Healing Families

Reprinted from D Magazine

By Jason Heid

(The following is excerpted from “Great Minds Don’t Think Alike” in the D Magazine Legal Directory for 2010.)

Lawyers aren’t quite like the rest of us – and we like it that way.

Kristy Piazza knew early on in law school that she wanted to be a family lawyer. She’d been “bored to tears” when she worked as a paralegal for a real estate law firm during her first year.

“I wanted to be able to do something where I was making a difference, not doing a big business transaction,” the 31-year-old says.

One of her most satisfying cases began soon after she was hired full-time by the family law firm of Koons, Fuller, Vanden Eykel, & Robertson. She went to trial to win custody of a child for a grandmother. The child’s parents were both drug addicts, and the boy had been placed in foster care for a time.

“He would come in and say, ‘You know, you’re my angel, and I don’t know what would have happened to me if you hadn’t helped my grandmother.’ So when you see stuff like that, you feel like you’re really making a difference,” she says.

Piazza epitomizes another common trait among lawyers: she’s an achiever. Family law is an uncommon career choice among SMU students. In order to maximize her ability to find jobs in the field, she took it upon herself to form a student family-law association while at Dedman.

“I was usually the one in the school group who did the project, volunteered to lead the group, set up the associations. I was always the president of everything,” she says.

Because her practice deals with emotional issues- divorces, custody battles, child abuse cases- it can be difficult for her to not become too emotionally involved. That can make her job harder, because she has to stay focused on the legal issues.

“My biggest obstacle is when I can’t fix things I have a terrible weekend, week,” she says. “It ruins my personal feelings when I can’t fix everything.”

But Pladziewicz says that it’s precisely the ability to work on these emotional issues and make those connections that draws lawyers to a family practice.

“There’s different areas of law where you represent individual people on matters of the heart,” she says. “Some lawyers are drawn to that.”