Family Law
Family Law News 2016, Issue 2, Volume 38, No. 2
Content
- McLe Self-study Article: Demystifying Marriage of Bonvino: What it Holds and What it Means
- Legislative Liaisons and Designated Recipients of Legislation
- Message from the Chair
- From Our Readers
- Table of Contents
- Family Law Section Executive Committee
- The Death of Litigation May Provide for the Life of the Lawyer
- Message from the Chair
- Military Pension Division: Back Payments
- Family Law Section Executive Committee
- McLe Self-study Article: Demystifying Marriage of Bonvino: What it Holds and What it Means
- Table of Contents
- The Death of Litigation May Provide for the Life of the Lawyer
- From Our Readers
- 2015 Case Highlights: the Year in Review
- Message from the Editor
- Holding Out as My Own
- Legislative Liaisons and Designated Recipients of Legislation
- Military Pension Division: Back Payments
- Message from the Editor
- Family Law News Editorial Team
- 2015 Case Highlights: the Year in Review
- Holding Out as My Own
- Family Law News Editorial Team
The Death of Litigation May Provide for the Life of the Lawyer
Gary Direnfeld
Gary Direnfeld is a social worker. Courts in Ontario, Canada, consider him an expert in social work, marital and family therapy, child development, parent-child relations and custody and access matters. Gary is the host of the TV reality show, Newlywed, Nearly Dead, parenting columnist for the Hamilton Spectator and author of Marriage Rescue: Overcoming the ten deadly sins in failing relationships. Gary maintains a private practice in Dundas Ontario, providing a range of services for people in distress. He speaks at conferences and workshops throughout North America and was the first social worker to sit on the Ontario Board for Collaborative Family Law.
To say that the practice of family law is stressful is a gross understatement. While civil litigators must deal with issues of finance and property, the relationship to one’s former partner and to one’s children is clearly of a higher order. While most people can live on with financial loss, the loss of family and times with one’s children is a formidable and lifelong burden. It is the family law lawyer who shoulders that burden on behalf of the client. The client comes to the family law lawyer to preserve relationships to kin, to one’s children.
In view of litigation, parents are pitted against each other, each seeking to prove the other the greater scoundrel while elevating themselves as the child’s savior and perhaps paragon of virtue. In the volley of attacks and counter attacks, it is the lawyer who becomes the repository of the client’s distress. "You’ve got to help me. We can’t lose."