I grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, spent about 23 years up there, between growing up and going to undergraduate. I came out with a degree in geology. Geology’s what brought me to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I went to work for Sun Oil in their uranium department, and after a couple of years there, I ended up moving into the oil patch. I worked the Mississippi Gulf Coast, South Texas and West Texas areas, and got to meet a bunch of real Texans out there.

In the late ’80s, I decided, for lots of reasons, to go back to school, and I decided to go back to law school.

You have to have a certain number of hours and a certain number of years practicing in an area. You have to meet certain requirements as far as jury trials, appellate trials. You have to be able to show that you’re experienced, and then you take a test which is actually, I thought was tougher than the state bar, and it’s specific to the areas of family law.

Once you pass all of those things, you are given a board certification, and you are then relooked at every five years to make sure that you’ve kept your skills up.

In most family law matters, the clients are closer to the solution than the attorneys are, so the best thing to do is get the fight out of the room. In the middle of a divorce, people are hurt, and if they dwell on being hurt, they’re gonna spend a lot of money, and they’re not gonna be happy with the solutions that you come up with in most cases. If you can get the fight out of the room, you can settle your case. Eighty percent of divorces settle.