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Geraldine  0:12  
Hello, my name is Geraldine Johns-Putra. I'm the host of the New Earth lawyer podcast. I'm a lawyer based in Melbourne, Australia. My podcast features lawyers who are changing the practice of law to change the world. Throughout my podcast, I have interviewed many lawyers who are part of what is known as the integrative law movement. What is the integrative law movement? In this video, I'll explain it, how it came about, and where you can find integrative lawyers

Kim  0:46  
So Lawyers as Peacemakers was actually commissioned by the ABA. They asked me to write that because they saw the work I was doing, I was videotaping interviews of lawyers, and the editor came to me and she said, we know this is the way law's going, but we didn't think that we had progressed this far. We would like for you to write a book about what you're discovering. So in 2008, as you said, I gave up my house, and I travelled with a videographer and we interviewed about 100 lawyers, who were pioneers in a new way of thinking. And so that new way of thinking got written into Lawyers as Peacemakers. At that time, there were things like, what is collaborative law? What is restorative justice, and people were beginning to do contemplative practices in law, and starting to integrate their spirituality and there was this whole movement towards, well, maybe lawyers really should be doing some more personal growth, and maybe coaches would help. And what about wellbeing? So after that book, I continued to travel and I started going overseas. In fact, the first country I went to outside of the US was Australia. And I was invited to come and talk about a holistic approach to law. And now that I've been on six continents, meeting lawyers, I actually could see that it is an international movement and that's when I wrote the update, or the expansion, which is Lawyers as Changemakers and that's about the global integrative law movement. 

Geraldine  2:28  
From writing the books Lawyers as Peacemakers and Lawyers as Changemakers, Kim Wright had discovered the integrative law movement. Today, you can visit the website integrative law.com, run by Kim, to discover more about this movement, and all of the practice areas and ways in which integrative lawyers work and serve. What Kim found is that integrative lawyers have four things in common. Firstly, integrative lawyers are reflective.

Chamundai  3:03  
I definitely started life as a traditional lawyer. And I actually loved the law and law school and was so excited to be like one of those TV stars who went to court and found out the truth. Except I found that when I went to court, it wasn't necessarily about finding the truth. And I found I had many, many clients, not only family law clients, but in other areas of law that I worked in, where even though we won the court cases, they weren't happy. And I was really puzzled by that. And I had loved litigation and court work. And I did work a lot in family law. So that was the area that I mainly practised in. And these clients seemed so unhappy at the end of their legal case, even when they'd achieved everything they told me that they wanted. And I was really puzzled about what else is going on. And I felt like the legal system wasn't the structure that could help me enough to help them.

Geraldine  4:09  
Kim also found that integrative lawyers tend to be values-based, and purpose-based.

Geraldine  4:15  
Purpose grows out of passion. Think about what you're passionate about, it will be unique to you. They are the things that you can spend hours on and not even notice the time passing. When you do them, you are in a state of what we call flow. And these things energise you rather than exhaust you. In the words of Joseph Campbell, it's about following your bliss, because that's the word for it. When I realised the vital connection between passion and purpose, I began to think about the things that I loved learning about. I am a reader. I love reading. Over the years, I have read hundreds of books, mainly non-fiction ones. But to find my passions, I had to think about the ones that stayed with me. I made a list of my favourite books and themes, again began to emerge. Out of that work was born my purpose, which is to create better enterprises and legal systems. Enterprises that aren't just about making profit, and legal systems that will enable this.

Geraldine  5:39  
Next Kim found that integrative lawyers were systems thinkers and design thinkers.

Patrick  5:45  
So I had this conundrum, this paradox. Why is it that these good, responsible caring people collectively become stupid, irresponsible and uncaring? What is it about the system? So, in a way I ended up and I used to, I thought, I suppose because I was good at maths at school, I thought, I'm going to solve it. So I'll find the answer to organising, you know, we'll design a better system. Because I could see, I could feel if we could get these very, very capable people, and all the systems that surround them, just pointed in a slightly different direction. Turn away from growth, turn away to regeneration, to love, to peace, to beauty, just switch and solve world poverty.

