Hi, Lawdopers - I’m curious: If you’ve handled divorces in your practice, what was it like? Was it just another family law matter, or did you think someone was going to shoot you? My understanding is that people involved in divorces tend to get very emotional, and some of that emotion is directed towards the lawyers.
NaDL but; it’s bad.
You have significantly understated the extremes of emotion that divorce lawyers face. Lawyers themselves tend not to become the victims, at least directly. The common outcome is mid-divorce murder-suicide. Dad drives the kids to secluded spot. Well, you’ve heard some stories.
The figure I hear is 9 months. That’s the average time in divorce practice before a client dies violently as a result. Lawyers are occasionally targeted and frequently threatened, but it’s not the main stress.
I moved from criminal practice to juvenile law practice to education law and high conflict family law with a focus on custody disputes. This seems like an odd progression but in many ways I just followed the children.
It is in the nature of a calling in some ways, that must be said. There are a large number of lawyers who break out in hives at the very thought and they should certainly not practice family law. There are also a number of lawyers who are, IME, part of the problem. If you want to practice family law and be happy you must be competent and you must also be able to establish and maintain a high degree of client control, and you need to expect that and to some extent impose it on the other side.
A nicer way to put this is: you need to maintain good boundaries with your clients, opposing counsel, opposing and other parties, and also the court. Probably because I came in from criminal law I found this not to be very difficult. You also need to develop an extensive list of other professionals – shrinks, social workers et al – and use them. Trying to be all things to all people ends badly.
Of course some of the emotion is directed at the lawyers: we place ordinary people in an untenable situation every day. we take everything they care about, material and nonmaterial, and then we say, “eh, how it’ll come out is a crapshoot”. This kind of uncertainty is untenable for most people. But no, mostly the biggest threat is not getting shot. Mostly the biggest threat is getting a bar complaint. I never actually had one but I knew a lot of people who did, for the weirdest reasons imaginable.
The only times I was threatened was when I was functioning as Guardian ad Litem (twice); but I was only appointed in high conflict cases so I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, as Superchicken said. You don’t have to specialize in high conflict cases and regular divorces are mostly uneventful.
The best way to find out if you will like it is to associate with folks who do it all the time and follow their lead. Most will, IME, be happy to give you a hand.
I have been doing matrimonial law almost exclusively over the last 12 years. What Marienee said.
You are dealing with stressed out people and you do cop it a bit. I’m suprised sometimes at how clients (seemingly) keep it together as much as they do. Having said that, I do have an unlisted number as a result of some threats I’ve received. Mostly, it has become increasingly more civil over the years I have been doing it, though. This would be because things have leant toward mediation and away from court, at least in Australia. There is a lot of pressure on parties to settle and most end up doing that.
Depressing.
The first rule you learn–taught to me by a family lawyer long before House, M.D. came on the air, is “everybody lies…even more than the usual client.” The issues are intensely personal, so there are more reasons to not be truthful.
I did only a few family law cases in my practice, since our firm didn’t do much of that. However, they were all rich people, and all of them were spending themselves into the poorhouse, all in the name of using their kids as a weapon against their ex-spouse.
Usually, we were not the first lawyers on the case. Typically, clients had already burned through multiple lawyers by the time they came to the lawyer I worked with. This was because these people were naturally antagonistic. The whole reason they got divorced, I surmised, was that they were probably angry and contentious people from the start, who could never let anything go. Eventually, they fought with their lawyers and moved on.
Most people have the picture of family lawyers as egging on this sort of behavior. I think some of the bottom-feeders do. But the partner I worked with and I spent a lot of our time trying to talk our clients into seeing reason on issues. This usually did not go over well.
EVERY SINGLE CHILD associated with the cases I worked had been in long-term psychotherapy, and all of them were taking medications for depression and anxiety. The worst was the 12 year old I met who had been in therapy since he was 4. The kid was seriously messed up, and why? His mom and dad spent every single day on the phone, screaming at each other, and faxing angry letters back and forth. They fought the custody battle for eight years because they just couldn’t let go of their hate for each other.
I now have a totally different view of people who are getting divorced with kids. If they don’t put their child’s well-being at the very top of the list, and figure out how to amicably co-parent with their ex, I have no respect for them. People who rush right into a new relationship, and don’t do their utmost to spend the maximum amount of time with their kids, I have no respect for them. Because I’ve seen what happens when the parents put their own desires first. The kid gets screwed up. Every single time.