Predominately the staple of my practice is a divorce practice, or actually it’s really family law. Because family law encompasses divorce, it encompasses adoptions, it encompasses child custody and child maintenance, and maintenance for a spouse of somebody. So there’s a lot of facets to family law. So I do family law. I do bankruptcy because it is really a tangent to family law because a lot of times people who are getting divorced have financial issues and sometimes the bankruptcy aspect sometimes solves their divorce issue, because nobody wants to walk away from a marriage with $50,000 worth of debt. And sometimes it’s not fair for that to happen, people need a new start. Sometimes bankruptcy associated with a divorce is how everybody gets a new start. And then the other thing that I do is I do estate planning and probate work. The probate work is where you go to court and you take the assets of an estate and they get distributed essentially.
Well when people come in the first thing is you generally you got to let them talk because they have a story to tell you and they want to tell somebody their story. And you have to develop the patience and you develop the ability to listen to their stories. Sometimes you have to try and keep them on point of their story, but they want to tell a story. So I find that the best thing to do to start off with is to let them tell their story. Then, try not to pepper them with questions while they’re telling their story, but then as the lawyer, I know which parts of their story are tangential to what we’re trying to solve and I know which parts of their story are material to it. So then you go back and you try to drill down into the things that are material and you explain to them why your issue with, say it’s a woman, you explain to them the issue with why “let’s not worry right now about the fact that your husband is five minutes late to pick up the child every day ”you say to the person, “you’re right it shouldn’t be like that, but that’s not the biggest issue we have right now. Let’s focus on the big issue.” And that’s how you ultimately get the client to go ahead, and you both get to where your goals are the same in the case. Because one of the things that has to happen and ultimately is the lawyer and the client have to see the case from the same perspective and have the same goals. If I have the goal to get you divorced and get you out of debt and your goal is to, and the client’s goal is to, and the third one is to not let the father ever see the child, well that’s we don’t really mesh in that. And that’s not something that I’m going to be able to do for you.