 there's so many things you can do from sports law to entertainment law, to criminal law, to tax law, and to, you know, anything you could imagine there's a legal component to it. So it's one of those fields that's so broad and provides so many opportunities and options no matter what your talents or interests are. So welcome to the podcast, Deborah Whitson. Thank you, Kyla. So great to be here. Yes. So would you share a little bit about your background with the audience? Sure. So I've been a practicing attorney in New York State for almost 29 years now. In addition to that, and prior to that, I had careers in marketing for IBM Corporation. So I did big corporate stuff, run a couple of small businesses over the years in addition to running my law firm. And I also have a virtual online mediation company that provides online mediation for all manner of family and relationship issues. So pre-nuptial agreements, post-nuptial agreements, separations, divorces, etc. So family law mediation. Yeah, for everyone that's listening or watching, I do have every guest complete a pre-recording questionnaire. And Deborah, you mentioned that a close family friend actually was involved in a criminal matter. And that was what prompted you to go to law school. Could you share a little more detail about that? Sure. So when I was 14 years old, one of my brothers had a really good friend. So we were all in the same high school together. I was ninth grade, and my brother and his friend were seniors. And the seniors had just graduated really shockingly and tragically. My brother's friend was murdered that summer. And we were growing up in a sort of a small town, small city, and it felt very safe. And so this was the first time that something like that had really hit close to home for me and my family. So we followed the criminal proceedings very, very closely. I said everybody in our town and in our school, the perpetrator almost got off on a legal technicality. And as a 14 year old, I thought that that was really just shocking, because there was, you know, overwhelming evidence of guilt. But there was some issue in the case that nearly let him walk free. So at that point in time, I thought, well, there's something wrong with the legal system or the criminal justice system. And it's broken. If that could happen. I didn't know at age 14 that that's lots of protections for people in the law. But in my youthful view, the system could have been improved. And so that was my mission. And I went to law school with the idea that I want to be a criminal prosecutor. And indeed, that was what I did for the first 10 years of my legal. You said that the friend of your brothers, when all of that happened, you were 14 years old. What did you actually study when you were in undergrad? You know, you always knew you were going to go to law school. But what was that process like? Yeah, so the beauty of law school, I guess they call it sometimes referred to as, you know, the last great general education, it really teaches you to think critically. So the beauty of that is you can really major in anything as an undergrad and go into law. So since I knew I wanted to go into prosecution, and I had an interest in psychology, there was a psychological defense, a, you know, in that particular criminal case. So I went to Cornell University as an undergrad, and they had a program in the College of Human Ecology called Human Development and Family Studies. So that was my undergraduate major. It was a lot of psychology and sociology. Yeah, I love that. And I can see how that would play into working as a prosecutor and then now working in family law mediation. Yeah. Okay. That was awesome. Very good. So I have so many notes here. I'm going to try to get through most of them. Your prior experiences in sales, would you explain to the audience if there was any tie or relation between sales and then being a lawyer? Yeah, there's a huge tie in my mind. So I was in sales for IBM, and I also was a real estate salesperson. That's how I paid my way through college. So I got my real estate license at 18. And in law, we're storytellers, first of all, I tell my clients that I'm there to tell their story to the court in the most compelling way and persuasive way possible. So we're storytellers and we're persuaders. So sales is spot on applicable to the legal practice, you know, we're selling a position, we're selling our clients' versions to the court. Yeah, definitely. I even think, you know, when you're filling out when you're writing a resume, that's sales. When you're interviewing, that's sales. Yeah, everything is sales. Yeah, it just can get a bad rap, but lawyers can get a bad rap too. But we're all selling all day every day, you know, and how we deal with our co-workers and our romantic partners. And if anyone out there listening as a parent, you know, you are trying to sell good behavior to your children every minute of every day. It's a persuasive process for sure some days. Absolutely. I have a two year old and every single day is a negotiation. You can wear the dress, but with just tights. Yes. Absolutely. I find that so fascinating that you were a criminal prosecutor for so long, and then you switched to family law and mediation. What happened that made you decide to do something else or were you just like, let me just test myself and challenge myself with a different field? Well, you know, prosecution was a really, really fulfilling career, but government work has its advantages and disadvantages. And so it becomes a time that I think many of us had a place in our lives and our professional careers that we want to do something new and different and branch out into something. And so in the course of being a criminal prosecutor, I specialized in special victims prosecution cases. So I was doing sexual assaults and domestic violence and child abuse cases. I developed an expertise in working with victims of sexual and domestic violence. I thought it would be logical to put that knowledge and that experience to work in the family court setting or family law setting. And so that's, you know, what sort of led to that transition from government work to private practice and they sliding myself into family law just seemed natural based on my career focus during the years I was a prosecutor. Yeah, especially because you were in that SvU type area with special victims. So Deborah, let's take a couple minutes and discuss your book, which is divorce like a pro. Excellent, excellent read. You did send me a copy of it. Thank you for that. And so what made you decide to write a book, right? You have all this knowledge you're working with people on mediation. But why did you decide to put it down on paper? Well, I put it down on paper because I find myself saying it over and over every day as I'm talking to existing clients or potential new clients. And in the criminal justice side of the law, courts are an unfortunate necessity, right? We have laws for keeping society