After growing up in California, attorney Daniel A. Gillespie went to college in Virginia. Before his second year of college, he joined the Marine Corps Reserve. Later after joining the Army he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky. As a paralegal he learned the highly specialized area of military criminal law, before joining the Army reserves. While finishing college and spending time in the Army reserves as a paralegal, he was deployed several times. While serving in a special operations unit in Iraq, he spent time working in international operations law with the Army civil affairs. Upon returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom, he finished his undergraduate degree in Social Science before attending law school at Regent University in Virginia Beach. While in law school, he worked primarily with small firms in the area of family law and litigation.

Upon graduation from law school he was accepted into the highly acclaimed LLM in Trial Advocacy program at Temple University in Philadelphia. Deferring it for a year, he worked for a small firm in Maryland handling contract litigation, estate litigation, and civil RICO cases. In early 2010, after completing his LLM in Trial Advocacy, he opened The Gillespie Law Firm in downtown Knoxville.

After many years of successful practice in Knoxville, Daniel and his wife and daughter spent some time in Charlotte, NC area in order to help begin a congregation.  When that was completed, they moved back to TN to the Memphis area.  Where he opened his second practice focusing on helping people solve their problems.