What Do You Value sits in the strange space between technique and judgment. A junior attorney with good technique and no judgment will miss it; a senior attorney with great judgment and rusty technique will get half of it right. The best practitioners keep both sharp.
This piece is for guardians ad litem who already have the basics and are deciding whether to make What Do You Value a focus area.
For guardians ad litem, What Do You Value affects the child’s best interests in ways that need to be surfaced for the court. The GAL’s role is to evaluate the impact on the child and articulate findings in a way the court can use, not to make decisions about the underlying What Do You Value questions. Effective GAL reports keep this distinction clear.
How What Do You Value engagements begin
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.
A useful intake habit: ask the client to articulate, in their own words, what they’re hoping the engagement will produce. The answer reveals where the client’s expectations align with what What Do You Value engagements actually deliver and where they don’t. Closing the gap before the engagement starts saves significant friction during the matter.
What happens in the middle phase
Communication discipline during the middle phase prevents most of the problems that show up at the deliverable. Practitioners who send the client weekly or biweekly written updates — even short ones — maintain trust and surface issues early. Practitioners who go silent during the analytical work leave the client to imagine what might be happening, which is rarely productive.
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.
How the matter ends
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.
Most What Do You Value deliverables follow a consistent format that practitioners refine over multiple matters. An executive summary at the top. Background and scope. Methodology. Findings. Conclusions and recommendations. Appendices with supporting documentation. Practitioners who maintain a template they refine engagement by engagement produce stronger deliverables faster than those who reinvent the format each time.
Matter-specific considerations
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.
What Do You Value engagements vary along a few predictable dimensions: client sophistication (institutional client vs. unsophisticated individual), case complexity (single straightforward question vs. multiple intertwined issues), opposing-side cooperation (cooperative vs. adversarial), and timeline pressure (negotiated timeline vs. court-imposed deadlines). Each dimension affects how the standard engagement pattern needs to adjust. For deeper reference, see National Center for State Courts.
None of this is shortcut work. The practitioners who own What Do You Value in their markets earned their position the slow way — consistent attendance at the same conferences, careful case work compounding over years, relationships built deliberately.
How VennBoard fits in
Practitioners who handle What Do You Value repeatedly find that the back-office infrastructure is the difference between a practice that scales and one that absorbs the practitioner. VennBoard provides the structured workspace that lets you focus on the substantive work — the part that actually compounds.
If you’re a guardian ad litem building a focus on What Do You Value and looking for the operational backbone, visit VennBoard.com to see how it fits into your practice.
Further reading
ABA Family Law Section resources
National Center for State Courts