A Conversation With Debbie Fordree

Debbie Forgery, a lawyer and mediator, discusses her experiences during the pandemic. She talks about the importance of personal interactions and the limitations of remote communication. She also discusses how technology has helped her connect with friends and colleagues. Debbie explains the difference between mediation and collaborative divorce, emphasizing the importance of listening and addressing emotional issues in the latter. She also mentions the effectiveness of her law practice management software and discusses her remote work setup as a software developer. Debbie shares her use of the Getting Things Done methodology and the benefits of meditation and nonviolent communication. Welcome to Phase Shift. I am Bruce Weber. Recently, I had the pleasure of talking with Debbie Forgery. Debbie has been practicing law since 1993 and has been a mediator since 2016. Her areas of concentration are estate planning, probate, mediation, and collaborative divorce. She offers limited scope representation to make legal services affordable. Debbie enjoys spending time with family and friends, yoga, and gardening. Here is our conversation. Hi, Debbie. Good morning, Bruce. I would like to start by talking about the pandemic. My sense of this is that there are things that are in our world that were revealed by the pandemic that some people may have known and seen but became evident. I'm wondering, for you, what you saw with systems maybe not working well or just personally? Yeah, so particularly the stay-at-home order for me reveals a lot of personal things. In terms of personal interactions, I think it really allowed us all to slow down a bit and focus on really what was more important. For me, it was focusing on friendships and family relations. But suddenly, when the pull of needing to drive to a meeting and have a fully scheduled day was no longer there, it opened up a lot, which was, I guess, it was always there. I know for me, I live alone, and so I would see my daughter occasionally. But for the most part, I was, you know, I'd go out for walks, things like that, especially as it got warmer. But I became very aware of communicating with people remotely and how, you know, how to communicate with them. That's not the same as being in person. And I had an experience, I forget what month, it might have been April or May, where I went to a park and actually met with people. The weather had gotten nice, and it was great just to see people in person, to have that nonverbal communication that I don't get with screens. I don't get all of that. I don't get the eye contact isn't quite right. It isn't there. And I'm just not seeing everything, and it's much better to see people in person. Although I do appreciate the technology we have that allows what we are able to do. I appreciate the technology as well. I mean, it is, it's different. It's been, it's been more connecting in some ways and more just connecting with others. More connecting in that I'm able to connect more and as a more regular part of my life with my friends who are further away. And with people across the world. I do meditate and I'm involved in some groups and all of a sudden there are people from South America and Europe and Canada and all across the nation on the line. And, you know, maybe to some extent our eyes are closed during that, so the nonverbal language is important. But in other things, yeah, I agree with you. Many of the systems that I've been using for my work as a lawyer remains in place. I do a lot of networking and one of my networking groups, we went and locked down on a Friday. We meet on Wednesdays. By Wednesday, we were all set up to go remotely. And we've been going remotely every Wednesday morning. The system has not worked so well in terms of our personal relationships. I think that they have suffered a bit, although we are all staying together when you have social time and you're on Zoom and you have 40 people on the screen at the same time. It's not the same as if you're speaking with one person individually and somebody else comes up and joins and the conversation turns a little bit. It's quite different. So you mentioned that you're an attorney and I know that you do a lot with collaborative divorce. That's one of the things you work with. I'm curious to hear about that. That is one of the things that we could do on Zoom. I know some of my colleagues are continuing with collaborative divorce online and some places it's working well and others not so well. I have not had a collaborative case online. I have been mediating online and I've actually found that to be much more efficient, surprisingly. So that's working out okay so far. Could you explain the difference between mediation and collaborative divorce? And I think there's even another category in there as well. So the mediation is a process where a neutral mediator will meet together with parties who need to resolve a matter. It may or may not be a lawsuit, but basically the parties agree to participate and we set up a comfortable environment where people are able to express what they need to. The mediator really facilitates positive conversation, gears toward a resolution of the people's issues. What you would really like to happen is just to set the scene so that the parties are able to speak openly back and forth. And sometimes that dialogue works very well and they're just able to resolve their problem by themselves and you sit back and it's a beautiful thing to watch. And, you know, you intervene as necessary and intervention is necessary to provide some clarification and when things may get to a hot point or where people may get stuck. Other times you may need to separate people into rooms and talk to them individually and figure out what's going on and kind of work on rephrasing and letting people see things from the other side and getting their input and coming to a resolution. So the mediator is really a neutral and not involved in either party other than facilitating. With collaborative divorce, each party has an attorney that represents the party and all four of the people sign a participation agreement that everything will remain confidential and that the parties will work towards a resolution without having an arbiter or another person