Reimagining Divorce: An Interview with Erin Levine of Hello Divorce

Erin Levine:
The amount of grief and pain and anger and resentment that goes into the 1, 2, 3, sometimes 5 or 20 years leading up to a divorce is so awful. But the way people come alive in that next chapter, if they have what I like to call a good divorce, is so much better than a bad marriage.

Ali Katz:
Welcome to the NewLaw Podcast for Entrepreneurial Lawyers. Here at Personal Family Lawyer, we want to help more families and business owners make eyes wide open legal and financial decisions. But we cannot do this without you. Which is why we started this podcast to find those of you ready to offer a better way to serve your clients.

Ali Katz:
So if you are a legal professional who wants to help improve the legal and financial well being of your clients and offer a service model that differentiates you while meeting the needs of your community, and rest easy knowing that you are running your law practice like a real business, then join us on this journey by subscribing to the show and find out how you can use a new law business model to love your life as a lawyer.

Ali Katz:
This episode is a raw, real conversation about divorce, venture capital, business, and if you like those kinds of things, you're going to love this episode. I'll see you on the other side.

Ali Katz:
So let's go back, back, back. When did you graduate law school? Where did you go? When did you graduate?

Erin Levine:
University of San Francisco, 2005.

Ali Katz:
And did you always know you wanted to be a lawyer or did that spring up at some point because you didn't know what to do with your life? How did you make your way to law school?

Erin Levine:
I did not always know I wanted to be a lawyer. I became a lawyer or wanted to become a lawyer after my own experience with the legal system. When I was a late teen, I sued my abuser. I had been abused and raped by my gymnastics coach and I turned him in after many years of abuse. And then I went through a civil case, a criminal case, got justice in like the traditional sense of the word. But the whole experience was just awful, triggering and inefficient and messy and just almost worse than the abuse itself. And so I became a lawyer because I wanted to really change the system itself and then realized that that's not me. I'm not a politician, I'm not a legislator.

Erin Levine:
Like that's not where I shine, that's not what I want to do. So sort of let, that led into family law because I felt like if I could help people who ordinarily didn't have much contact or any contact with the legal system, navigate it and come out better for it, then that would be a huge win.

Ali Katz:
Yeah. And so did you come right out of law school and go into divorce law in your own practice, one to one, just serving clients? How did that end up occurring?

Erin Levine:
No, I took a job with a firm. Well, actually, I did public interest work all through law school and expected to have a public interest job out of law school and found that those jobs were wildly competitive. And having not been like Stanford or Yale or Harvard, there was just no way I was going to get one of those jobs. So I took a job about an hour and a half away from my house. So I was commuting back and forth for several years. And I was so naive. It was a family law position, but right in the job description, it said I was going to get to go to court from the first day. And I thought that's what it needs to be a real lawyer.

Erin Levine:
And so here it is. So. And it's true, from the very first day I went to court. And that mentor, God bless him, man, he brought in the messiest, wildest, craziest cases. And we have the best story. So my assistant from day one, Shelley, she still works with me today.

Ali Katz:
Yeah.

Erin Levine:
And so every so often at work we have like these happy hours where we just like, tell these stories about, oh, the witness jumped over the, you know, witness stand at a trial and attacked me or when I went to do a property cleanup and the shotgun was pulled out and just like these really crazy stories.

Ali Katz:
Yeah, yeah.

Erin Levine:
That I don't miss all.

Ali Katz:
So you went right into court. You really were in the trenches. And was it all divorce related?

Erin Levine:
Yeah, I mean, it was. Well, I did some probate trials like, oh, God, those were. I thought divorce was bad. I thought people were bad at the end of their marriage. They are a thousand times worth like death when they're fighting.

Ali Katz:
And they're fighting over the stupidest things.

Erin Levine:
The stupidest things. Oh, my gosh, it's crazy. Well, so, yeah, I started right away in divorce, family law, a little bit of, you know, estate administration. And yeah, we just kind of went from there. But I got a really. The interesting thing was in law school, I was really, really shy and the Socratic method was terrifying for me. I didn't look like anyone else in law school. I went in with a Mohawk. I had big platform boots.

Erin Levine:
I spent the summer before law school following Anita Franco all over Europe. We made our own language. And so when I got to law school that fall, I could barely remember English. Like, I was just a mess. And so it was just really uncomfortable and all the professors wanted to pigeonhole me. Like, they would come to me for an answer and it was just awful. So I almost wanted to hide under my desk every time I got called on. So one of the reasons why I chose this job right out of law school with court is I'm like, I want to face my fears.

Erin Levine:
Like, the last three years, I've been hiding, I've been afraid to speak, and now I'm going to speak. I'm going to learn to use my voice. And for me, that was great. That's kind of what I needed. Even though I learned to be a terrible lawyer at that time, I did learn how to advocate on behalf of myself and others.

