Christopher M. Craig, J.D.
The Public Service Building
34 Wall Street, Suite 400
Asheville, NC 28801
http://www.chriscraiglaw.com
828 258 2888
Formerly a partner of Greensboro law firm Hunter, Higgins, Miles, Elam & Benjamin, Christopher M. Craig opened a collaborative law practice in Asheville in 2004. Chris commuted between Greensboro and Asheville for over a year, and finally relocated to Asheville in 2005 with his 4-year-old daughter and wife, a nurse/lactation consultant.
Chris' family law practice began when -- one month after his law license was minted – the only family lawyer in his firm suddenly died, and he inherited 185 active domestic litigation files. Chris quickly became a family lawyer. Chris has a master's degree in English and Linguistics and a significant social work/mediation background, and he immediately came to see that domestic litigation often causes more family problems than it solves. Chris discovered that Collaborative Practice helps separating couples turn their marital difficulties into enduring solutions which meet the needs of the entire family.
When Chris transformed his domestic practice by committing to take only collaborative cases, it turned from a job he dreaded into work that excites and challenges him. Chris also has practiced in the areas of commercial and residential real estate, estate planning, appellate advocacy, will caveats, and commercial litigation. Chris currently manages the Asheville-based law firm, Craig Associates, PC, developing his Collaborative Practice caseload, in addition to closing tax credit and bond refinancing transactions for commercial real estate rehabilitation projects. Chris is also an avid reader of good books, a middling furniture-maker, and a bicycle enthusiast.
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I practice Collaborative Law. This means that I help people resolve their marital issues peacefully and creatively, and without using the courts. I am a founding member of the Triad Collaborative Law Practice Group, in the Greensboro, North Carolina area, where I have had a busy collaborative practice for the past several years. In addition, I have co-founded CollabLaw.org here in Asheville, where I am currently practicing. Collaborative Law is an effective and interesting process that helps families resolve difficult discussions, without the expense and heartache of court. I would like to share with you how I came to adopt this process.
After getting a Masters’ Degree in English, I got a job at my alma mater, Guilford College, teaching young people how to write. A writing theory book I had read somewhere had recommended that I focus on personal essays as a way of getting students intrinsically involved in the process of writing, because they would be writing about a subject that they were selfishly intrigued by: themselves. I soon discovered that such writing offers people a chance to discover themselves in a way that spoken language typically does not. Writing, and the act of teaching it quickly became a therapeutic act for teacher and student. Students would often report that their lives were changed by having learned to write with clarity and truth. They learned to use language as a tool for internal change. I was learning to guide people through their discoveries.
Somewhere along the way I discovered the book Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury. It is a treatise about how to “negotiate agreement, without giving in,” and it focuses a great deal on the importance of using language effectively to inform needs-based negotiation. It teaches how negotiation can achieve solutions to conflicts in which both parties are able to feel successful. I realized that helping folks solve their problems is a kind of social activism, that it is social change work. I was intrigued by the power of the process, and I read the book cover-to-cover about five times. It made me more intrigued by the relationship that language has on helping people change, and helping to make peace between people in conflict.
About that time, my College spent the Fall semester threatening to shake out all part-time workers at the end of that year’s Spring term. I knew this, yet I did not have a plan or any ideas for a job. When the Fall semester ended, I decided to lay fallow over break, partly with the hope that a solution would come to me if I stopped focusing on the problem. A strange thing happened…
My Grandmother died at Christmas. Her funeral was scheduled at New Years. I flew from North Carolina to Kansas City, where I had grown up, and where my Grandmother had lived for X years. During all those years she was a parishioner at the x church, and served as an elder for that church for X years. The priests knew her well, and had known her for years. I, on the other hand, had long-ago tried to forget my Catholic upbringing. In my early adolescence, I lived in Dallas, Texas and, I had gone to an oppressively strict catholic boys school for seventh and eight grades, run by a sect of monks who had formed in the X century as an offshoot of the Jesuits. These monks had separated from the Jesuits because they found the Jesuits inadequately ascetic. It was not uncommon for the priests of this sect to wear shirts made of hair under their woolen habits. I can only imagine the willing discomfort these men enjoyed during the swollen Texas summers. Now, I had been bored by the ritual of catholic mass as a child. And even in those early years, I was intolerant of a multitude of the essential tenets explained by the priests. Catholic school formally killed any residual intrigue which might have endured in me. So by the time I arrived at my Grandmother’s full Catholic funeral mass, I don’t think I had been to church in fifteen years, except to sit now and then with the Quakers during my college years at Guilford.
