20 for the Next 20: Sarah Love, Lung Rose Voss Wagnild
With her background in psychology and strong leadership skills, this law firm partner helps solve thorny construction and real-estate conflicts.
Sarah Love
Partner, Lung Rose Voss Wagnild
The first to recognize Sarah Love’s potential as an attorney was probably her mother. That’s how Love remembers it.
“My mom likes to say I was an opinionated child,” she says with a laugh. “So yeah, I think it was always in the back of my head.”
Although she first earned a psychology degree in Indiana, Love changed tracks and was admitted to UH’s Richardson School of Law.
“I think law and counseling or psychology are very similar in some ways because you’re helping people, you’re giving them options and kind of talking through their issues,” Love says.
“But I think on the counseling side, you really have to leave it up to people to make their own decisions. … On the law side you educate your clients, but I think you have more of a role in what’s going to happen, how it’s going to happen.”
Love, 45, was born in Texas; her Air Force family moved often and when she was 9, they were assigned to Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i has been home ever since.
She joined the law firm of Lung Rose Voss Wagnild in 2006 and became a partner in 2014. Her area of expertise – the legal aspects of the construction industry – has proved to be compelling for her.
“The industry is just full of really great people to work with and it’s interesting,” she says.
Because so much of the work lands in private arbitration, Love says, specific cases are difficult to talk about publicly. But generally, she says, the more Honolulu shifts from an isolated “sleepy town” into a globalized economy, the more the construction industry here encounters the same kinds of conflicts as other major cities.
At the same time, she has been drawn into the statewide conversation over Hawai‘i’s housing shortage, and was part of the panel at a Hawaii Business event last year on affordable housing.
Love just finished her term as president of the Building Industry Association of Hawaii, where she was succeeded by Hinano Nahinu of Pacific Source, the building materials company. BIA Hawaii fell into debt because it was unable to host its fundraising home shows during the pandemic, but Love managed the sale of BIA property that helped fill the budgetary gap, Nahinu says.
“Sarah is an exceptional leader, because of her ability to navigate the association during its most challenging period. … She got things headed in the right direction during 2024.”
