Walk into any state bar conference and watch the conversations at the breaks. The practitioners who clearly know each other are usually the ones who have built reputations in specific areas. First Things First is a specific area that compounds well.
Aimed at family-law attorneys at any career stage who have started seeing referrals in First Things First and want to know what the work actually looks like once you commit to it.
Practical reality for litigators: First Things First work often becomes evidence. Memos written during analysis can show up in depositions; assumptions baked into early analyses get cross-examined. Family-law attorneys handling First Things First should write analytical work as if it might be read by opposing counsel — because in contested matters, it often is.
Starting the work
Document the intake. Either contemporaneous notes you keep in the file or a follow-up summary email to the client. First Things First 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 First Things First 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
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.
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.
The deliverable
The deliverable for a First Things First 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.
Walk the client through the deliverable before they take it to the attorney or court. The presentation matters; the same report explained well lands differently than the same report dropped over email without context. The walk-through is also where the client’s last questions surface; addressing them in real time prevents follow-up cycles weeks later. For deeper reference, see National Center for State Courts.
When the standard doesn’t apply
High-conflict matters require different communication and documentation discipline than cooperative ones. In high-conflict First Things First 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.
Pro bono or reduced-fee First Things First engagements present a specific risk: the temptation to deliver less rigorous work than the practitioner would for a paying client. Pro bono cases that go wrong because of insufficient analytical rigor damage practitioner reputation more than paying cases that go wrong, because the quality gap is visible.
If you’re considering First Things First 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 First Things First 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.
Practitioners interested in seeing VennBoard’s case-management infrastructure for First Things First work can learn more at VennBoard.com.
Further reading
Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement
ABA Family Law Section resources