A sidebar with … Alisa Peskin-Shepherd

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After working in family law for a few different firms during the first half of her career, Alisa Peskin-Shepherd decided to become her own boss in 2013.

That year, she founded her own firm and called it Transitions Legal, which is meant to signify helping individuals transition from one stage of life to another.

Peskin-Shepherd spoke with Michigan Lawyers Weekly about her Birmingham-based firm and a new addition to what it can offer.

What was your career like before Transitions Legal?

For a number of years, I had been working with other law firms as an associate and senior associate. I had an opportunity to partner with two other well-known and very good attorneys, which I did for about a year, and then the three of us decided to go our own ways.

How did you go about founding Transitions Legal?

As I was working on my own, there are many family law attorneys, so I began searching for something that could distinguish me from the other attorneys. I had to really think about what would make me stand out. One of the things that I felt made me stand out was really just how I practiced family law.

Just brainstorming, I see that when people are getting divorced, it’s not an end, but people are transitioning from one phase of life to another, and I started to use that term when I was doing a lot of mediation by helping people transition from one phase of life to another.

Have you always practiced family law as your specialty?

I actually tried to steer away from family law. I had a lot of experience as a child in going through a divorce, and I thought I did not want to do that as an adult. My natural proclivities steered me in that direction. I started out in practice in employment law, and I was mentored by a fantastic attorney who focused on family law. I started to focus on family law with the firm that I started with when I moved to Michigan. It’s just been where I’ve naturally landed.

I wanted to be a social worker growing up but my mom didn’t want me to do that because she was one. I think family law allows me to use the compassionate skills you would use as a therapist and combine that with my legal skills.

You use the phrase “mediative” to describe your approach to family law, can you explain what that entails?

Mediative is not actually a word so I like to say that I coined that term even though other people use it. We all know the horror stories people hear about their divorces and how horrible they were and how they ended up in court all of the time.

Mediative means that your divorce doesn’t have to be messy, we can go to court if we have to, but it should be our last resort. Once we walk into the courtroom, we lose control over the decisions that are being made. If we approach your divorce while trying to be mediative and work on settling and resolution, having a perspective of resolution instead of conflict and litigation, then we’re more likely to have a successful outcome and an outcome that works best for my client’s family. Court is a last resort, let’s see what we can do before then.

Why did you choose to add Guardian Ad Litem services to what you already offer?

That’s another phase of life people go through by transitioning from being independent to being less independent and what do you need in that regard. The driving force behind this was that the associate we hired, we had a case she was working on with me when we were helping out a family that was taking care of a family member’s child.

Our associate really felt like she could help the family a lot in terms of mediating between different family members and helping people who couldn’t necessarily make decisions for themselves. She also started talking to a lot of the judges who liked her approach and her style, and she was encouraged to become a Guardian Ad Litem.

We talked about it and thought it fit well within the services that we were already offering. We really help people who can’t make their own legal decisions, so the Guardian Ad Litem is the person who meets with that individual who may be incapacitated in some way and determines if they can make their own decisions or if they need a guardian appointed for them to assist them in making certain decisions.