What do you think is the biggest danger your clients face?
Last week I was at the Resolution YRes conference for young family lawyers.
One of the (excellent) speakers was talking about the manipulation of data in family law. Changing the content of your ex’s messages to make them look worse in proceedings. Cloning voices. Tracking phones.
It was enough to keep you awake at night!
It got me thinking about the role of the family lawyer (and lawyers in general). And their conflicted role.
You see, you get people like me talking about how, if you work with your client’s feelings in such a way that they feel heard and help them to understand their ex’s feelings better then you can protect your clients from themselves and their hot enraged feelings in the moment.
You know, all those times your client decides they want to post nasty content about their ex on social media.
Or they want to send that message telling their ex not to give little Priya toast for tea for the 10th time in a row.
You can help them to refrain and get in touch with their longer-term priorities and values. Rather than reacting from their baser instincts all the time.
Then you get people whose duty it is to talk at these conferences about how to protect your clients from their ex. From their ex’s lawyer. Like in the presentation I mentioned.
That is also a crucial part of the job. Of course, it is. No client wants a naïve family lawyer who skips around singing ‘The hills are alive with the Sound of Music’ thinking everyone else is lovely and wonderful. All the while their nefarious counterpart is gaining an advantage over them in proceedings.
But, the problem is this. Yes, there are all these advancements in technology. Yes, it gives us all the collywobbles.
But I think, *just as big a danger as the actual possibility of nefarious activity is our client’s suspicion and fear about such nefarious activity*.
When I was a family lawyer, I worked with clients who were convinced something dodgy was going on; whether it was through technology or their ex hiding money in secret bank accounts. In some cases, they were right. In many, they weren’t.
And so I see it as the duty of family lawyers to, yes, protect your client from the dangers ‘out there’. But, just as important is to protect them from themselves. Because there is as much danger to be found in going down expensive rabbit holes (incurring huge legal bills and then having to cope with the fact that you never find an answer and/or such investigations hugely increase the levels of conflict) to the danger you’re in if you don’t go down such rabbit holes.
We must talk about these glaring conflicts. If we don’t give our young lawyers some guidance on how to deal with them then we will find their wellbeing dribbling down the drain.
What do you think? Am I talking claptrap? Or do you agree that the role of the lawyer is often to walk this tightrope?