The Letter I Wish Someone Had Written Me at the Start

Dear Louise at twenty-five —

You have just completed your articles (a relic of the past). You are competent, keen, and under the impression that the most important thing about family law is knowing it well. You are partly right, and partly quite wrong, and the gap between those positions will take you a decade to fully understand.

Let me try to compress that decade.

The legal problem is rarely the whole problem

You will spend the first few years of your practice becoming technically proficient — mastering the Family Law Act, the property settlement framework, the procedural requirements of the Federal Circuit and Family Court, the mechanics of parenting orders. That technical proficiency is genuinely necessary. It is not sufficient.

The people who come to you are, almost without exception, in the worst period of their adult lives. Their marriage — the central commitment of their life so far — has failed. Their children are going to grow up in a different family structure from the one they were born into. The financial security they thought they had is being divided. Whatever else is happening in the matter, that is happening underneath it.

The family law problem that arrives on your desk is always downstream from a human situation of considerable complexity. The property dispute between two people who have been married for eighteen years is, at some level, a dispute about what their life together was worth. The parenting dispute is, at some level, a dispute about identity — about who each parent is in relation to their children, and what happens to that identity when the family reconfigures.

You will not resolve the human situation. That is not your job, and conflating your job with that task will make you a worse lawyer and damage you personally. But you need to understand the human situation in order to do your legal job well, because clients whose emotional reality is not acknowledged make worse legal decisions, and lawyers who do not understand what their clients are actually experiencing miss things that matter.

Emotional intelligence is not soft

Law school will have given you no training in this. The profession will have given you even less. You will encounter senior practitioners who pride themselves on not being affected by their clients' distress, who treat clinical detachment as a professional virtue. Take what is useful from that model — the precision, the clarity, the refusal to be swept into the client's emotional narrative — and discard the rest.

The ability to hold steady while a client is distressed, to maintain your professional judgment while fully understanding what they are going through, is not softness. It is a trained capacity that takes years to develop. You will not develop it by suppressing your own emotional responses. You will develop it by becoming sufficiently secure in your own psychological resources that other people's distress doesn't destabilise you.

That requires investment — in supervision, in peer support, in your own therapy if that is what is needed. The lawyers who told you it wasn't necessary were probably not as fine as they looked.

On children's matters

You will find, early in your career, that parenting matters are the most difficult work you do. Not technically — though the threshold test, the paramountcy principle, and the range of considerations under section 60CC will give you plenty to work with — but humanly. When children are caught between two parents who cannot agree, and the court must make orders that will shape their lives, the weight of that is considerable.

You will also find that the children are often not present in the proceeding in any meaningful way. Their voices, where they are old enough to have articulable views, come to the court through the Independent Children's Lawyer, through family reports, through the filter of adults. You will want to remember that those are not the children themselves, and that the gap between an adult's representation of a child's experience and the child's actual experience can be considerable.

Take your children's work seriously. Take the ICL role seriously when you are appointed to it. The orders made in those proceedings follow those children for years.

On being a sustainable practitioner

Family law has a significant practitioner attrition problem, and you should think about why that is. The work is emotionally demanding in ways that are often not acknowledged. The conflict with clients who are angry, frightened, or in deep grief — sometimes all three at once — is wearing in ways that accumulate below the threshold of conscious attention. The adversarial model, in a practice area that is increasingly trying to move towards more collaborative approaches, creates internal tensions that are not easily resolved.

By the time you have been practising for ten years, you will know practitioners who have burned out quietly — who have become cynical, or who have left the profession, or who are technically still practising but are plainly not well. You will also know practitioners who have sustained high-quality, engaged practice for decades.

The difference, in my observation, is not talent or technical skill. It is intentionality. The practitioners who sustain themselves are those who have made deliberate choices about their workload, their client intake, their supervision and peer support arrangements, and the things they do outside work that restore their capacity for the work. Those choices are not automatic. They require the same discipline you bring to a complex parenting matter.

You are a person who happens to be a lawyer, in that order. That is not a platitude.

With some accumulated perspective,

Louise.