By: Elaine McArdle
“Almost nobody at Harvard thinks about going into matrimonial law—but they should,” says Kristen Gourrier’24.
As a 2L student in LSC’s Family Justice Clinic, Gourrier worked directly with clients in divorce and custody cases, learning not only a full range of litigation skills but how to work with people at a very difficult time in their lives. It also led to a job offer she otherwise wouldn’t have gotten fresh out of law school, she says.
Today, Gourrier is an associate at Cohen Clair Lans Greifer & Simpson in New York City, a boutique firm that handles some of the most complicated, high-stakes divorces in the country, with many celebrity and very wealthy clients. The work involves significant financial complexity, often dealing with trusts and complex investment portfolios, and among her clients, multibillion-dollar marital estates are not unheard of. “You might see someone walking away with multiple Hampton homes out of the six Hampton homes the couple owned,” she says.
Gourrier finds her career highly stimulating intellectually and personally rewarding, including that the firm has a robust pro bono practice. Her cases tend to involve “all kinds of very sensitive issues,” she says. “The litigation of custody issues is deeply creative, deeply personal—and it’s also deeply academic.” In cases involving public figures, there are additional considerations around privacy and nondisclosure agreements. “I considered going into Big Law myself, and I do find corporate work interesting,” she says. But when she talks to her friends practicing at large firms, “I hear all the time how cool my job is, and I would have to agree.”
In terms of professionally and intellectually challenging areas of law, family law is often overlooked. But alumni of the Family Justice Clinic say the field offers enormous opportunity for professional challenge, not to mention the satisfaction of helping people with the most intimate, important aspect of their lives.
“If you’re looking for something challenging, that provides that ‘HLS feeling’ of being among the best of the best, that absolutely can be found in matrimonial law,” says Gourrier, who notes that “a brilliant HLS alumnus, Jad Greifer ’95, was my first contact at the firm.” A matrimonial lawyer “is primarily a litigator, and this is serious litigation practice,” she adds, especially “if you’re a person who enjoys creative and dramatic writing, fact patterns that are engaging on a human-interest level, and complex financial and child-related issues that impact people’s real lives.”
For Alexa Richardson ’21, the practice of family law offers the opportunity to explore innovative ways to challenge legal structures that are harmful to families.
“If people want to do innovative, creative legal thinking, there’s a lot to do in this area that can be hugely impactful for so many families,” says Richardson.
An attorney at Civil Rights Corps, whose founder and executive director is Alec Karakatsanis ’08, Richardson is applying to family policing some of the same constitutional frameworks that CRC has used to successfully challenge pretrial detention and cash bail in cases around the country.
“There’s been this traditional divide since the founding of the country where family law and issues having anything to do with women and children were considered state-court material, less important, not to be taken too seriously,” says Richardson. “I think nothing could be further from the truth.”
Marianna Yang is an LSC Senior Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law, and co-director of FJC, where she supervises clinical students in their work with clients. “Every case at FJC touches the very core of the most valuable aspect of our lives, which is our family,” Yang says. “To dismiss it as facile or inferior would be misguided. Family litigation can embody highly nuanced skills of navigating social dynamics as well as more regimented skills like developing complex discovery strategies.
“FJC students have historically been dominated by women, fierce women at that, as you can see from the FJC alums featured here,” Yang adds. “I suspect that many people who think it’s not for them may have misconceived notions about what a family lawyer does.”
“When you say high-impact area of law, family law is it—not in the sense of moving markets, but it is incredibly high impact in terms of how it can impact people’s lives,” says Rebecca Greening, LSC Senior Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law, and co-director of FJC with Yang. However, she adds, “Over time, I think because of misogyny and other cultural drivers, what happens in the private domestic domain gets associated with women and women’s work”—and thus regarded as less prestigious than other practice areas.
David Hoffman ‘84, who’s been practicing family law and general litigation for over 40 years and is a leader in the intersection of mediation and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in family law and other areas, agrees.
“Family law is a good example of marginalization within the legal profession,” he says. “My family law professor, Martha Minow, who taught me to appreciate the importance and vast complexity of family law, pointed out that the majority of family law attorneys in the U.S. are women. She said that when more men choose to practice family law, this vital area of legal practice will probably be viewed as more prestigious. I was already leaning in the direction of wanting family law to be part of my practice, but her comment cemented my resolve.”
Inspired in part by his experience as a clinical student doing divorce cases under the supervision of LSC founders Gary Bellow and Jeanne Charn, Hoffman has devoted much of his focus to family law. “I am fascinated by family law and family conflicts,” says Hoffman. “They are so three-dimensional: legal, financial, and emotional issues abound.”