Geraldine  6:34  
And the final thing that Kim found was that integrative lawyers are harbingers of evolutionary conscious.

Idara  6:42  
Well, I've always wanted to do more formal study of metaphysics, and I certainly had time to do it. So that's when I enrolled in the doctoral program at that time. Because what I was doing, I mean, my thesis research in particular, was I was looking at how energy manifests in different corporate settings. I was looking at corporations as an energetic entity, because I wanted to see how people can live out their spiritual truths in this environment, if it possible, how that happens. One thing that was very interesting is that there are portions of my thesis that were channelled. Yes, I made that clear to the panel that was evaluating my thesis to say, hey, look, when you see these portions of the thesis that are in italics, these are from, you know, channelled entities, they don't wish to be identified at this time. But I want you to know that, you know, this is going alongside, you know, the traditional research, and, obviously, because of the company, I was in that wasn't a problem. But these ideas, the ideas that I was exploring, were channelled, and then I picked up, you know, supporting research to expand upon them, or what have you. But there was one quote that really kicked things off, and I'll read it to you, because I still still remember because they hit me like a tonne of bricks. It's like, the downfall of a corporation is a potent example of what happens when unhealed individuals hold leadership positions.

Geraldine  8:30  
Now that we know what integrative lawyers are, where do we find them? What areas of law do they practise in?

Marguerite  8:40  
I suppose part of where I come from is the idea that law has claimed territory that perhaps doesn't belong to it. I think that when there are any interpersonal disputes, which is usually where interpersonal relationships intersect with the law, of course, when people are in dispute, if we stand back, it's quite curious that people with training as lawyers would be in charge of the idea of helping people to resolve interpersonal disputes. And I think that lawyers often, we don't understand our own conflict style, we don't understand how we're contributing to the conflict. And also, when we see people come along to us in some kind of dispute, we're not seeing the context for that. We're not seeing where that fits into the system. We don't have any understanding of the individual's emotional or psychological makeup, what's in their personality. We don't understand the dynamic that's happening between people. And I absolutely agree with you that this is, the collaborative approach is not only right for people who are separating, but in any kind of dispute. And one of the areas that's starting to grow in Australia is people who have disputes about wills and estates and like divorce they're about family relationships, much more than about money or law in many cases.

Geraldine  10:05  
I've been talking to people around that. But we haven't really got into restorative justice on this show. So I'd love to hear about your experiences with that.

Kelly  10:16  
Yeah. So, a few years ago, I was in, there was a workshop and I said, oh, I want to learn about this. And there were there were four people sitting on a stage. Two couples. And Andy and Kate Grosmaire's daughter Ann was shot and killed by Michael and Julie McBride's son. And they knew each other for years, they were, the kids were young adults, but they had been dating for quite a while. And these two couples made a decision that they didn't want Conor McBride to get the death penalty. And they wanted to talk to him about the last moments of Ann's life. And they found restorative justice, which is a way of addressing harm, where the person who did the harm has admitted accountability and wants to make things as right as possible. And the person who was harmed agrees they want a face-to-face meeting. And if those parameters are met, then a trained facilitator will meet with each person involved in the incident and anyone else that's impacted. and talk to them about the four main questions: what happened, who was impacted and how, what needs to be done to make things as right as possible, and what needs to be done to make sure this never happens again. And then they talk about, then they gather at a facilitated meeting, and go over those questions together. And then those become an agreement that helps make things as right, repair harm as much as possible. Obviously, in a murder case, you cannot bring someone back. But their repair came in some of the things they asked Conor to do. Like when he gets out he's going to speak about there was dating violence in the relationship. So he's going to speak to high schoolers about dating violence for a certain number of years. There's other things that they wanted him to do, after he got out of prison, and also, obviously, there was prison time involved in this agreement. But it's so transformative. In every study, it's been shown that I've ever read about restorative justice, it has shown that there's effectiveness in reducing recidivism, and satisfaction of the victim, and their family and the offender's family who really is normally, you know, just cast aside.

