The Wrong Area of Law

Most lawyers avoid family law like the plague. Some are hobbyists, practitioners who focus on a different area of law – criminal or real estate law or something – and take on the odd domestic case here and there thinking it will be easy because it’s “only a custody case” or “just a divorce.” This always frustrated me. Family law has a whole set of statutes and case law all of its own. There are complexities that you won’t just know from what you remember from law school 20 years ago and it’s an area of law that changes – often dramatically – every single legislative session. And all this is secondary to the fact that it is an area of law that affects the very heart of people’s lives – things like how their children will be raised, how often they will see them, what will happen to the home and belongings they’ve worked a lifetime to have and enjoy. Other than criminal law, where a person’s liberty and freedom is at risk, family law affects people on a day-to-day basis more than any other discipline.

With my success with domestic violence work and my desire to help people on a broader scale, family law seemed like a reasonable next step after the non-profit for which I worked for 2 years. Before taking cases at the firm, I did an in-depth study of the body of law that covers domestic cases. My partner and I went to trainings, met with experienced family law attorneys and soaked up all the knowledge and wisdom we could. I literally read the annotated family law code – a volume of very densely packed information – to make sure I had a sense of all the types of cases we might encounter.

I think I was good at family law. I have a calm disposition by nature, which helped in the often-dramatic arena of divorce court and with contested custody matters. When cases went to trial, my experience litigating gave me a little bit of a leg up on other new-ish attorneys who worked for larger firms and rarely saw the courtroom. Most family cases settle, though. I sincerely believe in the benefits of negotiation, particularly in family law cases. Who is better equipped to forge a set of rules a family must follow – the people who will actually be living under the rules or a judge who meets the parties for a very brief time and only hears a fraction of the evidence that exists about what their lives are like pre- and post-separation? I also believe that with creativity, finesse, and careful drafting, a comprehensive agreement can provide a fair, agreeable, and stable framework that will allow the family to settle into their new lives as quickly and painlessly as possible. Particularly with parties in high-conflict cases, having the rules written out can spare everyone the drama of having to negotiate simple things like pick-up times for child access Every. Single. Time.

A big problem I faced as a family lawyer was that I became too invested in the outcomes of my cases. One of the good reasons to have an attorney represent you is that they are an objective party who can argue your case zealously, but without the entanglements of emotion that come from your personal history with your opponent. It sounds counter-intuitive, but in family law, it is a liability to care too much about your client or their case. I struggled with that in every case. Since I only accepted cases where I believed my party had a meritorious claim, I tended to like them. Not necessarily want to have them over for Thanksgiving and become BFFs, but I appreciated their commitment to their kids’ best interests and typically thought they were nice people. This made the job even more stressful than it normally would be.

I would get angry at opposing parties when a client would tell me some reprehensible thing their ex had done. I would get frustrated and sad when a non-custodial parent bailed on a visit, leaving a poor child waiting at the window, refusing to take off their coat because Daddy must just be stuck in traffic because he promised he would really come this time. I would literally lay awake some weekends, anxiety-ridden from wondering if, when my client went to pick up his kids from his ex-wife, she again refused to let them go even though it was his scheduled weekend with them. And I absolutely could not do child sex abuse cases. After my second one, I made a law firm policy that I didn’t even go to intake interviews if that was the subject of the case (my partner had a similar policy about animal abuse). I have always found the subject infuriating and repugnant, but having two young kids at home, I just couldn’t handle it. My last child sex case had me crying myself to sleep for weeks and having terrible nightmares for months. Even the domestic violence work I’d done at WLC had been easier to take.

The details of the family cases also frustrated me greatly. Our little firm represented a lot of DV victims for the first couple years, but over time, it felt like we were dealing with more with petty people who were arguing over minutia rather than focusing on what was best for their kids. I understand that it’s an emotional time and certain things feel like matters of principle, but how can you spend 6 months arguing over who gets the stupid entertainment center while your kids’ custody and visitation is in limbo? Especially when with all the money you have spent on lawyers’ fees, you could have gone back to IKEA and bought 20 of the damn things?

The lengths people who once claimed to love each other will go to in order to destroy each other is exhausting and demoralizing. By the end, I mostly continued to take cases in an effort to protect as many kids as I could from being collateral damage in their parents’ missions to harm each other.

Next time, Why I Stopped Practicing Law, pt III