Archive for What is a peacemaking attorney?
“What is a peacemaking attorney?” Someone asked me that question the other day, and I was drawn to my own personal experience as an attorney. When I started practicing law some 27 years ago, I thought of myself as a modern day gunslinger or “hired gun.”
As a hired gun, I was using the law either to force someone to do what my client wanted that person to do or I was protecting my client from being forced to do something someone else wanted them to do that they did not want to do.
As I matured in my practice, I began to see lawyers as “conflict managers,” as apposed to mere hired guns. Transactional lawyers managed potential conflict by drafting agreements in a way that anticipated future conflict and allocated risk among the parties to the agreement, and litigators managed actual current conflict as they argued with each other over their respective clients’ rights and responsibilities and they asked judges, juries and/or arbitrators to resolve the identified conflicts among their respective clients.
I have since come to think of lawyers as having the potential, at least, to be “conflict healers,” helping their clients to resolve conflict in a manner that is for the good of all without focusing on winners and losers and the need to dominate and avoid domination in order to prevail.
I haven’t used the expression “peacemaking attorney” before now, although it seems to fit. I like to think of myself as a “transformational lawyer,” one who teaches his clients to transform their legal problems into opportunities for personal growth and positive change. I do that by inviting them to take 100% responsibility for their lives, (to use a Jack Canfield expression).
I ask my clients to choose to believe that the legal situation that they find themselves in is the result of choices that they have made in the past and that when they made those choices they were doing the best they possibly could, given the resources available to them at the time.
I also ask my clients to believe that everyone else who has been involved in their lives and in their legal problems has also done the best they possibly could, given the resources available to them.
Now, they are all free to make new choices that may better serve all of them to achieve their respective goals and to offer others in their lives resources that may have not been available to them before. This way the parties to a legal problem can achieve their goals in a way that is compatible with the other parties’ achieving their goals.
From this perspective, it has been my experience that conflict can be resolved in a synergistic fashion and peace can often be made effortlessly, contributing to the welfare of all involved. Everyone benefits. I call what I do a coach approach to the practice of law, but I don’t think that the name is so important.
Today I will call myself a “peacemaking attorney,” as well as a “transformational lawyer.†Crafting synergistic solutions to legal problems sounds to me like a great way to make peace. What do you think?