Transcript

Christina Hollwarth: And I had a client one time who said, well, I don’t want to gaslight my kids. If they don’t want to go, I need to hear them, and I need to be present for that. And I’m like, that’s very honorable, but also, you’re not their therapist, and so your job is to encourage them to appropriately love their other parent.

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Texas Family Law Insiders podcast, your source for the latest news and trends in family law in the state of Texas. Now here’s your host, Attorney Holly Draper.

Holly Draper: Today, I’m excited to welcome Christina Hollwarth to The Texas Family Law Insiders podcast. Christina is the founding attorney of Hollwarth Law Firm in Longview, Texas. She knew she wanted to be a lawyer before she really knew what that meant. She just thought she liked the idea of arguing.

Now, a Board Certified attorney with over two decades of experience, Christina brings heart, humor, and sharp strategy to even the toughest cases. Her favorite things in life include traveling the world with her husband, laughing with her college age kids and spoiling her rescue mutt, Stella Mae. Preferably enjoying all of those with a side of champagne. Thank you so much for joining us today, Christina.

Christina: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Holly. I’m so excited to be here.

Holly: So why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Christina: Well, gosh, that introduction really covered a lot of it. You’ve captured a lot of what drives me. I guess I would say, if I was going to add to that, I’d say that, like family law chose me as much as I chose it. I’ve always been fascinated with relationships and families. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home where I didn’t have to go from home to home, but I watched my friends go through it, and so that was really interesting.

And then I watched several families adopt kids, and thought well that’s really interesting. And so I just, I love getting into the weeds with my clients, because I feel like behind everything that we do is a family that’s trying to figure out what they’re doing next. And so I just love doing it and doing it all knowing I get to go home to my amazing kids and husband so, and the dog, of course.

Holly: Yes, they are definitely a part of the family.

Christina: Absolutely.

Holly: So how would you describe your current practice?

Christina: So I’m a small firm in East Texas. I’m out in Longview, and when I say I’m a small firm, I’m actually the only firm that has more than one attorney in my town. And so I have an associate attorney working with me. We’re working on growing, and we’re planning to hire another associate next summer. So we are trying to be a little bit cutting edge in terms of what work life management, firm life management looks like.

We practice exclusively family law. I tell people, I’ve got a limited amount of space in my brain, I can do one thing well. And so we practice family law out here. Travel in the the small East Texas area where, you know, you walk in and you have to be careful not to call the judge by their first name. But yep, that’s what we do. And I have a wonderful associate and amazing team.

Holly: What counties do you cover?

Christina: So I practice primarily in Gregg County, which is Longview, and then I cover also Upshur County, which is to the north, which is Gilmer, and then Harrison County to the east, which is Marshall. So I’ll pop around to some of them. Occasionally, I’ll hit Panola. I may hit Smith every once in a while, but don’t tell people that too loud.

Holly: I just had someone asking you about an attorney in Smith.

Christina: Yeah, so I often don’t go there, but they’ve really had some impressive judges as their benches have rolled over in the last several years, and so I’m feeling a little bit more confident about going out there.

Holly: Well, today we’re going to talk about the topic that you also spoke about in Advanced. We’re recording this right after Advanced, so it’s all fresh in our minds. And I thought it was a really interesting topic that our audience might really enjoy. And hopefully, even if they caught it in Advanced, they still can pick up some new nuggets today. And those who weren’t there can find out what they missed.

Christina: Absolutely.

Holly: And that is, we’re going to talk about dealing with difficult personalities. And whether that’s clients, co parents, kids, this is something as a family lawyer that should be like the number one bullet point of things that you have to deal with in our lives that maybe we didn’t expect when we chose this career path. So what makes someone difficult in this context?

Christina: Golly, so I think it’s one of those things that we know it when we see it or hear it. It’s the client that’s angry and you can’t figure out why they’re yelling at you. It’s the client who can’t make a decision. It’s the client who refuses to respond to communication. It’s the client who either is so dependent on you that they can’t do anything without running it through your office first. They call 14 times a day. They send 27 emails.

