A different approach to resolving family conflicts

In 2018, family lawyer and mediator Jacinta Gallant was having a momentous day. Like any mom wanting to mark the occasion with her family at home, she stopped to pick up pizza for dinner in her hometown of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. That's where she ran into a fellow University of PEI alumni she hadn't seen in years. 

"Hey, what's going on with you? You're glowing!" was the first thing he said to her. She credited it to the career-changing decision she made that day. The compliment affirmed to her that she had made the right one.

Gallant had just completed her final day as a litigator in family law after 20 years in practice. Not that she had any intention to retire, but it was the last time she pled the case of a family, mother, father or partner whose fate would be determined inside the courts.

For over seven years now, Gallant has completely reoriented her practice at Waterstone Law Group to focus on out-of-court dispute resolution. Although this alternative to litigation is hardly novel to practitioners, the idea of upending one's practice to prioritize mental health is. 

"I became so aware of how the burden of advocacy, the burden of fighting other people's battles, was affecting me," Gallant says.

Her practice now revolves around the Insight Approach to conflict, a learning-focused mediation style that has been around for a little over 20 years but has yet to be the norm among practitioners.

The approach reflects a more holistic perspective to addressing clients' needs and their relationships. It's based on curiosity over judgment – something Gallant says is far too rare in family court. 

"If you think about lawyers, we get a law degree, we become lawyers, and then we have to be right all the time," Gallant says, adding that lawyers tend to shy away from questions they don't know the answer to. "It's no wonder we struggle in those cases where we have to be more curious or more asking because it's really not what we're trained to do," she says.

To Gallant, the inherently emotional nature of family law lends itself better to a practice that rejects the conventional, adversarial approach to cases of separation. Based on feedback she's heard from her clients over the years, there is valuable insight to be discovered if only lawyers take the time to break down conflict before leaning into legal processes.

"What I learned from these clients was that they really appreciated the deeper dive into the more human aspects of their separations," Gallant says. "They appreciated that I was going beyond just facts and figures in the law and helping them explore possibilities in a more hopeful way."

Her clients also shared a feeling many might relate to outside of family law. Gallant's clients couldn't grasp what was being said during sessions as they watched the ticking clock on the wall, focused on what the session would cost them rather than how they could resolve their issues. 

This observation was the spark that led Gallant to publish internationally recognized separation workbooks. 

Branded "Our Family in Two Homes" and "Our Family in a Few Homes," these take-home resources help clients reflect at their own pace about what threatens them, their communication patterns inside their couple, and why they react to change the way they do. 

Inspired by the Insight Approach, the workbooks are meant to get litigating parties on the same page as they embark on emotionally charged discussions. As a collaborative worker who believes lawyers can't be the only practitioners with a hand in resolving family matters, Gallant uses her workbooks as a guide for psychologists, life coaches and whomever clients work with during separation.

Gallant has sold the workbooks worldwide to practitioners in more than 40 legal jurisdictions. The interest in the Insight Approach is only growing, and it's at the core of Gallant's mediator training sessions, hosted in PEI each summer, as well as her podcast, The Authentic Professional.

Although Gallant has applied it to family law with great success, it was developed as an approach to conflict resolution more broadly.

Cheryl Picard, a mediator for over 40 years, created and wrote extensively about the Insight Approach in the late 2000s while teaching at Carleton University in Ottawa. When she describes its principles today, she points to psychology's idea of "fight or flight," which explains behavioral changes during conflict. 

"In conflict, we're saying people behave in a way that responds to their experience of threat to the things that matter to them," Picard explains. Family lawyers like Gallant know that clients caught in family disputes feel exposed to risks associated with what matters most to us all: loved ones.

Picard developed the Insight Approach, now used widely in alternative conflict resolution, with a colleague from St. Paul's University. Together, they deduced that the primary role of an insight practitioner ought to be discovering what the client perceives as a threat and working toward a better interpretation of it. 

To Picard, insight practitioners must go beyond being law experts. They must be intuitive by reading defensive body language and uncovering inefficient patterns of communication within their client's relationship. Doing so helps lawyers and clients avoid high-stress situations, such as bringing a family dispute into the courts. 

In 2013, Picard retired and moved to PEI, where she eventually connected with professionals interested in applying the Insight Approach to their work. Among the most eager to learn was Gallant. 

"She just became this enthusiastic learner and worked really hard to understand something that, to her, seemed to make a lot of sense," Picard says about Gallant. The two met bi-weekly for a year, and to this day Gallant refers to Picard as her mentor.

If you ask Picard, Gallant's work to spread awareness about the Insight Approach is the first step in proving that lawyers in all sections of the law and new lawyers should rethink their approach to conflict resolution. 

She notices a trend, among younger lawyers in particular, to help people with deeply ingrained and difficult conflicts "make their lives that much better," Picard explains.

Although Picard was teaching alternative conflict resolution over 20 years ago, many law schools are only recently offering the same opportunity to break away from traditional teachings. Gallant's daughter, Taylor Smiley, witnessed this first-hand at law school.

Inspired by her mother's work, Smiley went to Schulich School of Law in Halifax to follow in her mother's footsteps. Smiley wanted to learn more about conflict resolution on her own, so she tried to enroll in an alternative dispute resolution class.

As the only class of its kind at Schulich at the time, its popularity proved too great for the number of seats available in the class. Smiley never got in. Schulich has since tried responding to demand from a growing number of students looking for alternative teachings. It offers a class on dispute resolution specific to family law.

Now, Smiley works side-by-side with her mother, and she looks at Gallant's work in training others in the Insight Approach as a priceless resource for a new generation of lawyers.

"I would love it if it was something everyone got to learn, especially when they're starting out," Smiley explains about her mother's perspective of conflict. "My generation and the next generation; there's a lot more focus on mental health […], and it really ties into that by opening new pathways for people to learn, to grow and self-reflect."