Extreme family matters

Did you hear the one about the man who burned his wife's wedding dress in a backyard bonfire the night she left him? How about the couple, divorcing after 40 years of marriage, who amicably divided their retirement accounts but couldn't agree on who would keep the painting of the little girl on a swing?

Or the lesbian couple who sought legal review of their contract with a sperm donor - who happened to be the brother of one of the women?

These are not setups to jokes swapped at the bar association cocktail party. They are the stuff that family law is made of: the legal parsing of love and betrayal, patrimony and parenthood, sex, money, and, occasionally, violence. They are the grist of Margaret Klaw's days as a family lawyer in Philadelphia. And they are the center of her just-published book, Keeping It Civil: The Case of the Pre-Nup and the Porsche & Other True Accounts From the Files of a Family Lawyer.

Klaw, 55, who has practiced family law for more than 25 years and who blogs about it for the Huffington Post, said she wanted to convey the drama, intimacy, and impact of her work with clients, both in and out of the courtroom.

"I love what I do," she said in a recent interview in her Mount Airy home, where the wall heading up the stairs is filled with family photographs. "I sit there in court sometimes and think, 'This is so interesting. I can't believe I get paid for this.' There's so much drama. I don't mean titillating. But powerful. It's what really matters to people."

The cases described in Keeping It Civil - disputes involving child custody, prenuptial agreements, division of property, and domestic violence - also illustrate how much family law has changed in a quarter-century.

"The legal system is starting to catch up with what's going on in society and in some areas, pushing it," Klaw said. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized marriage for gay and lesbian couples. Every state has laws that prohibit domestic violence. Joint custody is more the norm than the exception. Courts - in an era where baby-making can involve sperm donors, egg donors, and gestational carriers - are grappling with the definition of parenthood.

When Klaw began practicing law, being gay or lesbian was "unsanctioned. It was legally permissible to hold that against a parent. In a decade, there's been a sea change. The 'underground' family has gone mainstream."

Twenty-five years ago, she said, "women were terrified at the thought of losing custody of their children." If that happened, "you were seen as a bad mother. Now so many fathers really want to have their kids with them. A lot of younger moms who are getting divorced fully expect that they will have shared custody."

While the legal terrain has shifted, Klaw - friends call her Margy - also has changed. The book tracks her evolution from emotional sponge - an attorney who overidentified with her clients' struggles - to seasoned practitioner.

One of her first cases involved a young couple in which the man - who was under a court order of protection after attempting to choke his girlfriend - was trying to gain full custody of the baby they'd had together.

The judge ruled that the baby should live with her paternal grandparents. The mother, Darlene, became hysterical, writhing and screaming on the floor outside the courtroom, and Klaw spent the weekend obsessing about the case. She had a baby and a 4-year-old herself at the time, and she imagined what it would feel like to have them wrested from her care.

"I went home and looked at my baby and started to cry," she writes. But by the following Monday, when Klaw called her client to check in, Darlene and her boyfriend had reconciled and were engaged to be married.

Klaw learned her lesson. "You have to find the right balance between caring about the outcome of the case and putting some kind of wall between you and your client so you can continue to live your life without internalizing the client's problems."

Still, that wall sometimes crumbles, as it did the day Klaw remembers as the worst of her legal career. Larry Stromberg - a man whose wife, Stefan, had just filed for divorce and obtained a legal order of protection against him - went to the couple's shared apartment and killed both Stefan and her mother.

The protection order "is an important tool," Klaw said. "But in the end, it's just a piece of paper. It doesn't create a boundary around you. That made me think, 'What am I doing this for? And what could I have done differently?' "

Though Klaw later helped analyze the case with representatives from the district attorney's office and domestic violence agencies, she could not think of an action or word on her part that would have prevented the murders. But she did begin to do one thing differently; She tempered her assessment of human beings. Even an affable man who shakes his wife's attorney's hand can be capable of murder. "This is Stefan's legacy to me," she writes. "Human beings are fundamentally unpredictable. The unimaginable can and does happen."

Fortunately, not every day. There are many days, Klaw said, when she can, through legal persuasion, protect a child from an abusing parent, secure a woman's financial stability through a fair alimony settlement, or help broker a joint custody agreement that lets a kid have time with both parents.

Being a lawyer was not Klaw's lifelong dream; she aspired to play concert violin, but dropped out of conservatory when she realized she wasn't talented enough. Feminism - her growing interest in reproductive rights, employment discrimination, and domestic violence - drew her to law school. A few years after graduating, she began working for family lawyer Joni Berner; the two "immediately clicked," Berner recalled. In 1994, she invited Klaw to become a partner.

Now the firm, with nine attorneys, all women, is Berner Klaw & Watson. Klaw and Berner joke that their law partnership is a "20-year marriage"; Klaw dedicated her book to both Berner and her "partner in life," architect Alan Metcalfe. The two have been married for 32 years and have daughters ages 27 and 24.

The practice of family law, with all its strife and heartbreak, hasn't soured Klaw on love, commitment, or marriage. In fact, she said, her work life makes her cherish her home life and its stability even more.

"People going through family law cases are at a really difficult point in their lives. I really get to see who people are: Are they generous, are they suspicious, are they optimistic, are they pessimistic? I like the transformative nature of what I'm seeing. They're going through a difficult time and I'm helping them navigate it."