Ali Katz:
Yeah, that's fantastic. I remember the first time I had to go to court. It was probate related. And it's like, I don't know what I'm doing. And I remember saying to myself, just act like a lawyer. And I did. I just acted like a lawyer. And it worked.

Ali Katz:
And I was like, yeah, okay, this is cool. I could do this. And there were aspects of going to court in litigation that I love. The deposition that lasted until 11:00 at night, though, was the realization of, oh, I'm not going to be able to be a mom the way I want to be and go to court. That's just not compatible. Like, I can't be at depositions until 11 o'clock at night with little kids, and I can't not be at depositions until 11 o'clock at night if that's what's needed in a case. And so I'm going to need to choose. And so that's really when I decided to go all in with the estate planning because there was going to be no depositions until 11:00 and full control over my schedule.

Ali Katz:
So did you go straight from that crazy experience into creating Hello Divorce, or did you start your own practice after that?

Ali Katz:
Would you love direct support to help you grow your law practice into a business you love? Go to newlaw.co/show and sign up for a call with one of our trusted law business advisors. Each of our advisors has been trained directly by me over the past five years plus to help you chart your path from wherever you are now to where you want to go as efficiently and effectively as possible. You're ready to grow. We are here to help.

Erin Levine:
I started my own practice, so I loved it. I actually did love it for a really long time. I was winning trials and I thought that's what it meant to be a really good lawyer. I did not understand how I was destroying families. I thought they were already destroyed. And by winning, I was giving people, like, a chance to have a better next chapter. I was just naive and young and I was making a lot of money. And so I was tired of commuting.

Erin Levine:
By that point, I was in a relationship, I was engaged. And so I decided to start my own firm. Actually, my father, who had retired, he was a lawyer. He was like, listen, I'll come out of retirement and come up to see you and work with you one week out of a month if you start your own firm. Because he knew I would need that sort of help to be able to do it. And so I did. And the first day I opened, he came up, like he said, and he looked at me and he said, I changed my mind. You're on your own, kid.

Erin Levine:
Like, so he knew I just kind of needed him to say, I'll do it. And he was a very different type of lawyer. He was an insurance defense attorney. But in any case, so I started my law firm. Of course, everyone said, you couldn't, you shouldn't, you're in a totally different area. Nobody, you'll never be able to get cases. It went really well right from the start. And at one point I had 13 lawyers, did really well financially, firm did really well. Loved, liked practicing law, became in love with running the business, absolutely in love with it. And then started having kids and began to have that crisis of conscience, like, what am I doing? Like, this is not healthy for people. I see a better way. So I did what a lot of lawyers, family law attorneys, start doing at that point in their life, which is like, I'm going to get a certified in mediation. I'm going to start learning how to negotiate outside of court. I'm going to start to take the level of animosity down. The problem is you're still caught in the system. Right?

Erin Levine:
The other attorney doesn't know they're still serving your client at all hours of the day and night. So then I was like, well, what about collaborative divorce? Collaborative divorce, for those of you not in family law, is where you've got lots of professionals who are all there to help the family transition outside of a trial and get to an agreement that's fair. The problem is, is that it's really inefficient, it's really expensive, it's really hard to schedule everybody's calendars. And you still got the issue of people billing on the billable hour. Yeah, they are still you know, the longer and more. Yeah.

Ali Katz:
By the escalation of that conflict.

Erin Levine:
Exactly.

Ali Katz:
Yeah.

Erin Levine:
So I started to scale back my law firm and figured out a way to not have to practice as much so that I could really start thinking about what else is out there. I started doing a lot of research. Maybe there already is a solution out there and I've missed it. That was in 2017. I started to really sort of dive in and say, is there something out there that I am missing? Is there a framework by which we can implement to really start to change how divorce was done?

Ali Katz:
Thank you. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for everything that you've put in to creating Hello Divorce. I'm super excited about looking at where I can contribute actually to Hello Divorce from the perspective of educating the consumers because of my personal story around it and to really see where we can help more lawyers to opt out of the model. That is truly incentivizing escalation of conflict. And Robert S. Kennedy Jr. whatever you think about him, he claimed to have a brainworm so that he didn't need to pay his wife alimony.

Ali Katz:
I'm sure he never thought that was going to come back and bite him in the ass. It did now because he's running for president. And that's one of the more extreme things that I've seen people do or say to avoid paying their spouse.

Erin Levine:
Wow.

Ali Katz:
And what I desire is to help people see the experience that I had, which is that, oh, you could actually do the exact opposite thing and create more abundance for yourself and your family than you ever imagined possible. Because your divorce inspires you to do it. Because now you have to support two households and what a financial opportunity. And so many, you know, we are money motivated. Right. Even people who say they're not money motivated are money motivated. And divorce, like you said, it's just this perfect moment for a life transformation. And if we can use that moment to help people live their best lives and lawyers get to be part of that, what a fulfilling career path.