Holly: And they get mad at the bill.

Christina: And then they get mad at the bill. Exactly. And they’ll send an email, and like, five minutes later, call the office and say, did you get my email? And so it’s just that overwhelmed, in your face, sometimes belligerent, sometimes overly emotional, just exhausting client. That’s that difficult personality, or that difficult client, I think.

Holly: And anyone who’s done family law for any length of time can relate to all of those different things.

Christina: Absolutely. And there’s a difference between the client that’s difficult because they’re emotional and the client that’s just a jerk, but both of them are difficult.

Holly: Yes. So let’s talk specifically about high conflict personalities. What does that mean?

Christina: So first of all, one of the things I said at Advanced, and I want to be sure we’re clear on, is I’m not diagnosing anybody. This is not a diagnosed. This isn’t in any fancy medical books. This was a term that was created by Bill Eddy, who’s an attorney and a therapist and does a lot of work.

Offers a lot of insights to both attorneys and people in all kinds of professions that deal with these high conflict personalities. But these people, are the ones who the traits that he really focuses on talk about just this, this preoccupation with blame. They’re looking for somebody they can blame for why they are where they are.

Oftentimes, if it’s not their ex, then it’s going to be maybe their former mother in law, or it’s going to be their attorney, or it’s going to be anybody but themselves. Then they tend to come in also, the second thing is, with this all or nothing thinking. The everything and the all and the never and the nothing are some of their favorite words.

There is no ability to see gray. Everything is black and white. Then you’ve got these unmanaged emotions, whether it’s anger, whether it’s tears, whether it’s the frozen can’t make any determination. They space out on you. You get this deer in the headlight look from them. These unregulated, unmanaged emotions.

And then extreme behaviors, whether that’s the person who’s emailing all night long, or the person who’s out with their friends and thinks they’re gonna go key their ex’s car or things that they wouldn’t normally do. But just these extreme behaviors, because they just are feeling so out of control. So those are the four personality traits that Bill Eddy really focuses on.

Holly: So I know, at least in our firm, when we have that initial intake, we are asking our intake people to look for certain red flags that maybe these are not people that we really want to have as clients.

Christina: Correct.

Holly: What kind of red flags in that initial intake meeting can we be looking for?

Christina: Absolutely. So we are looking at things like, how much time are they demanding on the phone with the intake person? Are they letting my team ask questions and gather information, or have they just emotionally thrown up on the first person who answered the phone?

We’re looking at the people who get angry if you can’t get them in in the timeframe they want to get it. If you tell them, hey, we’re booking two weeks out or three weeks out, and they get angry at you. The ones who if they throw down in the very first phone call with my office narcissist.

Holly: That is on the red flag list.

Christina: Yep, narcissist, bipolar or oppositional defiant is the new one that I’m starting to hear more of. As though they’re describing their spouses that way. But those words where they’re saying something that actually is a medical diagnosis, and they’re throwing it out there with no rhyme or reason, just to explain how terrible this awful person is and why they gotta get in with me ASAP. Some of those things are the flags that we’re looking for.

Holly: So how can difficult personalities derail a family law case?

Christina: They often are their own worst enemy. They cannot see the forest for the trees, and they are so caught up in their hurt, and they’re so caught up in their anger that when I talk to them about let’s focus long run, let’s focus long term. We are running a marathon, not a sprint, they cannot understand that a strategy might not look like immediately going out and asking the judge to punish their husband or their wife immediately, and shame them and put them in the corner in the courtroom because they’re such a terrible person.

And so they end up wanting you, access to you or to your team non stop. They end up wanting to go to court more often, or insisting they go to court more often, or blowing you up because you’re repeatedly, explaining why you can’t go to court more often. They get into court and they can’t stop talking. They don’t listen to all the ways you’ve prepped them.

