J. Kim Wright's blog

New territory becomes part of mainstream society with the thanks of many different courageous leaders.

Explorers scout the territory. They climb through the valleys and jungles. Sometimes they tell others about the wonderful places they've been and seen.

Trailblazers go into the jungle with their machetes and clear a path through the tangled vines. They fall in quicksand and muck out the swamps. The Explorers are off in new territory.

"Vocation is where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." ~Frederich Buechner

Wow. I sat down to write an end of the year letter and realized that Cutting Edge Law isn't even a year old but we have had a pretty impressive 2009! Since our launch in March, we've had tens of thousands of unique visitors to our web site and YouTube page. We have 230 video clips uploaded and dozens more have been edited and are ready to go up in the next few weeks. We have hundreds of text files on the site - blogs, informational pages, articles. Law students are telling us that they're having a hard time outlining evidence when they'd rather be watching videos.

Collecting more information for the ABA Book, this survey is about income.

A common fear for lawyers is that their income will drastically change if they adopt more peacemaking and healing approaches like collaborative law, therapeutic jurisprudence, and restorative justice.

As regular readers know, I was asked to write a book on Lawyers as Peacemakers for the American Bar Association. I've created a survey to collect some information. Please take a few minutes to help us.

Lawyers only: Please take a few minutes and click on the link below:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Nvn5JJBlyeL6ZLvmzCE8xA_3d_3d

Thanks so much!

I was scheduled to speak on Friday at the National Association of Women Judges Conference in Memphis. I expected to zoom in, speak, and leave. I almost parked my car in a 2 hour spot but was concerned I might not quite make it back. After all, who wants to hang out with a bunch of women judges?

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. - Mahatma Gandhi

I regard it as a duty which I owed, not just to my people, but also to my profession, to the practice of law, and to the justice for all mankind, to cry out against this discrimination which is essentially unjust and opposed to the whole basis of the attitude towards justice which is part of the tradition of legal training in this country. I believed that in taking up a stand against this injustice I was upholding the dignity of what should be an honorable profession. -Nelson Mandela

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb. - Sir Winston Churchill

For over ten years, I've been talking about the transformation of the legal profession. Those words are shorthand for a bigger conversation which I sometimes express as an inquiry: What if lawyers were peacemakers, problem-solvers and healers of conflicts?

What if?

Take a moment and imagine the paradigm shift of lawyers being peacemakers, problem-solvers and healers of conflicts. The world is facing a lot of problems these days. Many of them seem critical to the survival of the species or at least to the quality of life, peace and security of our country. A friend of mine with interests in both conflict resolution and environmental issues grew up with the goal of saving the world. After law school, she told me that she was torn about where to put her energies. Would the world be destroyed first by conflict or by environmental disaster? We need our best and brightest minds and most passionate hearts to be engaged in solutions, in finding common ground, healing polarization, in addressing the critical problems of the day with reason and compassion.

Lawyers occupy a large percentage of the leadership positions in our country. About half of all the members of Congress have law degrees and we all know that lawyers hold a lot of other political offices from local city councils to a high percentage in the executive and judicial branches of all levels of government. Lawyers are community leaders in many ways other than politics, on boards of directors of corporations, for-profit and not-for-profit. In many kinds of crises, lawyers are the ones who are called upon for advice. We are the protectors of human rights, the defenders of the Constitution. We have a lot of power to resolve or escalate conflict. We have the potential to be the problem-solvers or the problem-exacerbators. What if we took on being the problem-solvers?

The adversarial system was a big improvement over armed combat but I believe our society is evolving beyond that. I've seen evidence that the legal recession is actually part of a longer term shift away from adversarialism. Healthy people are exploring better ways to resolve their conflicts. One judge lamented that the majority of his cases now involve one party with personality disorder since everyone else settles out of court. In the business world, corporations can no longer afford the luxury of enemy-making through litigation.

Noting the trends toward a decrease in litigation, the ABA recently predicted that alternative dispute resolution is an area of growth in the profession. Those in the ADR profession haven't yet seen that shift in an increase of business and we are challenged to find ways of educating the public to the value of peacemaking attorneys rather than just avoiding the conflict or filing pro se.

Change is Urgent

Several studies and my own interviews have supported the idea that beginning law students have altruistic motives. In dozens of interviews, I've heard “I went to law school to change the world.”[If viewing from home page, click Read More or the title for rest.]

If you're a regular visitor, you have already noticed that we're remodeling. The familiar faces on the home page are changing. New content is being uploaded. We're re-organizing.

Six months after launch, we have over a thousand files and we're preparing to double that over the next few months. Our original ideas about how the site would be used are being tweaked to reflect the reality.

Publisher's Note: I sent this out as a newsletter a little while ago and I'm reposting it here in case there is anyone in the known universe who is not already on my mailing list. ;)

"We must let our voices be heard for our ideas and our ideals are important; it doesn't take a great deal of intellect to solve problems that confront us everyday. Some of our greatest ideas came from ordinary people trying to make things right." David Tanguay

A quick report in the midst of book-writing:

While I wasn't looking, last month we passed the mark of 20,000 unique visitors. By the end of this month, we expect to be at about 25,000. Not millions but not too shabby either.

The great news is that each visitor visits an average of over 4 pages and visits twice. So, people are spending some time on the site.

We showed up in Ode Magazine's newsletter in August. I've been interviewed for some other periodicals and expect those articles to land in the next couple of months.

There are many lawyers who revel in the fine-tuning of documents. They are amazed at the placement of commas. They can speak for long periods of time about sentence structure and word choice. I am not one of them. Don't take me wrong. I love drafting. I booked Legal Drafting in law school. I even like to edit. I like to have precision in my language and I can understand wanting a high level of precision in a uniform law. But as a spectator sport? How much of this can one take?

Today is expected to be historic in the Collaborative Law movement. I'm in Santa Fe, observing the proceedings of the Uniform Law Commission as the Uniform Collaborative Law Act (UCLA) is being considered.

IACP Advisory Board member Harry Tindall of Houston, Texas, a Commissioner member of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.

About the Uniform Law Commission:

When I first conceived of CuttingEdgeLaw.com blogs, I imagined one about substantive issues in the movement and another about the site itself. Perhaps someday I'll be able to do that but that day is not today!

We're in New Mexico for a few months, hoping to catch up. (No one disavow us of that possibility, please!)

On my plate: There are articles to be edited to add to the new client section which will soon be as large as the content that we currently have for lawyers. We're also putting together a teacher's guide for law professors.

It has truly been a magical week.

The IAHL conference offered many opportunities for connecting with leaders in this movement from around the world. As John McShane said, we're in the home stretch. The Tipping Point is near...how many metaphors can we use?
[Special thanks to Mari Frank for including me in her radio show taped at the conference. http://www.kuci.org/privacypiracy/]