Ali Katz:
And then, you know, the way of course, that I see it, interacting with estate planning. Because anybody going through divorce must update their estate plan. Nobody wants their soon to be ex spouse making their healthcare decisions or their financial decisions during the divorce. And then after the divorce, there's the whole restructuring of the estate that now looks completely different. And so in my opinion, every divorce lawyer should be partnering with Personal Family Lawyer Firms. And Personal Family Lawyer Firm maybe even wants to consider adding on the kind of divorce that is possible through Hello Divorce. The kind of divorce that Hello Divorce makes possible because you could have somebody in your office if you're a Personal Family Lawyer Firm leader. Well, now you could have somebody in your office who focuses on divorce, but not in the way that it's no good to focus on divorce, but focuses on divorce from the perspective of let's make this the moment to actually heal, to add family together, to actually resolve all those money issues, to actually resolve all the fights and okay, so you don't want to be married anymore.

Ali Katz:
Let's make this the best to your family and your kids.

Erin Levine:
Yes, because you better believe that whether you have the divorce offering in your office or not, the first stop that your clients are going to come to when they're getting a divorce is you. It will be you. They will ask you where to go.

Ali Katz:
Yeah.

Erin Levine:
And if you can offer it, great. And if not then knowing where to send them or how you can help them have a kinder, gentler. It's not just more affordable option. It's a better outcome. What I love seeing is people really coming alive. The amount of grief and pain and anger and resentment that goes into the 1, 2, 3, sometimes 5 or 20 years leading up to a divorce is so awful. But the way people come alive in that next chapter, if they have what I like to call a good divorce is so much better than a bad marriage.

Ali Katz:
Yeah. So good. And so for those of you that don't know 20 years post divorce, my kids dad actually lives with me.

Erin Levine:
That's so awesome. I don't think I knew that. Did I know that?

Ali Katz:
I don't know. I don't know if I mentioned it to you. We've mostly lived together since we got divorced other than two like three year periods where he hated me and yeah, other than that though, we pretty much always lived together because it just financially made sense and because yeah, just we wanted to parent the kids and I traveled a lot and, and my, and my kids have benefited from it so much and it was really hard and really good. Like so much personal healing that I needed to do. And I would say as well that he needed to do, even though I always say he never did his personal development work. Well the reality is he stayed in the relationship with me. That was the personal development work. There was another level of personal development work, if he could've done it it would have kept us married. But anything is possible. And so I guess I thank you again. Thank you, Erin. It's really, really so important what you're doing and.

Erin Levine:
Thank you.

Ali Katz:
Yeah. So I think we're actually going to end here with a call to action on if you are a divorce lawyer who's hearing this or if you want to be a divorce lawyer who's part of the Hello Divorce network, the Hello Divorce family. Where do they go?

Erin Levine:
Go to me. Go to Erin - erin@hellodivorce.com

Ali Katz:
Okay, great.

Erin Levine:
Just introduce yourself.

Ali Katz:
Okay, so I'm going to say do that soon because I think there's going to come a time when Erin and I are working together more closely where you will not be able to have as easy direct access to Erin possibly. So if you want to become part of the Hello Divorce family while it's still just $750 a year to be a trusted partner, yeah, I would say do that now today, because I can pretty much say for certain that based on what I have in mind, it's going to cost a lot more because it is so much tremendous value for you as a lawyer to really be serving your clients in this way. So thank you again, Erin. So good to be with you in this way.

Erin Levine:
Yeah, thank you. Have a great weekend and a great retreat. I can't wait to hear about it. And yeah, talk soon.

Ali Katz:
Well, you already heard me say it. If you're doing divorce law and you want to do it in a way that is better for your clients and ultimately better for you as well, go to hellodivorce.com, join the trusted partner program. And that $750 a year is literally nothing. It's going to be a lot more in the future. So I recommend you get locked in now at that $750 a year because I'm going to be working with Erin and supporting her to really make sure she's getting paid. Hello Divorce is getting paid what they should. Just like I help all sorts of lawyers get paid what they should. But in this case, if you want to get in at that lower pricing, do it now.

Ali Katz:
One of the things that I am well known for is rewarding the people who get in early. So all of the people who joined me over the years and got in early, they get to keep their rates as they are. We don't increase rates. And so the sooner you get in, the lower your rates are. And if you want to get in as a Personal Family Lawyer, I can see a future in which we are adding Hello Divorce and divorce services to Personal Family Lawyer Firms. But for right now, it's just if you're serving families with estate planning or business strategy, you can go to newlaw.co/show to apply to become a Personal Family Lawyer Firm leader, and get our support to build your law practice into a business you love. I look forward to seeing you on the inside.