chose trees. I studied them carefully as I walked -the yellowing of their leaves, the moss climbing their bark, the ridges of their trunks, the ancient tentacles of their roots. Slowly, trees became my emblem, my motto, my quiet religion. Their strength, their endurance through storms, droughts, pollution, and disease, their endless reaching upward while digging deeper into the soil, became my guide. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to be as resilient.
Through the trees, I found my breath again. My eyes began to notice what they had never seen before. Men and women waiting at bus stops, going about their days, heads lowered, sometimes their eyes closed, their weariness and struggle laid bare, but also their beauty. I imagined their stories. I began greeting them, and then offering my silent prayers for them. Anyone I saw, anyone who crossed my path, I would lower my head and wish them well with all my heart.
This illness opened my eyes and my heart to the struggles all of us carry, every day, every hour. Any safe moment in life feels rare, a brief flash before the next lesson, the next trial, the next unveiling arrives. And we are all in it together. We live inside this cycle of beauty and suffering, triumph and loss, rising and falling to our knees. Everyone’s path is different, yet we all share one promise: tragedy will touch us. This truth bound me to everyone I encountered during those eight months. I felt connected. I felt in love, alive, aware, awake.
I saw it in my doctors’ eyes as they carefully laid out my care plan. I saw it in my nurses’ faces as they placed the chemotherapy into my veins. I saw it in opposing counsel when they canceled an event because of family illness. I saw it in my neighbors, in strangers, in everyone. Each one carried a private pain unseen by the world.
And just as life had taken so much, it began to give back. It gave me the softest love, the brightest smiles, the most tender and wholehearted care. It gave me words of encouragement that filled me, nurtured me, and healed parts of my heart I never knew were empty. It returned everything in ways I could never have imagined.
Now, I see the world differently. I know, deep within, that all of us are on the same team. We are united by the same chances, the same promises, the same suffering, and the same deliverance. I carry a profound reverence for life. When breath and sanity are stripped away, when life breaks you down to your knees, it is then that you are freed. It is then that you are saved. It is then that your eyes and heart clear enough to see what was always there, waiting patiently: the trees, humanity, nature, love, the suffering of others, and the untapped depths of your own heart.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Suffering took success and placed it exactly where it belonged. That is what suffering does. It puts everything into its rightful place. It is a magic fog that sweeps in, blinding you. You grasp for what you can, you hold on, you pray for the fog to lift, hoping that when it clears your eyes will adjust and something of your old life will remain. You hope your heart, your soul, even a fragment of what was once familiar, will still be there. But suffering does what it will with you, and when the fog fades, life is never what we remember. We are altered. Our eyes take on jagged or sharper lenses. Friends and family may fall away. People are lost along the path. And yet the order of what matters is rewritten.
For me, success had always been defined by work. I believed success meant that the path of my career would expand, rise, and stretch wider every year. It meant recognition, respect, more clients, endless work, and eventually ease in work. By those measures, I was successful. Year after year, I climbed. I was proud of what we built as a firm and what I achieved through relentless effort. But I see now that I was only standing on level one.
Success demanded speed. It pushed me to move at one hundred miles an hour, to sacrifice sleep and meals if necessary, to push myself past breaking and then piece myself back together in whatever moments of breathing space I could find. Success valued the bottom line at the expense of everything.
When suffering came to my side, it stayed for quite a while. It is still there. And it has shown me the infinite levels above and below.
Suffering revealed that my clients are not just clients but family. They stood behind me and beside me when I was gasping for air. Suffering revealed that my colleagues are not simply partners in business but brothers and sisters in arms. Together, we endured a story that was part nightmare and part fairy tale. Like the Goonies, we stumbled through things that no one else could understand. That journey bonded us forever.
I realized true success is not in the outcome but in the work itself- in the joy of building strategies, in the hours spent piecing together puzzles, in the small triumphs of unraveling a case. It is also in the ability to rest, to let the mind grow still, to allow the body to eat and move and sleep in peace. Without that, I am a damaged vessel.
Suffering taught me that every cell in my body has been laboring for me from the moment of my beginning, striving to survive, to thrive, to live. And every night that I worked until 3AM in the morning and woke up at 6AM in a fog, I betrayed all that dedicated loyal effort by my body to do right by me.