make the decision for them. We share all of the information. There is some advocacy involved, some legal advice. In the mediation scenario, the mediator, even if the mediator is an attorney, mediator doesn't have to be an attorney, but there's no legal advice given. The parties would have to consult with an outside attorney or even have an attorney present with them during the mediation. But the collaborative divorce is a very representative process. So we collaborate together in collaborative divorce to keep the parties focused on the future. And also bring in other professionals. We'll bring in a financial neutral to gather all the financial information so that the parties can have an expert who speaks to them and answers any financial questions they may have. There usually is a party that is not as familiar with a couple of finances. They also put together budgets going forward so they have a really good idea of what life is going to be for them in the future and what their financial needs are. And then as we go along, whether or not they need to adjust those expectations or figure out the way to meet their expectations. It strikes me that in both the mediation and whether that mediation is for divorce or some other topic, some other issue, and with collaborative divorce, that listening is a big part of that. It is very important. And very rewarding. Particularly it works when people feel they are listened to. And both the processes work with facilitating communication. I also forgot to mention that in the collaborative divorce, there is a divorce coach who is a trained marital and family professional who has experience with marital and family therapy. And they really work to address the emotional issues that are inherent in divorce. And when a party has an emotional sticking point, they are really trained to see that and to address it because you really can't express your needs necessarily or I would say negotiate, although we tend to shy away from the word But it's hard to come up with a meaningful settlement when you're having some other things going on. So therapy isn't provided, but a therapist is there as a coach. And that's very effective. And the parties really are getting kind of a dissolution of their marriage plus in the collaborative situation. So, Bruce, you had asked about systems and what was working and what wasn't before as we transitioned into the pandemic. And one of the systems I had in place that worked very well for me was my law practice management software that really allowed me to continue working seamlessly. Everything is electronic and I send fee agreements to my clients electronically. They can electronically sign. I generate invoices electronically, can send confidential documents back and forth electronically. And that was easy, particularly because our U.S. mail system was not functioning so well. I'm fortunate that at my work, we had been doing some remote work prior to the pandemic. I'm a software developer, and each of us could work one day at home each week. And we had the system set up for that. When the pandemic started and we had the stay-at-home order, it was very easy to transition to working remotely 100 percent and just continue what we were doing. The methodology that we use for teamwork is called Agile. Scrum is kind of the subset of that. And we have what's called a Scrum Master who basically just makes sure that we're having our meetings, things like that. It's kind of a facilitator, not a manager. And our Scrum Master is wonderful, and he would do things like have show-and-tell, where one day people would show an image or just say something about their lives. And that helped to maintain the connections that we would have. That's been helpful. Personally, I follow a system or methodology called Getting Things Done, which was created by David Allen, also called GTD. And that's really helpful for tracking commitments that I've made. It's the to-do list kind of approach. But it goes beyond that. It includes an awareness of attention. That's helpful. The other things that helped me during the lockdown, meditation helped. We both practice nonviolent communication, which is very helpful for connecting to people in a meaningful way, for having authentic connections, relationships with people. Yeah. I'm curious about when you were talking about GTD and Getting Things Done, it seems it's a very structured approach. And I'm wondering whether that system helped you in a way through this pandemic to accommodate or deal with something that I think many of us struggle with, which has been a sense of unworrying. And really, sometimes not even knowing what day it was or what week or month or where we are. Yeah. I'm wondering if you experienced that as well and if you could speak to that. I definitely had a sense of losing my moorings. And this especially was during the beginning of the stay-at-home, the lockdown. Part of that was a lot of uncertainty. And I experienced what I would call decision fatigue and decision avoidance because there were just too many things to decide with not only things related to the pandemic. As you know, we were both on the board of trustees at our church. There was a lot of work with that. I mean, that ramped up tremendously. And we both put a lot of time into that. And a lot of that's decision time. A lot of it, it's communication. It's decisions. And so that took up a lot of decision energy, if you will. I think each person can only make so many decisions a day, maybe. And I ran out. So by the end of the day, it wasn't that I didn't have time. I had time. I just would sit in front of the TV and watch YouTube videos about the pandemic. And maybe that wasn't good. But I had good sources. I was listening to good sources of information. So the GTD, getting back to your question, helped in that I could define the things that I wanted to do. And having defined those later could follow that plan and have less thinking. So it helped with the decision fatigue. GTD has several different perspectives that it brings. One of those is this idea that work has three different aspects to it. And one of those is planning. Another is doing the work that was planned. And the third is doing work that shows up. So, you know, my manager contacts me and says, hey, I need this