Patrick  12:56  
I suppose for me, conceptually, we're shifting from a sort of a top-down assumption that purpose needs to be led or owners, finance, money needs to be led, or a big white man needs to lead, you know, somebody must be in charge of this chaos, right? And what the insight from quantum physics of, you know, 60,70 years ago was, well, life ain't like that, you know, life is dynamic and moving. And sometimes you have to see light as a wave. And actually, depending on how you look at it, it will show up as a wave or individual particles. And that's, you know, and you can read this in the Tao de Ching of 2000 years ago. So what would a... and as soon as we have this dominant thing, it just tends to sort of adopt the thinking of a cancer cell and just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. But if we allow a much more human, you know, like, our left brain, right brain. Who's in charge, you know?  

Geraldine  13:59  
Who's in charge of a forest? 

Patrick  14:02  
Who's in charge of a forest? Where's the head tree, you know? 

Geraldine  14:04  
Yeah. 

Patrick  14:04  
This is what we do, right? We do to make sense of an organisation or complex system of people, we sort of go in and say, oh, who's in charge. And in a way, the neatness of a legal structure is it brings a template to say, in all this messy humanity, well, that person is in charge, that group of people are in charge, and that person, that group and their employees, it's very simple. And I think the evolution that's happening is to... evolution tends to bring greater complexity. So what if we had four CEOs and five boards? Have, you know, and one board is a youth board, which particularly takes care of the children? So what if an oil company had a youth board and it had a wise elder, wise elder women board? You know, and then nobody's in charge? And that's much more like shifting to a democratic model.

Peter  14:55  
So what often happens in conflicts is, it's a 'you owe me this' or 'I'm not liable in the way that you're saying'. I remember having a dealing with a partnership dispute a little while ago, and the two men who were involved had built up a very, very successful business that was turning over millions. And it was almost stultified, because they were at such loggerheads, they'd been together for 15 years, When they finally got together and addressed it, we worked through a number of issues, and there was only a couple left. And the question that was asked was, look at the man sitting opposite you, he has been your partner for 15 years, and you and he and your families have gone out on innumerable occasions together, your children he is godfather to your children, and almost all of the material wealth that you are presently enjoying is as a result of that man's input. So what is it, not that you want from this man, but what is it that you might give to him? And that's when we were talking about the price, the buyout price, and we were able to agree on it like inside of moments.

Kim  16:28  
A conscious contract is a relational-values based contract. It's actually is a trademarked term for something that's becoming generically accepted in a lot of places. But our particular conscious contract version is a process rather than a piece of paper. So the process is that if people are going to be in a relationship that is documented by a contract, that they should know who they are. So we have a conversation, like who are you and what's important to you. With the clients, like this is not lawyers swapping drafts, this is, we're going to come into the room, we're going to have the client in the room or the Zoom Room, we're going to have the client there, we're going to have, if there's another lawyer, the lawyers there and the other client is there, and we're all going to talk about what's really important, like why did you choose each other? You know, what makes this the right relationship for going forward? And that's when we talk about what are your values. We might, you know, look at mission, vision and those sorts of things that people and companies look at.  And that's, we actually put it into the contract, it becomes memorialised in the contract, so that it becomes a reference point. And then, so that's the touchstone, that's the first part that makes it a conscious contract. And then the next part is, we call it ACED - addressing change, engaging disagreement. So then there's this conversation about how do we preserve this because we are human. And human beings get triggered. Human beings have arguments, they have differences of opinion, circumstances change, but these things happen. And when that happens, what are we going to do?

Geraldine  18:33  
These are just some of the practice areas in which you'll find integrative lawyers. But there are many more. There are lawyers who practise in what's called sharing law, which unlike traditional property law focuses on collaborative economies, and the minimisation of waste. There are lawyers who practise Earth jurisprudence or wild law that seeks to give rights to the planet and nature. You may already be thinking or practising like an integrative lawyer. You may call yourself an integrative lawyer, or you may not. It doesn't matter. What matters is that more and more lawyers are coming together and standing up, reflecting on how they can make things better, basing their practices on personal values, working towards a selfless purpose or mission, thinking about how they can design and improve the entire system. And understanding that all of this represents a shift towards a better place for all of humanity.

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