What the Judgment Doesn’t Give You

Heather O’Connor first walked into a Massachusetts family courthouse as a client, not a lawyer. She was leaving an abusive marriage, and she had three children under the age of six. From inside the courtroom she watched the attorneys deliver their arguments. They understood the law and the procedures. But Heather saw that the legal process couldn’t fully account for the person living through it.

Her lawyer could explain the legal terms and procedural steps. But the legal system was designed to resolve her case, not to give her the support and tools she would need to recover from abuse and rebuild her life afterward. A judgment could determine the legal outcome, but it couldn’t address everything that came next. That was the help she needed.

Looking forward, she decided this was a problem she could solve for others.

Why Heather built her practice on a different type of experience

Despite the path being far from clear, she decided to become a lawyer. She went to community college, did her undergrad studies, then went to law school. Days when childcare fell through, her kids sat in on classes with her.

Working from her living room, she opened O’Connor Family Law in 2016. She knew what she had wanted as a client, and that became the model for her firm. She hired a full-time coach to work with her clients on co-parenting, communication, budgeting, and the many other challenges that often come up. The coaching is complimentary, and it’s the part of the firm she’s most proud of.

“People need coaching because a legal result only gives you a piece of paper,” Heather says. “The coaching lives with you forever. The coaching is what changes your life.”

She once had a client facing attempted murder charges, a restraining order, and no contact with his children after he attacked a man his wife was seeing. Heather took the case on two conditions: He had to take accountability, and he had to commit to therapy and coaching. Months in, when the conflict in the case came to a head, he kept his cool. He won custody, the house, his retirement, and the other side covering the attorney fees. “If he had not jumped into the coaching, really focused on what he could do to change his outcome, I never would have been able to get that result,” Heather says.

Heather always brings everything she can from a legal perspective to her clients’ cases, but for her, the person sitting beside her at the table makes the difference.

How she frees up time to invest more in her clients

The firm’s model was built on helping its clients. That commitment meant the business needed to run smoothly. Every hour spent reconciling trust accounts or tracking down payments was an hour the firm couldn’t put into its services. From the start, Heather knew she needed a foundation that could carry the model she was building.

She started with a case management platform when she first opened the firm, but it didn’t have all of the capabilities she needed. In 2017, with three people on the team, she switched to Clio. Before the switch, the firm was bringing in six new cases a month and making $10,000 per week. Today, O’Connor Family Law takes on more than 50 new cases each month and brings in over $100,000 each week.

Heather’s team used to spend two to three hours each week processing roughly 100 invoices. With Clio Payments handling the reconciliation automatically, they now process 400 to 500 invoices a week in about 20 minutes. The firm’s collection rate sits between 98.5% and 99%. Document drafting in Clio cut the time spent on pleadings in half and created consistency across every attorney’s output. For Heather, that consistency helped eliminate the small mistakes that can erode client trust.

She also notes that you can utilize AI in a way that makes your services more efficient for clients. It can be a tool that speeds how you give clients case updates, automating when a hearing is coming up or other regular communications. With the addition of purpose built legal AI, Clio Work, Heather and her team can locate and reference documents that, before, would have taken time to simply locate, open, and read before we could even get to work on the heavy drafting. Now, that cuts down that time significantly, which ends up saving clients money as well.

“Using Clio can help you address the problems that clients are feeling in a much more strategic and efficient way that will make our legal team able to do what they do best and really concentrate just on the legal side,” Heather adds.

What’s next and Heather’s “mission”

Since opening her firm, Heather has gone from her living room to running an office with over 30 employees. Her annual payroll runs well over a million dollars. “My mission then, and still is, and always will be, to completely revolutionize how divorce law is done in this state.”

When looking back on everything she’s accomplished with her team, she can’t help but take it all in and think about what it means for the firm moving forward. “I am so proud of everything that we’re touching, everything that we’re doing. And everything that we’re living for each and every day.”