It’s a little hard for me to believe, but it’s now getting close to 25 years since my “ah, ha!” moment—the moment I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my legal career. It came after hearing about an attorney in Minnesota named Stu Webb. He was taking a radically new approach to legal representation in divorce, calling it collaborative law. Instinctively, I knew that what Stu and his colleagues in Minneapolis were doing aligned with who I am, in a way a courtroom practice never would. I had spent fifteen years as a lawyer working in state and federal courts and litigating cases, but in 2001, I began a drastic change in the way I practiced law.

Since that time, I’ve devoted my professional life to promoting collaborative divorce as an alternative to more adversarial approaches and to helping individuals in the collaborative process move through the hard transition of divorce. As the first attorney in North Carolina to have a law practice focused exclusively on collaborative divorce, I’ve successfully handled as many or more collaborative divorce cases as any attorney in the state.

It’s been incredibly rewarding to help hundreds and hundreds of couples avoid the nastiness of an adversarial divorce, avoid lingering bitterness and resentment, and, most importantly, avoid ongoing conflict between parents--the type of conflict that can so negatively impact children long after the divorce is over. As a trainer and speaker in dozens of Bar Association workshops and seminars on collaborative law over the years, it’s also been rewarding to help develop the “next generation” of attorneys who will practice collaborative law into the future. Most of all, it’s been rewarding to journey with my clients as they move through their divorces. Divorce is an unsettling and painful path. I’ve been grateful to be able to offer a divorce process that facilitates movement toward a stable future for both partners, with the possibility of healing and wholeness for each of them.

Thank you for your interest in me. If you’d like to learn more about divorce or the collaborative divorce process or if you need an attorney to represent you in the collaborative divorce process, please feel free to contact me.