Since 1998, Hoffman has taught courses in mediation and alternative dispute resolution at HLS, including in the family law context. In 2003, he founded the innovative Boston Law Collaborative, where family law representation, mediation, and arbitration are a significant part of the practice. Its core values include moral and spiritual integrity and a commitment to expanding the use of dispute resolution and collaborative law.
“Gary and Jeanne were pioneers in so many consequential ways,” Hoffman says, including as “early adopters of the view that lawyers representing low-income clients need to be well-versed in alternative methods of dispute resolution, such as mediation. I am hoping to leave behind some footprints on the path to a different way of practicing law—one that is focused more on healing people and relationships, when that is possible, rather than winning at all costs, especially when victory is so often pyrrhic.”
The practical litigation skills that students learn at FJC are transferrable to any kind of litigation, alumni note. The FJC is a terrific training ground no matter what kind of law practice a student might pursue. In this way, the FJC can also be a great fit for students who may not have any interest in pursuing family law as a career. The FJC experience enables students to present evidence in court, argue motions, counsel clients, and engage in strategic litigation—all skills that are used in any number of law practice contexts. What is more, because of the sensitivity and personal nature of the issues involved in FJC cases, students learn to become extremely client-centered in their approach to lawyering—a bedrock of LSC’s philosophy—and to develop emotional intelligence that’s invaluable in any practice area.
Gourrier is certain her experience at FJC—where her supervisor was Marianna Yang, Clinical Instructor and FJC co-director—contributed to her landing the position at Cohen Clair right out of law school.
“I think it was crucial to have clinical experience under my belt and on my resume,” says Gourrier. “I was able to speak about the actual practical experience I had in my interview, not just that I liked the idea of family law.” FJC “exceeded my expectations in every way. Once I completed the LSC clinic, I knew that I wanted to pursue matrimonial law after graduation.”
Kathryn Combs ’20 worked on divorce and custody/support/parenting cases under the supervision of Yang and Nnena Odim, former director of what was then called the Family/Domestic Violence Law Clinic. Combs learned to draft pleadings, analyze court rules and apply procedures, and communicate with clients. “Most importantly, I learned how to conduct client meetings professionally when the conversation required probing into facts surrounding traumatic experiences for the client,” she says.
Today, she handles family law cases as a staff attorney with Northeast Legal Aid, based in Lowell, Mass.
“The LSC experience was much more helpful than I could have ever realized,” Combs says. “In the cases I work on, my clients are very low income and have experienced violence from the person they either are married to or share children with. Their financial future and physical safety are in jeopardy based on the outcome in the family courts, and even the most basic of negotiations with the other party are fraught with re-traumatization. It’s humbling and energizing to use my legal training to advocate for and work with my clients who are often shoved to the margins. I don’t think anyone deserves well-trained advocates [more] than them.”
While family law may not always hold the same prestige as corporate law, the stakes are enormous practitioners say. “I think most people would say their relationship with their children and their ability to provide for them is the most important aspect of their life, and family court is where decisions regarding those things are made,” says Combs.
Moreover, she notes, “I believe family court is the most likely place for the average American to enter a courtroom outside of jury duty.”
Says Richardson, “These issues are entwined in every other area of law and to separate [family law] out and subjugate it as lesser area of law is short sighted and misses the centrality of these issues to everyday legal interactions we are having.”
Richardson, the first licensed direct-entry midwife in Maryland, arrived at HLS to study how the law interacts with pregnancy and childbirth. As an FJC student, Richardson did everything from client intake through a full trial in a divorce case involving domestic violence.
“I got to work closely with clients, which was invaluable as a law student,” Richardson says. “It was a fascinating opportunity to look at the intersection of the law and family, the way law comes into our homes, our relationships, our families in this incredibly intimate way, but still with a lot of power and force behind it. The experience shaped my understanding of how law is functioning in our society.”
She also learned that she wanted to get more trial experience after graduating HLS. With a Harvard Law Review Fellowship, she worked for 18 months at the Baltimore City office of the Maryland Public Defender, where she represented mothers whose newborn infants were being removed by the state. She was in a team that created a pre-petition program that supported pregnant women at high risk of losing their babies by connecting them with basic needs such as housing and offering legal support to avoid child removal. “The Clinic helped me understand that a lot of the time you win legal cases with the stuff you do out of court,” Richardson says.
Now, at CRC, “It’s very exciting to me to be able to create novel strategic impact litigation that could make systemwide changes, because what I witnessed in Baltimore family law courts was egregious violations of basic due process rights, dehumanizing treatment of people and their most precious rights: the access to their children and their families,” Richardson says. “There’s a lot of creative and stimulating legal work to be done.”
For more on the Family Justice Clinic: HERE