In Kansas City, I reeled with the possibilities and uncertainties of my future. I had one semester left of work at Guilford. I had no plan for a summer job, or beyond. I felt compelled to find meaningful work for myself, but possessed no method for doing so. I felt lost and full of inarticulated questions.
My grandmothers’ was an open casket funeral. I remember the rosy porcelain of her skin. The milky softness of her gown. The multitude of flowers and candles. The church was packed. I had moved away from Kansas City as a child, and I remember feeling awkward and surprised that I knew so few of those present. Although I had a feeling of unreality about the whole scene at the church, I remained aware that this moment was affecting me in strange ways. I tried to keep close watch. I kept thinking back to my childhood: on the conversations in the car rides home from church service when I was a kid, when Grandma and Grandpa Craig would quiz us on the message presented in the priest’s homily. All the old feelings of worry-free comfort and trust at Grandmas came back to me.
When the priest started the mass, a strange thing occurred. I remained starkly aware of the details around me, and became most especially aware of the messages of the priest. He had known my grandmother for many years prior to her illness. He had worked with her on community projects. Made parish decisions with her help. He told stories and related anecdotes. It was the warmest, most intimate mass I had ever witnessed. And because of this, I found myself swept away by the familiar rituals of it, rituals which I knew so well and had rejected so many years before. But this funeral mass for my grandmother felt so refreshing, so authentic, and so celebratory of the ways in which one person had made a difference in a whole community…a subtle difference, but an effective and lasting one too. I realized that the ritual of mass -- which had seemed so vacant to me all my life -- was in fact a vehicle ripe with intimacy and caring. And I found my whole attitude about it had changed. But while I was having this realization, another equally powerful event had taken shape in my brain.
I was hearing voices in my head. Well, specifically, one clear voice. On top of all the detail I was soaking up and the active epiphany I was having, there was a voice in my head telling me: “Go to law school. Go to law school.” I was sure I had gone crazy. But I did what I was told, and, by the Fall of that year, I had started law school. I carried Getting to Yes with me under the seat in my car..
Part of me was afraid that I had taken on law school as another way of distracting myself from figuring out what I was going to do when I grew up. I joked that it was the most expensive impulse purchase I’d ever made. Nevertheless, I stuck to it, with the hopes that I could somehow get back to helping people use language as a therapeutic resource and a tool for change. In law school, I didn’t meet anybody who had been as moved by Getting to Yes as I had been. But I did take an Alternative Dispute Resolution seminar in the summer between my second and my last year. I learned about collaborative family law during that seminar, as well as being trained and certified as a mediator. I wanted to search for a creative way of making use of myself after law school, but suddenly, during my third year, Elizabeth, my wife, got pregnant, and the realities of working for a living hit home.
About seven weeks in to being a new father, and five weeks into my first “real” job, a partner in our five-lawyer firm suddenly died. He left about 180 active family law cases in various stages of litigation, all of which needed attention. I was the new guy, and nobody in the firm wanted anything to do with family law. I had avoided family law courses in law school. I never thought I would be interested in it. But in short order, I got an education in family law that bordered on the encyclopedic. You’ve heard of trial by fire, well this was trial by flamethrower. I soon realized that family law litigation does not end in with one party winning and one party losing. The whole family loses, and most especially the kids, whose lives are often cut in two by a judges’ order that amounts to arbitrary compromise.
I was abject. Practicing law quickly became a chore, and a source of unhappiness, as I helped people through a family law process that ruined their lives. But thankfully, about six months into this, I rediscovered Collaborative Law. The founder of the process, Stu Webb, was training some lawyers in my area, and I was not too late to sign up. Collaborative law has changed my practice, and re-opened for me my commitment to social change work.
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