Our Mediation History

In 1981 I was invited to begin my career with the law firm of Holt and Baugh.  As a young associate I frequently worked ten hours per day for seven days per week.  My senior partners kept feeding so many divorce cases to me that there was no time to even discuss settlement from the beginning to the trial.  Almost every Friday I found myself handling from one to three trials in divorce courts.

Within a few years I became impressed with the predictability of divorces.  Within the first interview with a potential client, I could evaluate the case and accurately predict what would result at the end of the trial. After all, how hard is it to divide by two?

Child support has always been predictable, even before the Agnos Act and before the infamous Mandatory Guideline. Today the calculations are a matter of plugging the numbers into one of several computer programs.

I would like to state that in the first ten years of my practice I handled 1,000 divorces. That probably is not an exaggeration, although I have never actually made a count. The way that I handled cases changed when my senior partners retired. I began to settle the contested cases as soon as the emotions of the spouses settled down and everyone could act reasonably. It still amazed me that people would regularly spend $3,500 to $5,000 to $10,000 or more on each side to argue, confront and insult each other before coming to terms.