Why I came back to law

Times are changing, inevitably

When I was admitted, nearly thirty years ago, the fax machine was the most urgent object in the office. Documents went to court in a courier's satchel, briefs went to counsel tied in pink ribbon, and a client who wanted to know where their matter was up to picked up the phone and waited while someone went to find the file.

The law has moved under my feet more than once since then. In 2006 parliament introduced a presumption of equal shared parental responsibility, and for the best part of two decades family lawyers spent a remarkable amount of time explaining to parents that equal responsibility for decisions did not mean equal time with the children. A great many of them didn't believe us. The 2023 amendments removed the presumption, and I suspect some of those same parents still don't believe that either.

What hasn't changed is the person across the desk.

Brad Watts, who wrote another article in this series, ‘Long way to the top: how I ended up with the harbour view I didn’t want’ called it kitchen-table lawyering, and he is right that the law is about people. The people who come to see me now are frightened of the same things my first clients were frightened of: losing the house, losing time with the children, being judged by a stranger in a courtroom, and running out of money before the matter runs out of steps.

Slip slidin' away

Partway through my career I left family law. I spent a number of years in senior human resources roles with large Australian organisations in entertainment and healthcare. People sometimes ask whether that was a detour. I think it was the most useful part of my training.

HR is, among other things, the business of telling people what they don't want to hear. Restructures, redundancies, performance processes, the end of a role someone had built their sense of themselves around. Do that work for long enough and one pattern becomes impossible to miss. How a person is told determines what they do next. A redundancy handled carelessly produces a claim. The same redundancy, handled with candour and a little time, usually produces a person who is unhappy and then moves on.

Family law runs on exactly the same mechanism. A client who feels unheard by their own lawyer, rushed through the first meeting or blindsided by advice that should have come months earlier is far more likely to dig in, and a client who digs in costs everyone more, the children included. I came back to practice convinced that a large share of the litigation I had seen in my early years was driven less by the merits than by how people had been treated along the way.

I also learnt to see law firms the way an HR director sees them, which is not flatteringly. By the standards of most large employers, our profession does several things badly. We promote our best technical lawyers into managing people and give them no training to do it. We tolerate conduct from high billers that would end a career in most other workplaces. We treat exhaustion as evidence of commitment, and we lose good people in their late twenties and early thirties and then wonder aloud at conferences where they went.

Homeward bound

Family law kept pulling me back, mostly because it is the work I do best and the work I care most about. When I founded Veritas Family Law, I built it around what HR had taught me. Separation is a legal event, and it is also a financial and an emotional one, so we work alongside financial planners, mortgage brokers, conveyancers, mediators and counsellors. A property settlement that leaves a client unable to refinance, or a parenting arrangement nobody can actually live with, is not a good result, whatever the orders say.

I also hold a view, and I would defend it against most managing partners I know, that the way a firm treats its own people shows up in the way it treats its clients. Clients can tell. They can tell when the person answering the phone is frightened of getting something wrong, and when the solicitor running their file hasn't had a weekend off in a month.

Age and wisdom

There is a particular perspective that only comes with time. I have been practising long enough that children whose parents separated in my early years are now adults, some with children and separations of their own. Watching families across that span changes how you weigh things. A property dispute fought hard over a few percentage points can look like a victory in the year it is decided and a very poor bargain fifteen years later, when the people involved still can't stand in the same room at a graduation. Some matters have to be fought, and I fight them. I am less persuaded than I once was that most of them do.

If I had advice for younger lawyers, it would be this. Leaving the law for a while is not a failure, and coming back with something you didn't have before can make you better at it. Learn how people behave under pressure, because the law will only take you so far without that. And look after the colleagues beside you, since they will outlast most of your files.

Nearly thirty years on, I still sit across the table from people having the worst year of their lives. I came back because that table is where I am most useful.