Page 9 - AFCC Australian Conference 2018

Workshops
Workshop 3 Staying in Family Law and Keeping Your Sanity: Dealing with Clients with Personality Disorders.
Room: Ballroom C Dr Catherine Boland 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Clinical Psychologist, The Relationspace, Sydney, New South Wales
Chair: Mr David Edney
The personal and professional toll of working in the family law system is high. Dealing with parents at their most vulnerable time exposes you to intense emotions and demanding behaviours, whether you are a lawyer, mediator or clinician.
When clients have high con ict personalities and interpersonal styles they can present as rigid and uncompromising and engage in extreme behaviours. These clients consume all your energy and have a signi cant toll on you; and they can have the most dangerous parenting and interpersonal behaviours.
This workshop will help you understand the underlying mechanism of clients with personality disorders; and provide you with a serious of strategies and behaviours to manage them.
Workshop 4 Lawyers Thinking Differently: How to be a Genuine Problem Solver.
Ms Anne-Marie Rice
Principal Mediator of Rice Mediations, Director Rice Naughton McCarthy, Brisbane, Queensland
Chair: Dr David List
Room: Balcony 1/2 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
As the internet, lawyer’s blogs, court publications and the like make it increasingly easy for clients to access ‘legal information’ and the delays with the court system make it increasingly harder for clients to access ‘justice’, the expectations of, and demands made on, lawyers are changing rapidly. The role of lawyers as ‘wise counsel’ remains an important one and those on the front line have a profound ability to impact the way con ict is managed in the course of legal negotiations.
Lawyers have the capacity to in ame or dissipate the existing con ict from the moment a client makes contact and yet, largely by virtue of their training and a default focus on a litigation based system, few lawyers consciously consider the impact of their approach on the underlying dispute.
Lawyers notoriously struggle to apply, in a practical client’-focused way, the skills and research ndings of other disciplines to consciously reduce con ict and actively pursue resolution.
This session will explore:
 ways to readily, and productively, identify what is truly motivating a client and how a lawyer might work with, not against, those non-legal drivers;
 techniques to keep clients (and lawyers) focused on resolution rather than historic con ict;
 ways to deal with risk (as distinct from the discomfort of change) in resolution focused negotiations; and
 strategies for lawyers to genuinely avoiding litigation and the associated polarising mindset.
AFCC
AUSTRALIAN CHAPTER
afccnet.org.au | e: ausafcc@gmail.com 9.