They just have to tell the story to the judge as fast as they can. They can’t manage tone of voice. They can’t manage saying what they want to say without saying it with an exclamation point on it and blaming. And so they end up shocked when somebody wants to request a psychological evaluation or an amicus attorney or a custody evaluation.

They just can’t understand. But I’m not the problem. And so they end up with higher bills, they end up with longer cases, they end up with extra professionals, all of which ultimately overwhelms them more and just makes them more and more dysregulated.

Holly: Why do attorneys have trouble communicating with people with these types of difficult personalities?

Christina: I think that we are taught to be so detailed and so logical that we hear their question. We hear anything they say as a legal question that needs an answer. Because you know what we’re good at? We’re good at legal answers. We are good at explaining why the code says what it says, or what the case law says.

We are not good always at remembering that they don’t really care what happens to the other 99.9% of the world. This is their life. These are their children. This is their finances. And so we go in, and often can come across to this dysregulated person as cold or as unfeeling. We’re not hearing them. They’re trying to share their hurt, and we are just giving them answers, and we need to, that’s literally what they hired us for.

But I think it’s important for us to learn how to provide those answers in the most effective way, because it cuts down on our headache, because we’re helping them take a breath and de-escalate things. And so when we get in there, they either feel unheard, or they feel overwhelmed because, oh, you asked me seven questions.

I’m going to give you seven answers, and all seven of these answers are going to be three paragraphs that I’m going to quote or cite or include. And it’s just so overwhelming that then they feel like, well, I don’t even know what I’m doing, and my lawyer is not even explaining it.

And the lawyer is like but I did explain it. I wrote you this big, long communication. And so I think those are the ways that our communication and the ways we’ve been taught to talk to our clients and communicate with our clients just fail over and over again.

Holly: I also think, you know, yes, we are called counselors, but we’re not counselors in the.

Christina: Amen.

Holly: Mental health context. And so I think it’s very important for attorneys to recognize when maybe that’s who this person really needs to talk to.

Christina: 1,000% agree.

Holly: And you know, yes, I can sit there and listen to you lament your ex, soon to be ex for $600 an hour all day long. But maybe that money would be better spent talking to a counselor and working through your own issues as you’re dealing with the legal side on this end.

Christina: Absolutely. And I tell people that all the time. I would say, in probably a good 75 to 80% of my initial intake interviews with people, the first time they’re sitting in front of me, we talk about therapy. We talk about the fact that I care about their case, that when they get on the other side of this case, there’s gonna be a point in time where I am not in their life anymore, and I want them to be the best version of themselves and in the best position they can be in.

Because this is the first day of the rest of your life. But also, I can’t get you there emotionally, and so you need a team around you that’s going to take care of you. And if you’ve got a best friend and a mama that can talk you off a cliff all day long, great, but they’re not your therapists.

They’re not going to help you deal with the rejection you’re feeling, or the constant ongoing aggravation you’re dealing if you have a high conflict personality on the other side of your case. And so it’s so important to put yourself in a position where you are having your emotional and mental health needs met so that you can be the best version of yourself for your kids.

Because at the end of the day, I’m gonna leave you with a very, very expensive piece of paper. A decree or an order or whatever, and then I’m gone, and that person can still be there, and that person can still help you through what comes next.

Holly: So what are some communication strategies lawyers can use that are effective in dealing with these high conflict personalities?

Christina: So I have two that I use routinely, and they’re the two I talk about in my paper. And I literally have on the side of my computer. You can’t see it here, but I have them written. I have stickies on the side of my computer, and the first one is called BIFF, and the second is called EAR. So BIFF is what I use when I am writing and communicating in a written form with a client, an opposing party, an opposing counsel, the court, anything that keeps it simple.

And BIFF stands for brief, informative, friendly, and. Firm, and so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to keep the communication short and to the point. We are informative. We’re only addressing the actual issue. There’s no name calling, there’s no unnecessary sidebars, there’s no opinions needed. We are just dealing with the issue in front of us. Friendly.

