To infinity and beyond

A confession.

I used to get quite frustrated when I worked with people without imagination. The kind of person who needed to see all the tools in her or his box before she/he could proceed with hammering a nail in the wall, drafting a proposal to settle a family law case fairly, or whatever the task was.

I’m suspicious of straight-line thinking.

I distrust those who say you have to do it a certain way.

I don’t agree that Lawyers should stick to the path of the law and work out easy formulas.

Not being in the habit of quoting Winston Churchill, something that he did say about his work as an artist has always meant a lot to me. He loved the blank page, and all the limitless possibilities that it invited for the artist.

And I think of my profession as a lawyer in exactly the same way, someone with a skill set and almost limitless freedom as to how to deploy it to help a client.

Obviously there is no such thing as a typical family law client. We’re all different. All of our cases are unique.

I think that there’s a lot to be gained by listening, in particular to tone of voice rather than necessarily what is said by a client.

Looking back at the clients we’ve had over the last year at our family law clinic in West Brompton, I am hearing the emotions and concerns that lie behind the clients’ tone of voice.

As our family law clinic at Dads House is so often the last chance saloon for our clients, one is attuned to clients sounding lost, lacking guidance and lacking knowledge and confidence.

The reason that artificial intelligence is never going to take over the practice of family law is that, at the moment at least, computers cannot gauge a tone of voice and cannot layer legal advice with sensitivity to the voice being heard.

Deploying the fusion composed of our knowledge of law and our empathy, we are sensitive to any need that our clients have for counselling or care for their well-being. Obviously lawyers are not counsellors, at least not many of them are, but we have antennae that can point clients in the right direction.

Surely also the appreciation of a client’s emotional concerns dictates the way in which we provide our advice, and the direction that the advice will take our clients in.

So what’s the point of advising an aggressive strategy to meet aggression, simply to show strength? If it comes at the price of tearing the family apart.

Aren’t we instead going to find time to direct our advice towards strategies which are married to the client’s ultimate objective?

And what if we as lawyers mistrust the client’s objective, and want to challenge it? The age, maturity and experience of a family lawyer is often key here, because it provides the ability to showcase the lawyer’s own vision of potential family harmony.

It’s a tightrope though, because obviously Lawyers should not be in the business of imposing their own paragon of life.

This is what I mean when I talk about Lawyers applying a blend of skills towards fulfilment of an objective.

And it’s the art of the possible. There is no acceptable alternative.

Simon Bruce - Supervising Solicitor, London, 30 May 2021