safe and orderly. And when people break those laws, there are consequences. Having made the transition to a family law, I've been doing that family law pretty much exclusively now for 15 years or so. I came quickly to realize that courts are really not as well equipped to deal with the nuances of family dynamics, especially in families where there's children. So in custody, just divorces for children is the court, the judge, you know, no matter how caring and knowledgeable and concerned he or she may be, they're never going to know the parents' skills and aptitudes and deficits as parents, they're never going to know the aptitudes and challenges and talents of the children involved in the family. The way that we would want them to know if they were making a decision about our own children, you know. And the fact that the court system is a plaintive versus a defendant, right? Every case has a caption about somebody versus somebody else. And that's true in family law too. So it's an adversarial system by its institutional design. And I think that's just terrible for families. You know, seeing what warring parents do to their children and the lasting effects it has on their relationship as parents and their ability or lack of ability that are effectively co-parent, moving forward and emotionally on the children. It's really heartbreaking. I'm a mom too. And I'm very blessed to have had an intact family. My husband and I remain married for 32 years and going very strong. And our kids are now young adults. So blessed that I didn't have to introduce my own family into that system, but I wouldn't want to. So I find myself every day explaining to my clients that there are better ways. There are other options, you know, running to the courthouse and filing, you know, a mud slinging affidavit against the other party. Isn't necessarily the right way to do this. And it's mostly it's typically much more harmful, stressful and expensive and lengthy to proceed in that fashion. So I try to be a problem solver. I try to help my clients reach their goals creatively with the least amount of negative ramifications. So this book is all about that. It's about that the courthouse door and the courthouse steps should be your last resort and that there are other paths, including, you know, for some people that could be just sitting down and and talking through and negotiating on their own the things that they need to address when they're separating or divorcing. Now, I realize that that's maybe for a relatively small percentage of the population because, frankly, if their relationship is broken, probably it's because communication isn't very effective. So negotiating on their own may not be right for everybody or possible for everybody, but there's mediation and collaborative divorce as options before you get to the court option. And then even if you're in the courthouse situation, because in my state of New York, we don't have mandatory referrals to mediation or alternative dispute resolution for divorce in our state. Many states do have that and I think that's a wonderful thing. But in New York, you have to be into voluntarily willing participants in the alternative dispute resolution methods. So if you don't have that, the other person is just entrenched and they see court as the only option. Then if you're in the court situation, you can be practical and pragmatic and a problem solver in that forum. Because in the end, I don't know exactly the statistics currently, probably the pandemic has skewed some things, but 98% of all cases, no matter what type of case it is, end up settling. The question is, does it settle early on before you've spent a lot of money and done a lot of emotional damage to yourself and the other party? Or does it settle way on the line after the lawyers have made a lot of money and you're now broke and you're settling because you're out of money to litigate anymore? So hiring a problem solver attorney, even if you have to go to court, is preferable. So that's what the book is about. It's just explaining to people that they have other options and there are better ways. I lay out the pros and cons of all the options and the relative cost and speed of those options, etc. Yeah, there's a chapter of the book called divorce shouldn't be ugly. And I was like, man, right? Even if you picked it up and you're like, is this important to me? And you're like, well, of course, it's ugly. So the fact that you're just saying, no, it should not be ugly, right? You're the expert. You've seen this tons and tons of times. And I love that because divorce is always shown as being really adversarial, really nasty. And it doesn't have to be, right? So I like that you're presenting an alternative to what people are used to. You know, divorce is always painful. It's second in the sense of loss and grief to losing a loved one by death. So but the thing with death is that that's a process. You go through the grieving process and the loss has an end, right? So the other person has died and then you have the healing process. But with the divorce, if it gets drawn out for a long time, you're just really exacerbating and prolonging that grieving and loss process. And in fact, you're, you know, you're making it worse and you're, you're like throwing, in many cases, throwing acid on an open wound. And it just makes the whole thing much more painful. So, you know, the sense of, you know, a relationship ending, a relationship that if you married, you thought was going to be forever. There's a real, a real loss and sadness about that. And that's natural, but the process shouldn't make it worse. Right. Yeah, I love that part. And then there's also a section about how mediation can assist in divorce. And I think, especially with what you just explained about how New York state doesn't have a mandate that you have to go through mediation. You know, a lot of times people may not even know that that's an option. Or even to your point, a lot of times if divorce is being discussed, it's because there is no communication. So you might need that third party in there. Yeah, I think that it's interesting that as I'm mediating with couples and putting into place some ground rules and some guardrails of the process is productive and respectful and civil and safe. And suggesting how people can present their proposals and positions in that forum. People learn a lot about more effective ways to communicate. And I have many couples who go through the mediation process. They reach a full separation and settlement agreement. And then they say, you know what, we don't want to go the next step to get the settlement turned into a divorce because we want to now reevaluate whether that's the route we want to go. Because now they're seeing with a little bit of help and training, they can communicate more effectively. And then they start to think, well, maybe we're giving up on this too soon. Let's give it a try. So I have a lot of couples who reconcile actually