As I was preparing to write and send out my next blog, I realized that I would be sending it out today, the 23rd of June, which would have been my father’s 100th birthday. As I practiced law with my Dad for ten years, and learned most of my Courtroom skills by his side, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on him and how I came to be practicing as I do. As an aside, and out of curiosity, I just pulled my grandfather’s 1914 law diary off of my shelf to see if he’d made note of my dad’s birth. Sure enough, he had. As a study in both contrast and change, I’m attaching his diary notation, alongside my newest Consilium® Divorce Consultation card.
It seems like only yesterday when I would be leaving the office for Court and my Dad would call out “come back with your shield or on it”. When a powerful adversary was on the other side of a case, he would say “you can’t sharpen knives on butter”. As for ethics, he told me “if you have to ask the question, the answer is “No”. He told me those words had been told to him by his father, and he passed them on to me in the spirit of summing up all you needed to remember about honesty, integrity, and compassion when handling other people’s money and problems.
When I became pregnant with my oldest child, my father wondered whether I might want to stay at home and leave the practice of law. I didn’t want to do that with my first (I still had too much to learn about lawyering). With my second, I cut back to part-time. With my third, he said to me “My father made this practice work for him. I made it work for me. You need to figure out how to make it work for you”. It was his blessing as it were for me to reframe, revise and rethink. I am grateful for his words, his lessons, his mentorship, his inspiration and his encouragement for me to “think outside the box”.