I’m going to take a respectful tone of voice. I’m going to try, not always perfect at it, but I’m going to try to check my sarcasm and my snark, my little sassy pants. We try to check them at the door. And then firm. I’ve answered your question. I’m not leaving it open for further discussion. I’m not leaving it open for further you getting back to me to argue with me about it.

So that works especially well when I have to write to an opposing party that thinks they know everything. Or my client, when my client is that high conflict personality. The EAR is what we do for verbal communication. And so when I’m on the phone with a client who’s spiraling, when I’m on the phone with an attorney who’s spiraling, and they spiral in different ways. And EAR stands for empathy, attention, and respect.

And so from an empathetic perspective, I’m trying to acknowledge, yes, I hear what you’re saying. Maybe I don’t agree with you, maybe I’m going to argue with you about it, if you’re my opposing counsel, but I hear what you’re saying. And then attention. I’m giving you my full attention. I’m not also texting while I’m talking to you. I’m not trying to answer emails.

I’m not going uh huh uh huh uh huh, yeah, okay. I’m present in that moment with them. And then respect. Civility, professionalism. Again, checking, checking, checking my sass, checking my snark. I have a tendency, I know about myself, to sound very snarky, even if I don’t intend to.

And so just bringing that respect to the fact that whoever you’re dealing with this is very, very personal to them. And if you have an attorney who’s making it very personal because they’re dysregulated, it’s still very personal to them. But especially for clients, it’s very personal to them.

Holly: So one of the tactics that I use, particularly if the difficult personality is opposing counsel, is just putting everything in writing. I don’t want to have that phone call where they’re going to yell at me, or they’re going to lash out and say all these things. I’m putting in writing, and then if you want to lash out with me in writing, go for it.

Christina: Go for it. Exhibit A.

Holly: Yes, yes. And with certain clients, it’s very similar. And if we have, you know, you end up on the phone with them and they’re lashing out, or they’re doing X, Y and Z, or they’re just not being rational. They’re not understanding, or they’re, you know, saying they want to do something that maybe we don’t recommend that they do. We’ll follow it up with putting it in writing.

Christina: Absolutely.

Holly: To summarize our call, we talked about A, B and C, and we’re gonna do X, Y, and Z.

Christina: Absolutely, absolutely.

Voiceover: This episode of The Texas Family Law Insiders podcast is sponsored by The Draper Law Firm. Providing family law litigation in Collin, Denton, and Dallas counties and appeals across Texas. For more information, visit draperfirm.com or call 469-715-6801.

Holly: The high conflict personalities also come up not just in the dealings that we have with our client or the opposing counselor or the pro se, but they come up in the relationships between our clients and the opposing party and maybe even our clients and the kids. So what advice should we give to clients about communicating with a high conflict co parent?

Christina: So one of the things that I recommend people do is first familiarize themselves with these communication styles. I routinely give out the BIFF book in my office. In fact, I’ve got some on order right now because I’ve run out of them, but there’s a BIFF for co parenting book, and I just give it out. If you’re dealing with this, I’m gonna give it to you, and then I expect you to read it, and I expect you to. I’m going to see in my communications with you that you are employing it.

With that, I tell people all the time, you can make communication on your terms. Okay, if they are blowing up your phone, put them on mute. You don’t have to talk to them the minute they want to talk to you. Don’t block them. You need the information unless you’re ordered to communicate through an app, and then which case, feel free to block them.

Not on the app, but on your phone. But take control of it. They are not in control of when you communicate with them, absent an emergency. Then I tell them, feed it through something like chatGPT, or if you’re using our family wizard or app close, a lot of them have tone AI that’ll help you write it. Don’t let them control your emotions. Don’t let them suck you into their emotions. So that’s, of course, a lot of times when you’re dealing with the co-parent.

Feed it through. Get a good answer before you respond. Don’t react. Don’t let them put you in the position of reacting. When you’re dealing with kids, and what I’m seeing more and more. I don’t know if you’re seeing this in your practice, but probably, probably since covid, I mean, the last five years these teenage kids, and it’s getting younger and younger, are just being put in these positions of choosing, and then being given permission by a parent to choose.