after going through the mediation process. And that's not the case for everybody. You know, that heals all relationships. But it is an interesting phenomenon that I've observed. As I've gotten more and more people doing mediation, the pandemic really directed a lot more people into mediation because the courts were limited access and they were slow and they're backlogged and it was cumbersome to do virtual proceedings, et cetera. I'm seeing more people realize that if they just had some training and guidance on how to communicate more effectively, that maybe their relationship is salvageable. Yeah, I love that. I can imagine also during the pandemic that people are like, I just need help now, whatever mediation is sure. And then they get there and it ends up being beneficial. Yeah, definitely. Did a lot of emergency mediation when people were trying to figure out what do we do about our parenting schedule and exchanges when, you know, we were on, you know, more restrictive lockdown type rules. So a lot of people were really confused about what are their rights and their obligations and what made most sense. And so there was a lot of mediation in those early days with people trying to navigate through how we live our lives when we are more restrictive. Yeah, absolutely. So Debra, I have to say, I'm just going to take a minute to say if you are watching the podcast on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. Debra has this gorgeous backdrop. I'm like, I need some pictures in my room. Your office looks wonderful. And if you're not watching, please take a moment when you get done listening to the podcast, go over to YouTube, search Kyla Denigno and take a look, right? This podcast episode is there. You hear I've lost my voice. I'll talk about that in a minute. And but yeah, see what we're doing. Talk to us, share the episodes with other people. Okay. So Debra, I would like to talk about Zonta International. Did I pronounce that correctly? Yes. So I went to Paris in December. I went for a week. Yay. And I loved it. It was my first time using my passport in five years. And for one, I had a toddler through there. I got married. There was a pandemic, but five years. And so Europe was the best place to go. But why are you involved in Zonta International? Well, so you've already heard if you've been listening to the podcast that I have an affinity for working with women and girls and children. I mean, when we talk about sexual violence and child abuse, it's not limited to female victims, but it's overwhelmingly female victims. And so Zonta International is the oldest service organization that is focused on improving the lives of women and girls around the globe. Their basic tenant is that women's rights are human rights. And until women have equal rights to all other beings on the planet, all other humans on the planet, Zonta's got work left to do. So they're an amazing organization. They do incredible things around the globe. And Zonta International is a standing member of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. So it gives us additional clout and ability to deliver services around the globe because we're partnered with the UN. Yeah. So along with advocating for women and girls, and why do you think that traveling is such an important aspect of their lives? So I'm an avid traveler, foodie, so I travel to experience new cultures, but I also see good food around the globe. But I think gaining a first-hand sense of what are the conditions, what are the human conditions of others around the globe? And we get a greater understanding the more you're exposed to different cultures, different races, different ethnic traditions and things like that. That's what unites us because really prejudices are grounded in fear and lack of knowledge. And so for me, experiencing that has been really key, just on a personal note, where I live and where my office is located is in the northeast corner of New York State, just below the border of Quebec, Canada. But we are not a very heterogeneous population in terms of race or ethnicity. I was concerned about that. I was concerned about raising children where they would think the world is entirely white. So we have made it a point to make sure from the time the children were born to make sure that they heard other languages, that they were supposed to other cultures and other people with other skinned colors and etc. So we've made frequent trips to Montreal, Canada, which is a short drive away and it's a much more international city. And we've hosted international exchange students, five of them over the years so that our children would have brothers. I have boys. So they have brothers from all over the globe, which has been very, very impactful for our family. And so, yeah, I have sons everywhere now. Oh, that's awesome. Okay. So Debra, is there anything else that you would like to share with the audience about the importance of the different types of law that you practice? You know, divorcing like a pro, anything like that? Well, I would really love it if people would grab the book or recommend the book to anybody going through a separation or divorce. I think the more people that I can deliver that message to about stop, think and plan about how you want to approach that process so that you can save yourself and your family a lot of stress and money. So that's something I want to say and I just want to encourage anybody who is considering law. I mean, there's so many things you can do from sports law to entertainment law to criminal law to tax law and to, you know, anything you could imagine, there's a legal component to it. So it's one of those fields that's so broad and provides so many opportunities and options. No matter what your talents or interests are, you can find something to put your legal knowledge and degree to work and doing good work. Yeah. So I'm a big fan of legal education. And if you don't mind me piggybacking off what you said, if for any reason you're practicing law and you're like, okay, this is fun, but you can always switch fields, right? Deborah was a criminal prosecutor and she didn't say, I'm absolutely done. I'm burnt out. I'm over it. She did family law mediation, right? So you can, you can change into a different field as well. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of flexibility and I still believe it's a noble profession. I know that we get a lot of slack sometimes from media and popular opinion, but you could do a lot of good work with a legal education. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Deborah Whitson, for being on the UR Lawyer Podcast. I will link your book, Divorce Like a Pro, in the show notes for the podcast and the YouTube video. So please, everyone, take a look. If you know anyone who's considering divorce, maybe you want to just download it for yourself to have, just in case you need some more information about mediation, the link is there in the show notes, okay? Bye. Bye, Kat.