Show Your Work is the kind of work that rewards practitioners who treat it as a multi-year investment rather than a one-week project.
Written for family-law attorneys thinking about how to position around Show Your Work for the next three to five years, not the next quarter.
Practical reality for litigators: Show Your Work 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 Show Your Work should write analytical work as if it might be read by opposing counsel — because in contested matters, it often is.
Conventional practice
Standard Show Your Work practice has become well-defined enough that CLE programs, professional standards bodies, and practitioner texts all describe roughly the same workflow. The substantive details vary by jurisdiction and matter, but the structural pattern is consistent across most practitioners doing the work. For deeper reference, see ABA Family Law Section resources.
The recognized standard for Show Your Work engagements involves five identifiable phases: intake, scoping, analytical work, deliverable production, and closing. Most family-law attorneys who have handled the work for several years would describe their process in these terms, even when they don’t use the same labels.
When conventional practice misses
Practitioners who do Show Your Work consistently see the same standard failures across years. Matters where the analytical methodology produces technically correct results that don’t fit the specific situation. Matters where the standard intake misses important context. Matters where the standard deliverable format doesn’t serve the actual case need. Recognizing these failure patterns at intake — and adjusting — is one of the markers of mature practice.
The standard approach also fails when the practitioner doesn’t actually do Show Your Work regularly. Practitioners handling one matter every two years can’t maintain the working depth that produces good Show Your Work outcomes. The standard approach assumes the practitioner has internalized it through repetition; when that’s not true, the standard becomes a checklist that produces checklist-quality work.
Variations that work better in specific contexts
Experienced family-law attorneys working in Show Your Work routinely depart from the standard approach in specific ways. They invest more in the intake than the standard contemplates — sometimes 90 minutes or more — because the early diagnostic shapes everything downstream. They produce more interim communication with clients and co-professionals because long matters drift without it. They review their analytical work with peers before delivering, because solo work product has blind spots.
Seasoned practitioners also vary the deliverable format based on the matter. Standard memo format for negotiation-track matters. More extensive written report for litigation-track matters. Oral presentation with supporting materials for mediation-track matters. The same underlying analysis, presented in different formats, lands differently in different contexts.
When to use which approach
Choosing the right approach for a specific Show Your Work matter starts with reading the case carefully at intake. Is this a procedurally clean matter or a contested one? Are the parties cooperating with discovery or fighting it? Is the timeline driven by negotiation or by court calendars? The answers shape which version of Show Your Work workflow makes sense.
The skill that develops over years isn’t memorizing more approaches — it’s recognizing matter type quickly and selecting the right one. This pattern-recognition can’t be taught directly; it accumulates from handling matters repeatedly and debriefing what worked and what didn’t.
The honest summary of Show Your Work for family-law attorneys: it rewards depth, it punishes shortcuts, and it compounds across years for practitioners willing to invest in the long arc.
How VennBoard fits in
VennBoard helps family-law attorneys build the operational backbone Show Your Work engagements require — engagement letters that handle the scoping conversation in writing, case files that stay organized across long matters, communication tools that keep the broader case team coordinated, and the infrastructure that lets the practitioner focus on the analytical work rather than the administrative drag.
Learn more about how VennBoard fits into a family law attorney practice focused on Show Your Work at VennBoard.com.
Further reading
National Center for State Courts
ABA Family Law Section resources