The 2025 AAML Institute for Family Law Associates: A Review and Recommendation, Part 2
Mentors, Mixers and the Business Valuation Gauntlet
By William B. Reingold, Jr.
Editor’s note: This article is a continuation of “Part 1: Why Every Associate Should Attend the AAML Institute.” If you missed the first installment, we recommend starting there to read about the conference’s opening days, session highlights and initial impressions.
The attorneys running the conference understood that it couldn’t just be four days of work. Time was carved out for us to make a day of the city. There was a Cubs game you could go to with other AAML Fellows (97°F but we were promised seats in the shade), plus there were museums and architecture tours and other touristy attractions. Some of us decided to make use of our free time by retreating to our air-conditioned rooms for a nap, embracing T.S. Elliott’s gospel that “time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted.”
That said, we all participated in the scheduled nighttime events. Our mentors took us to dinner on our first night to get to know us better. The second night there was an entire bar rented out for us to mingle with another AAML conference happening across the street on mediation. “It’s all 7th-grade here,” Dan Gray said to me at the bar, impressing upon me (1) how socializing with our future AAML Fellows is vitally important and (2) why the best character in Paul Newman’s The Verdict is actually the hospital’s attorney, Ed Concannon (the villain of the story to pretty much every viewer except Dan the Man, apparently). And then, after dinner, our only instructions were to make sure we were back and ready for the conference the next morning—something most (but not all) of us managed. It was a great time, as it always is in a place like Chicago.
From our group of 25 associates, we were further placed into smaller groups of 5 and assigned a mentor. The mentors would meet with us in our small groups to talk about the conference and any concerns or questions we had. We were told this was a cone-of-silence pact. Anything we say cannot and will not be used against us later on. (Translation: nothing we say would make its way back to the Partners at our law firms.) “If you want to tell me that you hate family law,” one mentor said reassuringly, “that’s fine because we’ve all hated family law at one point or another.” Frequent topics of discussion with the mentors, at least in my small group, involved questions of salaries and bonuses and pay structures between partners and associates.
The mentors were extremely generous with their time, ready and willing to impart lessons they’ve learned throughout their career. They were all good-natured and equally good-humored. They didn’t take themselves too seriously, at least as far as I could tell. I’ll shout out my assigned mentor, Lauren Melhart, who was an unexpected shot of espresso in the best possible way, jovial and enthusiastic in ways I’ll never be. She also happened to be the person moderating the Advanced Course. She’s just one of many people who made me laugh each day. (My favorite line from the whole conference came from Renee Ross, who noted that crypto is her “go-to white elephant gift.”) It was genuinely comforting to have mentors who not only cared about family law, but also us as mentees.
There was also a professionalism to the presenters despite the heat and other attendant distractions. E.g., at one point we could all suddenly hear a booming protest coming from outside. (This is an apt time to mention that the conference was literally a stone’s throw away from the Trump International Hotel & Tower® Chicago.) Mind you, our conference room was on the 21st floor of the building. The protester was employing one of those tinny-but-highly-effective megaphones we all recognize from demonstrations. Ignoring the protester was impossible; she was aggressive and was going to make absolutely sure you feel her message. And yet the presenter kept going as if there were no distractions, offering just one fleeting acknowledgment that “something’s got them riled up” after a particularly loud flare-up. (Turns out it was a ‘Free Palestine’ protest, which in hindsight could not have been a sharper contrast to what we were learning about in that moment: Bitcoin and “nodes” and how we should never ever disclose the private tag/code for our client’s cryptocurrency.) The protester left after about 15 long minutes, for reasons I assume having to do with the inferno-ish humidity.
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Day 3 of the conference turned out to be our Battle of Verdun: an entire day devoted to a Business Valuation Case Study (BVCS). We were warned it would be a long day. Other associates attending the AAML’s Introductory Course (hosted in the same building) gave their condolences in advance.
Presenters Stacy Collins and Kyle Garcia are evidently the gold standard for this kind of work. We were expected to be acquainted with a BVCS they’d prepared. The plan was to walk through the BVCS in painstaking detail over the course of the day. The BVCS, as it happens, was 146-pages long, comprised of two competing valuations with a bevy of exhibits attached to each. Time was spent digging into various exhibits, deciphering them and deciding whether this was or was not a helpful exhibit to support the business valuation. Here again there was a range of (dis)comfort amongst the associates. No one seemed overly comfortable with the materials. Some seemed to follow along pretty well; for others, an exhibit like this came across like hieroglyphics:
The good news was that Stacy and Kyle understood our competency levels (and how for a lot of us this was an honest-to-goodness pons asinorum), so they were very patient with us. From time to time, we associates might say something like, “I have no idea how this expert got this figure,” to which Stacy might respond, “That’s right, it’s not clear at all from this methodology,” or she would walk through the math and other exhibits needed to understand the answer to the question. Slowly but surely we were able poke holes in the reports. Questions we started asking included: what are the big credibility concerns with this report? when are income adjustments overly aggressive? at what point is the Guideline Transaction Method yielding too broad a search? and so on. Examining two reports at a granular level makes for a long and exhausting day, but it was an incredibly insightful experience that made all of us appreciate our go-to experts back home.
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You might be thinking this sounds like a puff piece. I suppose it kind of is—(consider my perspective: I want to eventually join the AAML, so I don’t want to torpedo my chances with a negative review)—but really the only complaints I can muster have to do with the near-biblical humidity and close quarters in the conference room itself.
The most sobering of the talks came from Tom Sasser. “There’s no such thing as work-life balance for a family law litigator,” he said, a bit dour and akin to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman lamenting about how “once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken.” His topic on managing one’s practice didn’t exactly bring the house down. But it wasn’t supposed to. It was to offer a realistic picture of what it is we are working toward in making Partner at our law firms. The advice he gave to manage expectations, manage work and manage our lives outside of work—e.g., “When work’s slow, take that opportunity to be with your family, because it will soon ramp back up again”—would have been a good capstone to the whole conference.
There are plenty of topics and moments I didn’t cover in this review: drafting was a huge point of emphasis for just about every speaker; Janet Battey offered tips for presenting voluminous evidence in ways so practical-yet-simple that some of us were left thinking, “why didn’t I think of that?”; our session on questioning experts (a shapeless, joint presentation between Dan the Man, Jim Hunnicutt and Scott Mann) felt like a sitcom, filled with bickering and shit-talking about what strategies work best depending on the jurisdiction.
But by my lights, the big takeaway is how much the AAML Fellows running the conference want us to be the best attorneys we can be. For us associates, this bootcamp is an investment in our careers; and it sure came across like the AAML is investing in us, too. I suppose that’s what a fellowship is. And yes, I say all this while fully acknowledging that it costs $2,520 per person to attend. But if the hefty price isn’t a total sockdolager to one’s attendance, this conference is a worthwhile use of money for the committed associate. The material covered, the expertise exhibited and the connections made will pay dividends for me, personally, for years to come; I’m guessing most others will feel the same way.