Reading three CLE articles on What Do You Value will give you the vocabulary. The actual capability comes from a different place — years of cases, a few mentor relationships, and the willingness to sit through hours of the kind of work that doesn’t feel like progress.
Aimed at therapists at any career stage who have started seeing referrals in What Do You Value and want to know what the work actually looks like once you commit to it.
For therapists working with family-law-adjacent clients, What Do You Value shows up in the emotional and relational consequences of practical decisions. The therapist’s role isn’t to advise on What Do You Value substantively but to help the client navigate the decision-making process and the emotional weight of the outcome. Practitioners who clearly maintain this scope produce more effective therapy than those who drift toward advisory roles.
Starting the work
Document the intake. Either contemporaneous notes you keep in the file or a follow-up summary email to the client. What Do You Value engagements involve enough small decisions across long timelines that working from memory six months in produces errors.
The right intake length for a What Do You Value matter is usually 60 to 90 minutes, conducted in person or by video. Shorter intakes miss the depth required for the engagement to be properly scoped; longer intakes overwhelm the client. Many practitioners follow up the intake conversation with a written summary the client confirms before the engagement letter is sent. For deeper reference, see APA Ethical Principles.
The body of the engagement
The middle phase of a What Do You Value engagement is mostly about data gathering, analysis, and coordination. The data gathering involves requesting documents from the client and (often) from third parties through subpoenas or formal requests. The analysis involves working through what the documents reveal. The coordination involves keeping the attorney and other co-professionals informed.
Analytical work during the middle phase often produces interim findings that affect the engagement scope. A finding the client didn’t anticipate may open new questions; a finding consistent with expectations may close lines of inquiry. The engagement letter should anticipate these scope adjustments and provide a path for handling them without requiring full re-papering.
What gets produced
Review the deliverable with a peer before it goes out, especially in your first dozen What Do You Value matters. A senior practitioner or a peer who has done similar work will catch things you didn’t notice — both substantive issues in the analysis and presentation issues that affect how the deliverable lands.
The deliverable for a What Do You Value engagement is the work product everyone will reference for years afterward. It needs to be defensible (your analysis can withstand scrutiny), readable (the client and any non-specialist can understand it), and complete (it addresses what the engagement was scoped to address). The deliverable usually takes 20-40% of the engagement hours; underestimating this consistently produces matters that run over time.
Common variations across matters
Matters with unsophisticated clients require more explanation, slower pacing, and more deliverable walk-through time than matters with sophisticated clients. Practitioners who run the same engagement structure regardless of client sophistication produce uneven outcomes; calibrating to the client is part of professional judgment.
High-conflict matters require different communication and documentation discipline than cooperative ones. In high-conflict What Do You Value engagements, every communication may eventually be reviewed by opposing counsel or a judge; the practitioner needs to write as if the matter will be litigated, even when it won’t be.
If you’re considering What Do You Value as a focus area and you want one concrete commitment to make: pick the upcoming family-law conference closest to you and commit to attending every year for the next five years.
How VennBoard fits in
VennBoard supports the kind of case-management discipline What Do You Value engagements benefit from: organized case files, integrated communication with co-professionals, deliverable versioning, and the kind of operational consistency that makes the difference between burning out at twenty matters and running a sustainable practice at fifty.
Learn more about how VennBoard fits into a therapist practice focused on What Do You Value at VennBoard.com.