We are pioneers, social and system entrepreneurs, building Portland as a Community of the Future. Have you ever met a lawyer? Do you want to make a difference in your community? Do you want to create a better world? There is a movement around the world, a shift in consciousness that realizes we are all one, that we are interconnected. It is happening in all areas - business, journalism, psychology, medicine - and LAW. It is time to involve all the stakeholders in a better world. Kim Wright has been one of the leaders of this new paradigm in law. She has traveled around the world several times in the last ten years and she's the world expert, author, speaker, and proponent for a more conscious and compassionate legal system. If you are not a lawyer, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with me? Consider this: Law is like the DNA of a society. It is the thread that winds through our lives and communities, providing a structure for our relationships. Law sets the rules of how we live together. Law tells us who we can marry, when that marriage is over, that we should stop at the red light, that there are consequences when we break our agreements. It reflects the values of society and defines our rights and responsibilities to each other. Law is how we design, maintain, repair, and heal our relationships. And if that is not enough, more than half of all politicians are lawyers. Lawyers are the first responders in a lot of change these days and they're creating new models of practicing that don't look like the old, stodgy, and adversarial ways. All over the world, Kim has been bringing together these changemaker lawyers with other changemakers in their communities. Read her story and join us in creating a legal system that works for everyone. My Path to Lawyers as Changemakers: by J. Kim Wright
I am an integrative lawyer. Did you cringe when you saw the word “lawyer”? Did you think I must be about to tell you about some case I’ve won, someone I’ve dominated and destroyed? Calling a lawyer is what you do when enlightenment and consciousness fail, when you want to beat someone up, right? I’m a different kind of lawyer. There is a movement in law that is more conscious and compassionate, but first I will tell you my story. I went to law school because I wanted to be a change agent. I was 29 years old, raising a passel of children in a blended family. I was politically active and law school seemed to be a place where I could find the tools and power to make a better world. I almost didn’t become a lawyer. Especially after I went to law school, I thought that lawyers were jerks. I had a lot of evidence. If you’ve ever spent much time in a courthouse, you understand. I thought that all lawyers were unhappy and argumentative and they spread misery. It is true that the legal profession has very high rates of stress, suicide, and addiction. The lifestyle is pretty dysfunctional. After I graduated from law school, I passed two bar exams, and then I put my law degree and bar membership in a drawer and ignored them. I worked in nonprofits and socially conscious businesses. I immersed myself in personal development. I was all about peace, love, and understanding, trying to do some good. If anyone asked about my law degree, I told them how horrible lawyers were and how the legal system was broken. I complained a lot and figured that I couldn’t make a difference. A few years later, I met Forrest Bayard, a lawyer who spoke of granting dignity to everyone in the legal process. As a divorce lawyer, he worked to help parents, (his client and their ex), to be friends at the end of the process, so they could raise their children together. As he spoke about how his personal transformation changed his law practice, a new world opened for me. I opened my law practice. At that point, I didn’t know how to be a lawyer unless I went to court. That’s what lawyers do, right? I tried to grant dignity to all, even as I was immersed in trials. I soon discovered that being a lawyer who helped parents be friends was easier said than done. I thought I was muddling through. Then, I started to notice the impact. I won a lot, actually most of the time. I enjoyed matching wits, coming up with creative strategies. But it wasn’t a game. It hurt my clients and their children. Even when my clients won, they told me it was the most awful experience they’d ever had. One client said she’d give up her children rather than go to court again. I might have quit, but having met Forrest, I knew something else was possible. In the mid-1990s, there were a lot of new ideas emerging. Forrest told me about a lawyer in Minneapolis, Stu Webb, who had created a divorce process, Collaborative Law. In Collaborative Law, the husband, wife, and their two lawyers, committed to resolve the divorce without court. They approached the divorce as a family, trying to resolve how to go forward. I also found a [then] relatively new approach called Mediation, then Restorative Justice, then....
