J. Kim Wright

J. Kim Wright is an attorney, coach and consultant who is an speaker and writer on a new model for the legal profession that works for everyone—lawyers, clients, and society. Kim was a business owner and mother of seven children when she returned to law school at age 29. After passing both the Georgia and Florida bar exams, she worked as the director of a domestic violence program in Florida. She relocated to North Carolina and joined the North Carolina Bar in 1994, beginning to practice law in the traditional legal system. After enthusiastically winning her first custody trial and crushing the other side, she noticed that the family still had a lot of problems. Litigation did not resolve their conflict, it actually made it a lot worse, and her client kept calling her, wanting to ease the pain. The long hours, the brilliant trial techniques, and legal expertise didn’t resolve the problem the client brought to her in the first place. It was frustrating for Kim and she was tempted to become cynical and to give up on ever making a difference. She questioned whether she should practice law at all. Instead, Kim began to investigate ways to work with clients that were innovative and focused on healing the pain and chaos of legal dispute.

As she explored innovative approaches, she took them into her own law practice and applied them with her clients. From 1995 to 2000, she experimented with the approaches in her practice in a small town in central North Carolina. Using a coach, she created The Divorce and Family Law Center, a comprehensive law practice providing for all the needs of clients going through divorce: legal representation, social work, coaching, counseling, mediation, and resources for divorcing clients and the community. As her practice evolved, she began to see that her clients were much more empowered and she was making the difference that she always wanted to make, resolving problems, easing pain, and helping people. She actually liked to practice law! Clients welcomed the new approaches; even the clients who initially came in looking for revenge shifted when they were offered the opportunity to actually resolve their situations. She began to see herself as a peacemaker and began to imagine a legal profession where all lawyers saw themselves as peacemakers, healers, and problem-solvers.

In 2000, when she relocated to Oregon, she made the decision to focus her energies on sharing the lessons from her law practice into a new coaching practice, working with other lawyers to transform their practices, creating a new model and future for the legal profession, creating a new context of lawyers as peacemakers, healers, and problem- solvers. Discovering many like-minded lawyers, she and a team of visionary colleagues founded Renaissance Lawyer Society in 2000. The Renaissance Lawyer Society web site, originally written by Kim, features about twenty innovative approaches, models, and trends to law practice and Kim recently returned to the RLS board after a five year absence. Kim is a frequent speaker and writer for legal periodicals about innovative approaches to law practice that are based upon connecting people, solving problems, and resolving conflict. She also leads trainings and continuing education programs based on her work. Kim maintains her law license in North Carolina.

On a personal level, Kim has been divorced more than once. She raised a blended family of eight children and a total of sixteen children lived with her between 1977 and 2003. All are adults now, and believes that she has had to deal with just about every issue that a parent can face. She particularly enjoys working with teenagers. In addition to extensive work in conflict resolution, she brings twelve years of personal growth, coaching, transformational, and relationship training to her work.