Educate, Educate, Educate

Yesterday was a blast.  The stand alone family law military program went off without a hitch.  Patty's and my presentation on custody issues and the military was even better than we expected it would be (and of course, we had high hopes).  We even got an "Excellent" from the grand master of family law and the military, Mark Sullivan.  Patty's husband, Steve, who is also a fabulous presenter, made the military version of child support really interesting - for those of you who have never read the military regulations about interim support, that isn't easy.  The best part of it was that we had a varied audience, with both Alaskan trial court judges and military legal officers; everybody learned something, and no one was bored.  You all know I do quite a bit of military divorce and custody cases, so in that way, of course, yesterday related to the Trenches.  You know me, however, and I've thought of another way it relates to the Trenches.
What yesterday was about was education.  We educated the folks who provide legal help to the people who serve in the real trenches, the military, and their spouses.  We educated the folks who make the decisions in family law cases.  That's really a big part of our jobs here in the Trenches.  Whenever we have a case before a judge, our job is to educate him or her on the applicable law and its relationship to our facts.  If we do that well, and our client's facts follow the applicable law, then we stand a good shot of winning our case.  Whenever we have a contested case, part of what we do to avoid standing before a judge by settling the case is to educate our clients on the law, how their facts fit into that framework, how their spouse's facts mesh with the law, and what a judge is likely to do given the law and the facts.  How well we educate our clients has a great deal to do with whether we can settle their case.  If opposing counsel hasn't done the same job, then we may not settle, but at least our client has realistic expectations about what might happen in their case.  At the end of the day, that may be the difference between a satisfied client and an unsatisfied one, or a good result and a bad one.  Here in the Trenches.


BTW:  Big kudos to Phil Tucker, this year's chair of the military law committee, for putting this program together so it ran so smoothly.