Or encouraged by a parent to choose. You don’t have to go see your dad. I know your mom’s crazy. You don’t have to deal with them. And so you have the client who is either the alienating parent, and I you know that’s encouraging the child to empower themselves and be heard, all of which are appropriate things to do, but not in a manner of just cutting out a parent because you’ve decided you don’t like them anymore.

And so when you’re in that situation, if your client’s the one doing that, and I’m calling my client out on it, I’m BIFFing my client, you know, and I’m encouraging if they’re the alienated parent that they are BIFFing with that high conflict parent who’s creating that.

And then I’m encouraging them when they talk to their kids, if you are the parent whose kid thinks somehow they have the right to say they’re not going to see their other parent, and you are encouraging them to see the other parent, you’re going to be using that EAR. Okay, why don’t you want to see? Tell me what’s going on. Help me help you come to a way that we can make this happen. Because you need that relationship.

Are you unsafe? Is this your best friends got a different schedule than you have, and you guys just want to be together on weekends. Because, let’s be honest, at that point, they don’t really want to be with either parent. They want to be with their friends. We don’t have to demonize this person to get what we want. And so teaching them how to listen to what’s being said, that isn’t what’s being said. A lot of that communication trickles down.

Holly: And in the situations where you have the really difficult, high conflict teen or child, it’s usually not young kids we’re just talking about, probably in the 12 and up range.

Christina: Generally, yes, I would agree.

Holly: I think alienation, which I know, if you talk to the mental health professionals, they don’t like that buzzword anymore, but, you know, we still use it.

Christina: Yes, it’s also what I listen for in that intake interview.

Holly: Yeah, usually there’s some sort of alienation going on where one parent is not encouraging the relationship with the other parent, and figuring out how to deal with that. And sometimes, let’s say you represent mom, and the kid is upset with dad or doesn’t want to go to see dad.

You feel like, oh, it’s going to help my relationship with this kid if I agree or I encourage that, and that is universally the wrong thing to do. And it’s counterintuitive for the parent to tell them that’s your dad. You’re going to see your dad, and I can’t wait to hear about all the things that you do when you get back.

Christina: I had a client one time who said, well, I don’t want to gaslight my kids. If they don’t want to go, I need to hear them, and I need to be present for that. And I’m like, that’s very honorable, but also you’re not their therapist, and so your job is to encourage them to appropriately love their other parent.

And unless you’re showing up with some significant red flags, you may think on a scale of one to 10 you are killing it like you’re a solid nine, but unless that other parent is like a two and needs to be supervised, you’re gonna have to show up with something pretty significant. You’re not gaslighting your kid by saying, hey, I know, I know you enjoy being over here, but it’s important for you to have this relationship with your dad.

And you’re gonna go. Because I’m your parent. People tell me all the time, I can’t force my kid to go. And I’m like, if your kid said, hey, mom, by the way, I’m gonna take your car tonight and drive to Mexico and go party, you’d find a way to make it not happen. So why can’t you make them get in the car with the other parent?

Holly: Right. I’ve regularly had the conversation with people who are asking for advice on this topic, and I can’t make them go, you know, whether it’s a client or it’s somebody in a Facebook group where they’re asking for these questions or whatever, and I’m like, you make your kid go to school, right? I mean, your kid’s not truant.

Christina: Exactly.

Holly: What would you do if your kid didn’t want to go to school? You’d take away their phone, you’d punish them.

Christina: You don’t reward them.

Holly: Right. By giving them the thing they are seeking.

Christina: Exactly.

Holly: Yeah, I think that’s a very tricky situation that attorneys need to be ready to advise their clients how to handle. So in your paper, there were a couple of advanced scenarios that you talk through, and I thought those were interesting, so let’s kind of tick through those real quick. One of them was the serial attorney firer. It made me chuckle when I saw this, because in your paper about, you know, somebody who’s already had four lawyers, I was like, oh, that’s this on our red flag list.

