Sitting with a client helping them find their way through; helping them simplify a complex legal process whilst respecting them as a human being.
Being a family lawyer is the most meaningful work I know. I wrote this for anyone wondering what actually happens in that room.
She sat down at 9am and told me her marriage was over. Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet, exhausted way that people speak when they’ve already cried everything out. She’d spent three weeks rehearsing what she was going to say to me, and when she finally said it, there wasn’t much left.
She apologised for crying. I told her not to.
That was a Tuesday.
The night before, I’d been on the couch watching MAFS. Glass of wine. Half-scrolling my phone during the ad breaks like everyone else.
And I remember watching one of the couples, the screaming match, the accusations, the producer asking someone how they were feeling and getting thirty seconds of devastated silence and thinking: I know exactly where this goes next.
Not because I’m cynical. Not because I’ve stopped feeling it. But because I’ve sat across from that silence hundreds of times. I know what’s underneath it. I know what the person on the other side of it needs and what they’re terrified to ask for.
“We watch MAFS to decompress from the week. The irony is we’re watching our week.”
People sometimes ask what it’s like to do this job. I think they expect me to say it’s heavy. That you carry it home. That you need strong boundaries to survive it.
And yes — all of that’s true. But there’s something else that’s also true, and it doesn’t get said enough:
This work is a privilege.
People let you in during the hardest chapter of their lives. They sit in your office and tell you things they haven’t told their closest friends. They ask you to help them protect their kids, their financial future, their sense of themselves. They trust you with the version of them that isn’t holding it together.
You don’t take that lightly. Not after the first client, not after the thousandth.
I had a client last year who came in convinced she needed to fight for everything. Every asset. Every school holiday. Every piece of furniture with a memory attached to it.
We spent a long time talking. Not about the law but about what she actually wanted her life to look like in two years. What she wanted for her kids. What she was actually afraid of losing.
By the end of it, she didn’t want to fight for the furniture anymore.
She wanted to fight for her peace.
That changed everything about how we approached her matter. And she got a better outcome, not just legally, but actually.
This is the part of family law that doesn’t appear in the textbooks. The moment when you stop asking “what happened?” and start asking “what do you want your life to look like when this is over?”
Because before anyone can make genuinely good decisions about property, about parenting, about what to fight for and what to let go they need clarity about who they are and what they’re working towards.
The legal problem and the human problem are always connected. You can’t resolve one well without understanding the other.
We’ve built our whole practice around that idea. Not as a point of difference as a basic truth about what this work requires.
There are days we eat lunch at our desk because we have back-to-back appointments. One client will be mid-litigation and terrified. One at the very beginning, still in shock. One just reaching a settlement and crying, the good kind of crying, the relief kind. We probably tear up a little too, not for the first time and not for the last.
Then we go home to our ordinary lives and watch two episodes of something completely mindless.
“This is a job you choose because you believe the legal process should leave people intact. Not because it always does because you’re going to make sure it does.”
I love MAFS. I will continue to watch MAFS. I reserve the right to yell at my television about communication breakdowns and emotional unavailability like I didn’t spend the day thinking about nothing else.
But I also think about the people watching it who are a few weeks away from sitting across from a lawyer, trying to work out what comes next.
What I want them to know is this: the person you sit across from should understand that this isn’t just a legal matter. It’s one of the most significant transitions of your life. The two things aren’t separate. And the best outcomes the ones that actually hold, the ones that let people move forward come from treating them that way.
The legal resolution matters. The human resolution is everything.
That’s the job. And on most Tuesdays, I still wouldn’t trade it.