Open for Business: Managing Your Collaborative Practice for Passion & Profit

Joryn Jenkins, a 36-year trial attorney and now dedicated peacemaker, and the author of War or Peace: Avoid the Destruction of Divorce, I Never Saw My Father Again: The Divorce Court Effect, and A Free Divorce Handbook: Organizing a Collaborative Divorce Pro Bono Project, now offers this staff management handbook that will guide collaborative professionals in creating or improving their businesses.As a collaborative divorce professional, you want to ensure that your clients experience the best divorce possible. To do that, you must proactively design your office’s physical space, your policies and procedures, and your team culture to reflect your vision and your passion, to enable clients to achieve what many see as impossible — divorce with dignity, a conclusion to a marriage that serves as a positive and healthy step toward a restructured family’s future. Every collaborative services business, no matter the size, no matter whether legal, mental health, or financial, must have standards. Establishing your own policies and procedures will help your business run more smoothly— especially when you can't be there. More importantly, if you offer collaborative divorce services, your staff must understand the attitude and the ambiance that must travel with those services. Your space must reflect the collaborative process, as well, cocooning your clients in an inspirational atmosphere that will empower them to make the right decisions for their families. This book will help you to equip your staffers to talk-the-talk and to walk-the-walk, ensuring that your team’s culture, your office policies and procedures, and your space’s infrastructure all project the same enthusiasm for collaborative practice as you yourself do.

Joryn Jenkins is a trial attorney with 36 years of courtroom experience, now in private practice at Open Palm in Tampa, where she concentrates on the collaborative practice of family law. Ms. Jenkins received her B.A. degree from Yale University and her J.D. from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is a former editor of The Family Law Commentator and former editor-in-chief of both The Federal Lawyer and The Bencher magazines. She is the author of Florida Civil Practice Motions (Lexis Law Publishing), The Stepmother’s Cookbook, War or Peace (Avoid the Destruction of Divorce Court), and I Never Saw My Father Again (The Divorce Court Effect). Ms. Jenkins serves on the board of the Next Generation Divorce practice group. Joryn represented one of the spouses in the first pro bono collaborative divorce completed in Florida, and has appeared on TV on Fox 13, ABC Action News, NBC 8, and Bay News 9, as well as on radio on The Sam Sorbo Show, Legally Speaking, Ask The Dom, and Social Media Today. She has also been featured in The Tampa Bay Times, The Tampa Tribune, and The World of Collaborative Magazine on the subject of collaborative divorce.