Bay Area Divorce Lawyer Blog
San Ramon family law attorney, Mary Nolan, was recently sentenced to two years in federal prison for unlawful interception of telephone communications and tax evasion. Ms. Nolan illegally intercepted telephone conversations by accessing a listening device that now-imprisoned private investigator Christopher Butler had installed in a victim’s vehicle. Butler hired women to approach men at bars, drink with them and set them up for drunken-driving arrests that their wives could use against them in divorce cases. Two of the men whose wives were represented by Nolan have sued her, Butler and others for damages. Nolan also hid $1.8 million in income from the Internal Revenue Service to avoid paying $400,000 in taxes between 2005 and 2009, and admitted to obstructing justice by submitting false contracts to the IRS during an audit.
Mary Nolan was my opposing counsel, my client’s wife’s attorney, in my first divorce litigation. At the time I had no idea about her ethical challenges but I did know that she was not very nice. (That is very polite understatement.) So not surprisingly, given her apparent challenges with ethical behavior, the matter was a nightmare for my client and me. Rather than trying to help the clients work out reasonable solutions for a negotiated settlement, she engaged in abusive discovery and trumped up domestic violence allegations in order to reduce my client’s time with his children and more child support for her client. Essentially, she did everything she could to destroy, rather than helping to restructure the family. After several months of this nightmare I told my client that if he was going to survive with this ogre on the other side he needed to fire me and retain a seasoned and aggressive litigator. And I told myself that if I was going to survive in this business that I needed to find another way to practice law.
And that is exactly what I did. I found Collaborative law and mediation and learned that there is another way, a far superior way, and never looked back. Now I offer divorcing couples alternatives to the court system, Collaborative Law and Mediation, to help them create positive, mutual agreements and divorce without the emotional and financial costs of litigation.
It is nowhere near as lucrative as Ms. Nolan’s nefarious law practice, but it feels good to help people solve their problems, rather than helping to destroy their families.