"Breaking Up is Hard to Do," the song goes. It's easy for some. They do it by text, or they sit down at the kitchen table and draw a line down the middle of the page. His and hers. We lawyers call that "splittin' up the silverware."
But for many, the process is traumatic. Spend a day in divorce court and you'll see where dreams die, sometimes more than dreams.
Meet the parents who force their disabled son to testify in their own divorce, the tipsy judge who presides over drunk driving cases, the social worker who engineers a termination of parental rights case so her sister can steal a child, the caring grandparents who seek custody of their wayward daughter's children, until their own conduct comes under scrutiny, the funeral director whose scheme to sell fake coffins emerges at his divorce trial. These and more stories span forty-five years of courtroom experience.
Learn how the law has changed in recent times, away from the unrestrained tyrannical judges and collegial, but flawed, culture of the seventies, to the more professional, but boring, atmosphere of present days. Hear what happens inside court chambers, where judges and lawyers talk off the record about their cases and their clients. Learn how court reporters serve as liaisons between lawyers and judges, and how the lowest assignment clerk can change the results of a case.
Find out how lawyers do their job. Their successes and failures. How they deal with stress, lying clients, and opposing lawyers. How they forge friendships across the aisle. How black humor helps them get through the most gruesome of cases.
Meet the clients. Most of them are ordinary people, but they are challenged by the Sturm und Drang of court, the failure of their marriage, and the dissolution of their family structure. Some are heroic, some are diabolical. Others can't survive the drama, and react with suicide, even murder.
The reader will gain an understanding of how the system -- flawed as it may be - functions as it was intended.