done by the end of the day. Can you do that? That's stuff that shows up, right? And so that perspective, it's like, oh, okay, now I'm in this mode. Now I'm in this mode. And that helps. So I found getting things done to be helpful. And I'm thinking that all of these things, or several of these things, can help in general. Like the mediation work you do, the collaborative work you do, is not just about legal issues. These techniques, these practices can apply more generally in our society. Right now, things are very polarized, as you know. It's a very challenging time. I'm wondering how you think these practices can help with that. Yeah, Bruce. They are very helpful. In fact, you hit on something. It's not only legal issues. What collaborative is in the mediation are both really interest-based negotiations, not positionally-based negotiations or communications. And the positional is, I think, analogous to polarization. And the political polarization we're seeing in society that is really making us see ourselves as more divided than unified. So it really helps meet the goal of having people understand one another. And similar to the compassionate nonviolent communication that we have been practicing as a way of understanding one another, it's really helpful. And what I really appreciate about the practice is that people walk away with, I think, better communication skills. But hopefully, I hope that they carry with them after they've gone through the process. And particularly when you've gone through the process with a couple for months, you can see that improving. One idea that I've heard, I want to get your thoughts on this, is the idea that we are in a liminal time. And the word liminal, the definition, one definition I found is that liminal means relating to or at a transition or boundary between two states or states. So the idea is that prior to the pandemic, we had the old normal, which I will say was broken in a number of ways. And after the pandemic, we may have a new set of systems. Possibly there's a opportunity as people become more aware of how our systems don't work well or how they could work better. There's an opportunity to move into something better. Now, we may move into something worse. I don't know. Or maybe a mix of the two. I mean, the world's a complex place. But what do you think about this idea of this as being, this is a liminal time, a time, kind of a transitional time, a time between different stages? How does that strike you? Well, it strikes me a couple different ways. My first thought on it is that we're always in liminal time. You know, we're always, to some extent, the past is the past and the future is the future. And here we are now. And you really, it's always a transition between stages. And I think it's that it's never very obvious to us. And now it's really, really obvious. So I guess, you know, we are in liminal time and we're not in liminal time is kind of my take on that. But, yeah, I mean, there were many things that were not functioning well. Our habits and practices and way of life and its impact on the environment had not been working very well at all. And across the world, the impact of the change and grounding of most air travel and most people were staying home and not driving. And air cleared up for the first time in, you know, decades upon decades in some areas. And it was absolutely amazing to see pictures of Los Angeles and see things that just people had not been able to see, you know, just the beauty. And that was really and water clearing up and I'm hopeful that that's going to change. But all of a sudden, when I go out on the road, it seems like it was exactly like it was before. So what would you like our future to look like? Do you have any ideas about that? We're kind of coming full circle for me, Bruce. Because my ideas are when people are open and listen deeply to themselves and to others, that a lot of ideas can be generated. And I think that the answers are all within us collectively. And I think that the path to whatever it is that would be wonderful that maybe beyond what I can even dream or imagine, I think that's the path of getting there. I think everybody has something to offer that should be considered. I agree. And to do that, I think it's important to be able to, it's important for me to be able to hold my own perspective and listen to your perspective. Maybe take my perspective and set it aside for a moment so that I can take in your perspective and then listen to that and understand that. Maybe ask you questions about that to make sure I understand that. And it doesn't mean that I have to agree with your perspective. But then I can, maybe there is a third perspective, which is more complex, which includes elements of both. And that's, I think, Hegel developed this idea of dialectics, which is the thesis, the antithesis, or antithesis, and the synthesis. And the synthesis is that bringing together of those perspectives. And that's what I'm hearing you saying, that we all have truth, we all have valuable ideas. And if we have a method, if we have a practice where we can share those and listen to each other, and we can then develop solutions. And that's a process. We don't know what that end point is going to be. The process is very valuable. None of us has all the information. Right. And many of the ideas need to be discarded as well. They're just not workable. But, you know, until you start dialoguing with people and are open to constructive criticism and open to questioning your own ideas and open to really contemplating other ideas, it's hard to move forward. And, you know, I think that's the path out of this polarization we're experiencing as well as a nation. And, yeah, my future wouldn't include setting that aside and us realizing that we're really, at the core, all the same. Yes, I agree. If people want to contact you, how could they do that? I can be reached through my website, which is forgerylaw.com. And that's F-O-R-D-R-E-E-L-A-W.com. Ford's like the car with an R-E-E. Great. I will include that information in the show notes. And I've enjoyed our conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Bruce. Thank you for having me. Her email address is debbie at forgerylaw.com. The links are in the show notes. Until next time, be well.