Law school had trained me to fight. It hadn’t trained me to make peace. All my personal transformation work was looking inward. How did I take my desire to be a peacemaker and healer into the legal profession? I had to find a way to be me and still be a lawyer
I started calling myself a Lawyer-Peacemaker and reclaimed the term, Counselor at Law. I hired a social worker and counselor to work in my office, along with the regular legal staff. I went to court a lot less and eventually stopped doing trial work at all. We even feng-shiued our office. Back then, I was the weirdest lawyer in my town ... and a lot of other towns as well. Once, I remember going to a bar association meeting. At lunch, we were asked to introduce ourselves to the folks sitting at our tables of 8. I introduced myself as a peacemaker, working to make law a healing profession. Seven people (the whole rest of the table) suddenly saw someone they knew across the room. They got up and found other places to sit. They left me sitting there alone. If I wanted to create a different way of practicing, I knew I needed allies. I needed to find my tribe. A colleague told me about an organization called the International Alliance of Holistic Lawyers, IAHL. I arranged to attend their next conference. I thought I was hot stuff, cutting edge, that I would go to the IAHL conference and impress them with all my new ways of peacemaking. Instead, I showed up at the conference and found out just how conventional I was. What a diverse group of lawyers! Innovative law professors and collaborative lawyers were joined by energy healers and yogi-lawyers using yoga poses to transform conflicts. They meditated together. They even held hands and sang. I was from a small town in North Carolina and I was pretty shocked. At that point in my narrow life, I thought they were just too weird. But there was something about them. They were so outside-the- box that they’d moved into a new paradigm. They weren't angry and confrontational. They were happy, self-expressed, and full of possibility. I wanted more of what they had. I joined the organization. I have learned that community gives us courage. After I met those holistic lawyers, I got bolder. I became a collaborative lawyer and a mediator. I learned about restorative justice. As an RJ facilitator, I worked with families of murder victims as they prepared to go face to face with the one who had killed their loved one and I worked with those who had killed those loved ones, to effectively communicate their remorse and apologize. I started to really love my law practice and my clients. I facilitated some of life's most intimate moments, creating and dissolving important relationships. I held a lot of hands and listened to a lot of heartbreak. I celebrated a lot of milestones. I had experienced the difference that meeting Forrest had made for me. gained courage from knowing that I was not alone, and I sensed that there were others out there who felt alone. I decided to make it my mission to seek out and connect lawyers who were bringing peacemaking and healing to law. In 2008, I gave up my house and office to travel as a nomad on behalf of my mission. My Cutting Edge Law website grew to include dozens of videos of lawyers. They caught the attention of an editor at the American Bar Association and I was invited to write a book for the ABA. The editor told me, “We knew that law was growing in this direction but we had no idea it was growing so quickly.” I filled the book with stories about the lawyers I’d been meeting, showcasing their breadth, depth, and diversity. My second book expanded that to include a worldwide movement, expressions of a new consciousness growing around the globe. The book became an immediate ABA best seller. We were no longer just the weird lawyers. We were pioneers! Having the book opened doors for me to speak to law schools, bar associations and law societies around the world. For years, I have connected lawyers with each other. I’ve learned that evolution in law is happening everywhere. Lately I have been bringing lawyers together with other disciplines, to accelerate the change with different ways of thinking, to begin to design the new legal system that is based on values of interconnectedness. You may now know about Restorative Justice, and mediation. There are many other new approaches like:
- Conscious Contracts in business law.
- Earth Jurisprudence which recognizes that we are all interconnected and that Nature has rights.
- Sharing Law for the sharing economy.
- Purposeful estate planning
- Incorporating art and music into conflict resolution, prevention, and contract drafting
- Drug Treatment Courts which focus on helping defendants to get off drugs and become productive members of society, instead of locking them up. And there are so many more approaches. We share values like compassion, interconnectedness, peace, and yes, LOVE.
