War, divorce, and the pungent scent of skunk

Feeling the pinch of poverty as a young solo practitioner, fresh out of law school and green as a gourd, I was more than happy to take her divorce case and the healthy retainer that came with it. The retainer insured that I could continue to pay rent on the modest office space I was renting, and to be able to pay bills for that month.

It didn’t take but one meeting with my client to realize that I would be advocating for one side of a bitter dispute that was as much about me being a hired gun to help my client punish her husband. She brought both her children to my office the first time we spoke.

The youngest was maybe one year old and crawling all over my office floor and under my desk. The other was about four, and coloring on a professional certificate of mine that I had yet to frame and hang on my office wall. With tears streaming down her flushed cheeks, my client said, “I hate him, I hate him, I hate him,” rocking back and forth.

Opposing counsel put the matter in perspective for me. We were sitting in the courtroom waiting for the judge to emerge from chambers to preside over the hearing for contempt against my client that opposing counsel had filed a few days before. The money would run out sooner or later for our clients, and it made the most sense to put aside the squabbling and discontent for as long as it took to get the people divorced and out of the courthouse door. I asked my colleague whether there was any chance of a quick resolution to the case. “No,” he said, starring me straight in the eyes. “This is war.”

There was no doubt but that I was a very young lawyer, bumbling my way around the courtroom. I sensed that opposing counsel saw this as an opportunity to box around a baby lawyer. Though I did my best to disguise it, I was intimidated.

Our case was called. Husband took the stand and explained how his wife refused to bring the kids to him the week before, as required by the temporary order. My client took the stand and explained her lack of compliance as being a misunderstanding as to the meaning of the temporary order and the visitation schedule. The judge overruled the motion for contempt, and my client was free to leave. Opposing counsel stood at the court’s pronouncement.

“How can you rule that she is not in contempt?” he asked loudly and rhetorically, pointing at my client angrily.

“I made my ruling, counselor,” bellowed the judge. “If you don’t like it, you can file your appeal.”

“I will,” said my adversary. He never did.

I hustled my client out of the courtroom and into a stairwell where we conferred, until my adversary appeared. He got in the middle of us, and pointed in my client’s face. “You know you lied in there.”

I slapped my adversary’s hand out of my client’s face as hard as I could, grabbed a wad of shirt and tie, and shoved him against the wall, and reminded him that if he had something to relay to my client, he had better do it through me.

That experience was a rude awakening for me, and exemplifies the adversarial nature of the way human’s tend to resolve their differences. Instead of being able to set aside egos for long enough to take stock of a present dispute, and collaboratively extrapolate out into the future what would be in the best interest of all involved, financially, culturally and psychologically speaking, aided and guided, if needed, by professionals as resolvers of disputes and peace seekers, we opt to wage battle, and waste vital energy and maybe lots of money on hired guns. The end result is that parties only end up shooting themselves in the foot, and lawyers perpetuate a system that fails people, makes them miserable and ruins their lives.

A feeling of disillusionment and despair about the legal profession, and the people we serve, set up in me that day, and I have not completely shaken it ever since.

Eventually the money did run out, and I happily withdrew from participation in my client’s war.

A few months later I ran into opposing counsel in the courthouse and asked how the case was going. “It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We reached a settlement. My client got to keep one child, and mom got to keep another. They each relinquished their parental rights to the one they gave up.”

Upon hearing that I felt a profound sense of bitterness. Mom and dad weren’t violent criminals. It’s just that they hated each other so much, they each were willing to give up a child and run the risk of never seeing their own again, rendering two faultless siblings estranged.

Nobody won. It didn’t have to be that way, and opposing counsel and I didn’t help. But that is how the adversarial system works–and how angry skunks resolve disputes.

How many wars are waged, globally, regionally, legally, digitally and personally, to the point where everyone involved starts looking and smelling like a skunk? And to what end? Who wins what in a valueless pseudo-death match, wherein all that is salvageable gets pissed away?

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