Suffering taught me that success is connection. It is the bond with my colleagues, my clients, my teammates. It is the willingness to stop faking enthusiasm, to stop forcing effort in conversation. Now everything flows from a place of calm authenticity, and that generosity is shared, for me and for the one receiving it. If social interactions are a pressure cooker, then the only way forward is to release that pressure. To arrive breathing- to avoid striving. To meet another’s eyes and be genuinely curious. I want to know people as they truly are. I no longer wish to waste a moment on small talk. And this openness, this hunger to connect, has brought me closer to joy than almost anything else.
Suffering has shown me that all of us are holding hands in this great, strange, beautiful journey called life, each of us trying to do our best and maybe even laugh along the way. That is my philosophy now. I want to be the one holding hands with others, helping them do their best, and sharing the joy of laughter as we walk this path together.
I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
Using anxiety as a fuel, as a shield, and as a weapon to avoid life, love, connection, or success. We are all figuring things out as we move along, clinging to what matters most to us, and trying to shape the world into something we can make sense of. Until we are confronted with our own mortality, we fail to realize how crippling freedom itself can be. Privilege, good health, and freedom can create immense anxiety in the modern person. They present us with too many options, too many choices, too many possible paths. Faced with this, we often spend our time either avoiding decisions or trying to control them too tightly- scrolling endlessly on social media, eating without thought, watching television to fill the silence, avoiding social contact, working until late hours, and pushing sleep aside to feed the addiction to our phones.
We distance ourselves from our spouses, we blame anxiety for why we ignore calls or refuse invitations. And when we do find ourselves surrounded by people, we hide, we fail to connect, we pretend, and then go home depleted, promising never to drain our social battery again. We turn our anxiety into a joke, making light of it, but in doing so we further infect the wound.
The cure to this kind of anxiety is connection. It is showing up to the gathering and daring to reveal too much. It is allowing yourself to be your odd, authentic self. It is facing the truth that yes, life may contain a 1000 contingencies, but your choices will never allow you to drift into a place where you won’t recognize yourself. If you decide what your day, your hour, your morning will look like guided only by your inner heart voice, you will arrive at your life with intention, with love, with generosity, with focus on giving back and connecting with care. You will like your life- very very much.
It begins with language. Instead of saying, “I have to go to this party, this meeting, this event, this work,” you say, “I choose to go. I choose to speak with the people I feel drawn to. I choose to be curious about their lives. I choose to face this day with bravery. I choose to complete this task. I choose to have this overdue conversation. I choose to answer this call.” With this simple easy shift, you are no longer a victim of life. You become its author. And you’re writing a book you really like.
Anxiety is the illness of our modern age, but if we recognized that we all share in it, then every gathering could transform into communion rather than forced laughter. Tell someone a real fear this week. Stop pretending. Admit when you do not understand.
As Viktor Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Choose action to override anxiety. Choose it every day. We are assured of only this single moment, and life is taken quickly. Do not let your anxiety steal from you the one and only life you have been given.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: If you retired tomorrow, what would your customers miss most?
I have a fire in my eyes, in my heart, and in my gut for my clients and my cases. If I could skip into work, I would. That energy comes from a place of deep curiosity, fierce joy, and relentless interest, and our clients feel it.
As life steals time and energy from a person, that childlike spark often fades. Enthusiasm slips away, leaving only obligation. Too many arrive at work heavy with resentment and leave even heavier. So many of our colleagues are burned out, stuck on an assembly line, stamping out work as though they are punching a time card. Defense attorneys in particular often confine themselves to coloring inside the lines.
Our firm was built to reject that mold. Our brand, our philosophy, our spirit is to create our own canvas, to design our own palette, and to make each case its own original work of lawyering. Work is simply a piece of life, another moment in the day- why should it be stripped of laughter, joy, and connection? That is what we bring to the table.
Every case is a mystery to be unraveled, a puzzle scattered with clues and fragments of evidence. Our role is to bring our clients into that mystery, to explore it with them, and to choose the adventure together. To us, law is not only a profession, it is an art form. Art has its science, its substance, and its boundaries, just as law has its case law, its statutes, its judges. But the art is in the weaving, taking the constants and the immovable pieces and threading them together into an extraordinary outcome.
I believe our clients feel that. They sense the artistry, the energy, the curiosity, and the joy. That is the soul of our firm. That’s our soul- my soul.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://salehiboyer.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/salehiboyer?igsh=aHl3dDl3amx1YjNn&utm_source=qr
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/salehi-boyer-lavigne-lombana-pa/
- Other: https://www.law.com/dailybusinessreview/2021/07/26/once-homeless-miami-attorney-tanaz-salehi-now-runs-an-insurance-defense-firm/?slreturn=20250821132345
Image Credits
All photos were taken by myself or family.
