At first I thought I could litigate as long as I was respectful but I soon learned that the children (and parents) still were damaged by even respectful litigation. I learned many other tools for resolving conflict in divorces.
Some of the children bumped up against the legal system. Through them, I learned about restorative justice, an approach to healing the harm of crime for both victims and offenders. I came across holistic law and designed my law practice to care for not only the legal needs but the emotional, financial and spiritual needs of my clients and their families. My multidisciplinary staff was considered cutting-edge and we held support groups in the elementary schools for children whose parents were divorced.
It has been several years since I was focused on children. My youngest daughter is 26. I've moved into areas of law that are not focused on children, but the roots of my work remain connected to my role as a mother.
You had me at "seven kids." So, your experience - as a mother, guardian, and going through a divorce yourself - pushed you up against the constraints of law, as contact sport. What was it like, building your holistic practice? I imagine that potential clients were wowed by this more humane, more collaborative approach. Did you get flack from more other lawyers for being cutting edge?
Clients had mixed reactions. At first, most of them came in expecting an adversarial approach that focused on their legal issues. Initially, they wanted me to express their anger through the court system. It was a mutual education process. Clients learned that their emotions were important but didn't have to be acted upon. I learned to talk to them about their long term plans - e.g.what relationship did they want to create with their ex? I talked with them about the well-being of their children: did they want to be able to dance at their daughter's wedding? attend their son's graduation? take their child to the first day of school? I helped them put their legal matter in the context of the rest of their lives and to address it more holistically.
Lawyers were also mixed. Some looked at me like I had arrived from another planet and sometimes even laughed. Some attacked my ideas. Many said that the idea of peacemaking appealed to them but they didn't think their clients wanted it. Several confided in me, pulling me aside in back rooms of the courthouse, making excuses to stop by my office.
In 2000, after experimenting with different ways of practicing law and different ways of talking about it for five years, I wrote a web site and called it Renaissance Lawyer. At the time, it was over 400 pages of information. Basically, I wrote a book and put it on line. Those were still the early days of the Internet and I wasn't sure anyone would see the site but it seemed important to collect the information into one place. Over 100,000 visitors came to the web site the first year. I was invited to speak and several bar journals published articles about the new approaches to law practice.
I should point out that I wasn't the only one doing this holistic experimentation in law. As I became more public, I found many lawyers who had previously thought they were alone. In 1999, I attended a conference of the International Alliance of Holistic Lawyers and in 2000, conferences on Creative Problem-Solving and Therapeutic Jurisprudence. I used the web site to spotlight these approaches and began to network. I held teleclasses and conference calls. Renaissance Lawyer Society emerged as a membership organization with 100 founding members in 2001.
I saw the potential of lawyers to transform the world. Law is a foundational institution and lawyers are smart, hard-working, problem-solvers. If we could harness that intelligence, anything was possible. I was in a course called Power and Contribution offered by Landmark Education. Our assignment was to create a promise for the world, something seemingly impossible. I promised to transform the legal profession, to have lawyers see themselves as peacemakers, problem-solvers and healers of conflicts, being agents of transformation with their clients.
Let's pause here. Kim has much more to tell us when we return. I hope you'll join us.
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