Shelia and I spent the latter part of the week at the Georgia State Bar’s mid-year convention. The State Bar had asked Shelia and our Savannah attorney, David Purvis, to present to the assembled on The Justice Café, our very low cost, unbundled division of the Firm.
Also presenting was Bill Howe, the most sought-after family law attorney in Oregon and one of top five leading legal minds in family law in our nation.
Long story short, the face of law is changing rapidly, and the face of family law is changing more rapidly still. What worked as recently as 5 years ago now crashes and burns. A divorce, once affordable and relatively straightforward, is now a complex, costly mess with each side outdoing the other in skill, maneuvering, and often chicanery. More and more of the public, the parties who need representation, throw their hands up in frustration and relative penury and walk away from any hope of having a skilled advocate work with them through their dissolving marriage.
The world in the 21st century hangs in the balance on most every level, it seems. Global warming is the greatest threat mankind has ever faced. Politicians are racing each other toward the basest level of xenophobia, racism and yes, fascism. More than ever, we need all three of our branches of government to work effectively and independently, performing checks and balances on each other. The third branch, our judiciary, is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the vast majority of our citizenry, too expensive, too remote, too incapable of rendering meaningful, accessible solutions to the people’s problems.
The people have a right to an attentive and accessible judiciary. Through their taxes, the people pay for its judges, its clerks, its court houses. When our third branch ceases to be effective, the citizens are far less attached to their government, because it does not work for them. Like everything else, the people are paying for what only the privileged get to use.
Each and every one of us has something we can do to help take the world a step or two back from the precipice, so that it no longer hangs in the balance. We each have our unique talents and opportunities to improve our collective circumstance. For peace to reign in our time, for our country to be strong and free into the next decade and beyond, for our species to enjoy the bounty of the Earth, we are each one of us charged to do what we can.
In my world, the Firm’s part is in doing all that it can to strengthen our judiciary to be more accessible, more affordable, more responsive to the people’s needs. That is what we are doing with The Justice Café. And that is what we are doing with The Manely Firm, P.C. This is why the State Bar wanted to hear from us.
Watch these pages for a major announcement in the next few weeks on a new way that The Manely Firm, P.C. will be providing more access for more justice than ever before. Between The Justice Café and The Manely Firm, we are doing our part to provide our people of this great nation with access to their judiciary, as is their right.
May we all find our calling, our talent, our purpose and each of us contribute to making our world more just, more free and yes, even more pleasant.