My name is Steve Shapiro and I am a principal with the firm Resolution Matters. I’ve been in practice for over 30 years focused on bringing people together, having them work out their differences together and documenting these agreements in the most humane, sensible, cost-effective way. Particularly in the family context, separation and divorce, issues concerning care and decision making for elder parents, and issues concerning family business matters.

The work in the family business setting is an overlay of emotional issues, sibling, cousins, nieces and nephew issues; and then how do you keep a business running and successful in the midst of impending conflict. The mindset and the focus is in being able to bring the family together in whatever way works for their situation.

In a divorce setting, bringing the mother and father together to develop a parenting plan, is one of the essential starting points that once you have that parenting plan in place to discern your schedule, to discern how much is being paid from one to the other so that you could begin to set up your separate lives together. There’s a certain amount of care and concern that gets heard and worked through in those initial stages.

I founded this law practice based on that sense of I call it legal humanity that lawyers, I believe, have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients to settle their cases in the most dignified and resourceful way. And that’s what my commitment is to my clients, again, in whatever family context it is, and we become partners with each other as we do this work. I have the utmost respect for every one of my clients for who they are, where they are in their lives and a deep understanding and respect for how difficult they may be in at this stage.