Last week I began transforming my law practice, again.

I’ve been a litigator for 24 years.   In the popular imagination, that word more than half-rhymes with “alligator”.  New acquaintances have often remarked, “Gee, you don’t SEEM like a litigator,” meaning I don’t have obvious scales or a dorsal fin.  During my first years in the profession, I struggled with this dissonance myself, putting on my custom-tailored snakeskin every morning and shaking it off as soon as I came home at night.  I was working for others, and I felt I had to try to emulate what I heard as their hiss.  We escaped to Micronesia for a time, and that excursion brought our children, and documentary filmmaking, into our lives.  None of that emerging beauty seemed compatible with the crazy, wasteful, posturing business of litigation, and eventually I began plotting ways to become one of those “recovering lawyers” who ditch their wingtips for Birkenstocks and never practice again.  Which I did — or thought I did — in 2002.

It lasted a year.  The migration back to law wasn’t just about money, though we were indeed going broke.  Rather, during the time I was “not practicing,” I found myself drawn into the nastiest conflicts of my surroundings, wrestling with misunderstandings and bad actors, pulled back to the rivers of human spleen and bile that flow through the legal system.  I looked more closely at those waters and saw clotted trauma, treasure smashed to shards, hopes sunk beyond hope’s reach.  I watched people wading in after their losses, or shoved into the deepest places by ones they once trusted as family.  And I watched lawyers, diving after clients’ pearls, hauling clients to shore, fending off adversaries who would hold clients under until they drown.   Of course, the gyre fed sharks and gators too – fat, slimy and devious.  But others were lifeguards and boatmen, dam builders and salvage artists.  The best of them whacked the serpents on the snout, rescued both their clients and some share of their lost objects, and sequenced the recovered bits and pieces into a story that could be held up into the light, a kind of truth.

I realized too that my clients’ need to gather story as a means of recovering from loss mirrored my own.   I’d spent years sorting and sequencing shards and treasures of personal history: my mother’s private furies and public glories; the handyman rapist who tore my childhood and swore me to secrecy; the raised voices of my parents through my bedroom wall.  I understood clients’ need to live for a time facing backwards, sifting the ashes of a burned house, even years after the fire.   So I found a partner, and we started our own firm.  I succeeded for some clients and failed others.  It’s been a good run.

But ten years on, it’s time to change again.  My new decision is again partly about enforced circumstance, as I confront physical needs for more sleep and less breath-holding.   But it’s also the completion of a transition already underway.  I’ve been mediating cases part-time for a couple of years — working with Latino immigrant clients who need a Spanish-speaking mediator, people caught in small-scale commercial disputes, and couples struggling with circular eddies of post-divorce disagreement.   Some rightly distrust the unreliable promises of law.  Others have suffered and spent in litigation at least as much as the losses that first brought them to the courthouse door.   In mediation, I urge people to consider the option of pivoting away from their past and refocusing on their future.  A cliché of dispute resolution is that the disputants have to “let go” of their pain in order to “move on.”  Many experience this demand as an invitation to defeat, to add yet another loss to a losing history.   But I look for ways they can grab hold of a new life yet to be lived and emerge stronger and wiser, not hiding the scars of history, but wearing them openly as badges of experience.

As I told my colleagues in my firm of my new path, I felt acute pain at the prospect of renouncing a craft I’ve honed for almost a quarter-century.  But it’s time for me to take my own advice, and pivot towards my own future.  There’s light in that direction.