Christina: Oh, absolutely.

Holly: Somebody is not getting through the intake gates if they’ve had a bunch of attorneys and they fired a bunch of attorneys. Now, yes, it’s not unusual for people to have an attorney for their divorce and then they hire somebody else on modification and by itself, that’s not a red flag. But if you’re having attorneys withdrawing and it’s the middle of a case and you’ve already had two attorneys, the chances that I’m willing to take that case are slim to none.

Christina: Absolutely, I completely agree. So one of the things that is important to me is hearing people, and I feel like my personal perspective on my practice is that the first thing I do when I meet with people is I’m here to educate them. I’m not here to sell myself. I’m not here to create a scenario where they absolutely need me.

I’m here to educate them, and so I generally am willing to meet with them, depending on who they fired and what I’ve seen in court. Because I’m in a small community, if I’ve watched your hearing and I’ve seen you in action, or I’ve seen your attorney was absolutely doing their job, and you have bad facts, and you’re not giving any of that information or taking any responsibility for that in your intake phone call with us.

No, you’re probably not gonna get through the door. But if I can hear you say, hey, I’ve learned some things, or I’ve had this particular attorney that really doesn’t hear their clients. And I know they don’t because they have a different style than I do. You know, sometimes I’m willing to go ahead and meet with them.

And I think if you meet with them, and if you ultimately let them hire you, aside from all the things that we do to protect ourselves, protect our practices, paper our files, all of that kind of stuff, aside from all of that, I have learned a lot of these clients, what they need is empathy and boundaries.

And so they tend to be high maintenance, because the only boundary they’ve received is no, whereas I don’t mind explaining this is my boundary, and this is what’s going to happen if you cross it. It’s not just no. Most of them, they don’t know why I have a boundary I have. As much as it’s common sense to you and me, well, why aren’t you available after hours? You should be available if I need you.

When you finally say to somebody, the thing that’s so common to us, which is, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t get a hold of a judge, I can’t get an order signed, I can’t get an emergency. The cops aren’t going to talk to me. They don’t care what I have to say. They go, oh, okay, that makes sense. I handle this the same I would, as if I didn’t have an attorney, and I’m going to figure this out.

So I find that that’s a big thing, is setting those boundaries, explaining why those boundaries exist. I’m empathetic to the journey they’ve had, but I will say I tend to make sure I do everything with them in writing. And so I tailor my emails often with the BIFF.

And then, and one thing I’ll do is I’ll give you your too long didn’t read, and then I’ll give you the more paragraphs so you can break it down and read it as you need, which covers my need to communicate with their need to keep it short. And then I explain this is how our relationship is going to work, and it has to be a relationship. It has to go both ways, and both people have responsibilities in that.

Holly: So another one that we all too often have to deal with, and probably universally dislike dealing with, is an obnoxious pro se litigant. What tips do you have for that?

Christina: Girl. I just got done with the most obnoxious pro se. He decided at some point during the case, so I’d communicated with him in writing. I was kind, I was polite. I treat everything as though it will be exhibit A because so help me, if I’m going to go down on something, it’s not going to be because I let my mouth get away from me.

Most of the time. So this guy is emailing and explaining to me why he’s not going to give me something that I was entitled to have, and I needed to file a motion for discovery, which is not a thing, and if I was too incompetent to practice law, well, that was my problem, not his. And so I responded with, please, hire a lawyer.

Google is not your friend. That’s all I said. And this was, you know, after eight emails to which he responded, well, Krispy Kreme is not yours. And then proceeded to call me Krispy Kreme. I proceeded to attempt to fat shame me throughout emails. Would copy his wife, my client on emails and say, the only thing higher than her outrageous billing rate is the number on her scale. Just personal, obnoxious.

Holly: What in the world?

Christina: Yeah, yeah. And he would address emails to Dear Krispy Kreme, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I BIFFed. I BIFFed, I BIFFed, I BIFFed. I fed everything through chatGPT. Sometimes I’d go through chatGPT and Claude to make sure, like, am I covering everything here?

