About the interviews

Who are we interviewing?

When we began this project, we had the idea that we would interview about a hundred people. As we’ve traveled, we’ve had to shift the scope of the project as we’ve realized the numbers and types of individuals who needed to be part of this project. Below is a brief synopsis of the types of people we have interviewed or intend* to interview.

*(If your name is on this list and you haven’t heard from us, you will. If your name is not on this list and should be, feel free to drop us a line but trust that we have a much longer list of names than shown here.)

We have identified certain people who are on our “short list” of people to be interviewed and have created an itinerary to reach those individuals. We also look to see who else is in the geographic area and we interview certain other people. In some cities – like San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis, and many others, there are pioneers and leaders from several different vectors in the movement. In other cities, we focus on one person but are open to interviewing others.

Diverse Faces

Diversity is an important element of our movement and this project. Among other considerations, we strive to represent the diversity of the movement by vector, practice area, years of practice, size of firm, racial/ethnic groups, spiritual path, and geographic region. As we build, we’ll be including more international representation as well.

Pioneers & Innovators

There are many people who have provided the seeds of inspiration, leadership, and innovative ideas to propel this movement forward. Examples include pioneers and innovators like Stu Webb who conceived of Collaborative Law; Law Professor Susan Daicoff who tied lawyer well-being to practicing a different style of law; Larry Krieger who started a listserv for educators exploring ideas of humanizing legal education; Bruce Winick and David Wexler who co-created the therapeutic jurisprudence movement; Len Riskin & Charlie Halpern who have been teaching lawyers to meditate for decades; Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein, Baruch Bush and Joseph Folger, Jim Melamed and Robert Benjamin, who have taken mediation in exciting new directions. The list goes on. Our goal is to document the work of these pioneers and innovators, to learn from their past and continued work in their fields and to recognize and honor their contributions.

Leaders & Trailblazers

Leaders & Trailblazers have helped develop the ideas and take them to the next level. Sometimes they’re indistinguishable from Pioneers so the distinction is arbitrary. Without Pauline Tesler, would Stu Webb’s new ideas have garnered the attention and developed into the collaborative practice movement? What would Collaborative Practice have been if Carl Michael Rossi hadn’t created the international listserv? Without leaders like Daisy Floyd, Roy Stuckey, Judith Wegner, Paula Lustbader, Mike Schwartz, Barbara Glesner-Fines, or Anne Iijima, would the humanization of legal education have gained the ground it has in mainstream education? Leaders include folks like David Lerman who has been a leader in bringing restorative justice to prosecutors’ offices around the country and Dan van Ness, a lawyer and executive director of the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International. These and many, many others have done their parts to bring ideas into the mainstream.

Organizational Leaders & Conference Attendees

Occasionally, we’re lucky enough to find ourselves at a conference with many potential interviewees. In May, we conducted a series of interviews at the International Alliance of Holistic Lawyers conference in Detroit. These interviews covered a broad range of subjects and allow our viewers to learn about holistic law, the International Alliance, and what IAHL conferences are about. I think it was also useful to show that holistic lawyers share many of the concerns of other lawyers, that we are normal people approaching law from a broader perspective. In addition to our interviews, we also filmed some of the actual presentations. We’ll be doing similar work at upcoming conferences for other organizations.

Authors, Trainers & Teachers

This is another overlapping group since so many of our pioneers, leaders, and examples are authors and teachers. There are probably over a hundred possible interviews in just this category. Professor Marjorie Silver’s book The Affective Assistance of Counsel, Practicing Law as a Healing Profession provides a textbook for professors around the world who want to offer classes on this topic. Stewart Levine has written respected books including Getting to Resolution and the Book of Agreements. Janet Warfield Smith had a pretty mainstream legal career but left the law and wrote an award-winning new thought book called Shift: Change Your Words, Change Your World and Gary Gwilliam wrote Getting a Winning Verdict in My Personal Life: A Trial Lawyer Finds his Soul.

The teachers and trainers in this movement are also leaders. Not only is Nora Bushfield a leader in collaborative practice, she’s a trainer with a great story and some strong opinions about practicing collaboratively. Erica Ariel Fox was the force behind the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative and is an inspirational teacher and trainer. Attorney, author, trainer, and mediator Ken Cloke writes and brings fresh ideas into conflict resolution.

Hot Topics, Examples & Interesting Angles

We’re interviewing some people because they know about or have opinions about hot topics. For example, Bruce Peck is working with a group exploring bringing reconciliation principles into divorces. One coach or two coaches in collaborative divorce has been a long-running hot topic on the CollabLaw listserv. Other interviewees explore the application of neuroscience in law, appreciative inquiry, the Enneagram, the MBTI, emotional intelligence, integrating spirituality and law, creativity, and other topics of interest to the broad movement.

As we’ve traveled, we’ve come across a few folks who are just good examples of practitioners who have offered their viewpoints or folks who have found an interesting angle for their work. Our “Examples” represent a vast number of similar folks who have been doing good work in their own ways. Some have been local leaders like Barbara Davis who started the Mediation Center in Asheville, North Carolina and went on to become a collaborative practice trainer. Some were early adopters like Ron Supancic who learned about collaborative law at a holistic law conference in 1997 and knew a good thing when he saw it. The Georgia Justice Project in Atlanta brings together many good ideas and innovations so we interviewed several members of their staff to give a full picture of their good work. We also interviewed several members of the Collaborative Alliance in Minneapolis.

Celebrities & Media Personalities

Barack Obama has been known as a peacemaker since his Harvard days. Actor Robin Williams is having a collaborative divorce and we want to talk to him. Charlie Rose is a lawyer pursuing a career in journalism. Arnold Patent was one of Oprah’s first gurus. Sometimes we just want to hear someone famous tell us that we’re on the right path.