Because I love AI for those purposes, well, for a lot of purposes, but especially for that. And when all these emails got in front of the court, there was nothing the court could hold against me. I handled it that way, and it was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to act like an eight year old, just like he was acting like an eight year old.

But you cannot get pulled into that and you have to walk that high road. And what was interesting was the more and more I did that, the more and more unwound he got, which just made it worse for him once we finally made it to court. This doesn’t help you, and so don’t take the bait. Don’t take the bait. Do everything in writing. I will not communicate with a pro se party verbally.

Holly: Yes, that is a very, very good rule of thumb.

Christina: Yep.

Holly: So what are the ethical considerations to be aware of when working with high conflict clients?

Christina: So I think the big ethical things kind of come from two perspectives. When you have the high conflict person who is attempting to just be mean, to manipulate, to control, I think you’ve got to help them recognize their bad behavior without mirroring that bad behavior to them. I’ve watched lawyers get in screaming matches with their own clients, which is mind boggling to me.

And so you’ve got to ethically, zealously represent without letting them put you in a position where you’re going outside of our bounds of advocacy, our bounds, our ethics, our rules. I think that when you have the high maintenance client, you’ve got to make sure that you are encouraging them to get the help they need. That you are not crossing that line of trying to be their counselor, trying to be their therapist.

You don’t get caught up in their drama, their trauma, because you do no good. And ultimately, in some ways, you end up turning yourself into a fact witness, and we’ve got to stay in our lanes and do what we do well. But I think we have an ethical obligation as human beings to try to recognize where people are, and we do that all the time.

We don’t think about it, but we do it all the time. We do it with the person who checks us out at the grocery store just chatting with them. We’re always constantly reading those communication styles, those non verbal cues to communicate with people, and we have to do that with our clients, to meet them where they are, and not simply demand that they communicate the way we communicate.

Holly: So we’re just about out of time. But one thing I like to ask everyone who comes on the podcast is, if you could give one piece of advice to young family lawyers, what would it be?

Christina: Learn how to set your boundaries. Set them strong, set them early. I would always rather you have a strong boundary and then say, okay, maybe that’s too rigid, and walk back from it, then have your boundaries way out here and have to retrain people on what’s appropriate. Know that it’s okay to have a boundary, whether that’s I’m only going to communicate with you in writing.

Whether that’s I’m not going to talk to you after close of business. I’m not going to be available to you after close of business. Whatever that is, set those boundaries, because years and years ago, I watched several very distinguished attorneys retire. Left their practices in a variety of different ways. And I realized that as a baby lawyer, I couldn’t imagine practicing law without them here.

Because, again, small community, so we’ve got 15 or 20 of us that are doing everything in this Greater East Texas area. And life went on without them. The practice of law went on without them. And I realized that if I got hit by a truck tomorrow, my clients, I’m sure would go, oh, that’s terrible. That’s so sad. I probably have a couple who would feel really badly.

But the biggest calls my office would get is what happens to me now? What happens to my case? What’s going to happen next? And I cannot make their life overtake my life. And so set those boundaries, set them early so that you can be the best that you can be when you are present for them.

Holly: Where can our listeners go if they want to learn more about you?

Christina: So we have a website, hollwarthlaw. I post on Facebook. I post on Insta, I try to post on LinkedIn. Not so great about that. You can find any of those. And the wonderful thing is that if you actually spell my last name correctly, like we’re pretty much the only people, you’re gonna find me. So it’s easy to find me in all of those places.

Holly: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Christina: Thank you.

Holly: It was really great to get to chat with you. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this podcast, please take a second to leave us a review and subscribe to enjoy future episodes.

Voiceover: The Texas Family Law Insiders podcast is sponsored by The Draper Law Firm. We help people navigate divorce and child custody cases and handle family law appellate matters. For more information, visit our website at www.draperfirm.com.