Milwaukee Catholic Herald – February 8, 2007

This divorce attorney promotes marriage

By Maryangela Layman Román
Catholic Herald Staff

Name: Kelly Dodd
Age: 34
Occupation: Attorney, Petrie & Stocking S.C.
Parish: St. Jude, Wauwatosa
Book recently read: “The Art of War,” by Sun Tzu
Favorite movie: “The Exorcist”
Favorite quotation: “Always tell the truth, it’s easier to remember.”(Catholic Herald photo by Sam Lucero)

Did you hear the one about the divorce lawyer who tries to talk couples out of divorce? There’s no punch line to this lawyer joke; it’s true!

Attorney Kelly Dodd, a member of St. Jude Parish, Wauwatosa, takes her belief in the sanctity of marriage seriously, to the point where she discourages divorces and is focusing on marriage planning and legal strategies to avoid drawn-out divorce cases.

In fact, individuals who come to Dodd’s Petrie & Stocking law office seeking a divorce can expect to hear Dodd’s sermon on the reality of divorce.

“If more people understood what divorce is really like, they would be more strident in their efforts to avoid it at all costs,” she explained to your Catholic Herald in an interview at her downtown Milwaukee office. “I try to talk clients out of divorce by giving anecdotes and facts about what divorce will be like. Most people come with a fantasy – I’m going to get the house, the kids, and I’m never going to have to deal with him again. This is going to be fantastic.

“I can move on, and I’ll have a new life and I will be happy and I can leave the courthouse with a song in my heart and a skip in my step.”

Yet, Dodd said in her experience – as a divorce attorney and a child of divorced parents – that is never how divorce unfolds.

Dodd, 34, a native of Ogallala, Neb., was baptized Catholic, but raised Episcopalian, her mother’s faith. Her parents divorced when she was 11 and in fifth grade.

“Growing up I actually thought, that in hindsight, my parents’ divorce formed me as a person and I was grateful for that experience,” she said, adding, however, now that she is a married mother, she has altered her perspective on divorce.

Dodd met her husband, Jeff, while the two were in high school, attending a leadership conference. Even though they lived in separate cities, they remained in touch and were married between her junior and senior years of college.

At age 19, with her future husband’s father as her sponsor, Dodd entered the Catholic Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. After graduating from the University of Nebraska as a Spanish major, Dodd taught high school Spanish for a few years before enrolling in law school.

She chose Marquette University Law School, in part because the couple had fallen in love with Milwaukee, a city they described as “the best kept secret in the Midwest.” Jeff’s best friend lived in Wauwatosa and when the couple moved to Milwaukee, they, too, found a home there.

While in law school, Dodd chose family law as her specialty.

“I wanted to practice family law,” she explained. “It’s what I thought I’d be good at. Because of my background, I thought I’d be well suited to it and I found it to be a heady and intellectually challenging area of law, but I worried: Can you be both a good Catholic and a good divorce lawyer or were those terms mutually exclusive?”

Her decision-making process including asking a local, prominent Catholic judge his opinion on the matter. She also sought advice from priests, including her husband’s uncle, Bishop Thomas J. Olmstead, bishop of Phoenix.

Their answers were mixed, but she recalled that Bishop Olmstead suggested she structure her practice in a way to complement her faith.

While in law school, Dodd also balanced a growing family. Daughter Aubrey, now 11, was 2 when she began school. Regan, now 7, was born on a Friday. Two days earlier, law school began and five days after her birth, Dodd was back in the classroom. John Gerard (Jack), 5, was born two years later. In May, the couple is expecting their fourth child, another son.

A fellow attorney at Petrie & Stocking is the main reason Dodd is attempting to restructure her practice with an emphasis on marriage preparation planning rather than divorce.

“What really started me on the path of trying to craft my practice in a way I thought was true to my faith was when one of the partners at Petrie & Stocking said, ‘How do you justify practicing divorce after what John Paul II said?’”

He was referring to a speech Pope John Paul II made in 2002 to the Roman Rota, the second highest ecclesiastical court in the Roman Catholic Church. Secular media reported the pope admonished Catholic lawyers to reject divorce cases.

His question caused Dodd to panic, she said. “If Catholics can’t be divorce lawyers, my head started spinning. I’d have to quit my job, I have kids, what do I do?”

The first thing she did was to read the text of the pope’s talk. She learned he said it was important to consider clients’ intentions in the divorce. If the intentions are to end the marriage, then you shouldn’t participate, she explained, but in some instances, such as in Wisconsin with its no-fault divorce laws, where one spouse may not want the divorce, attorneys may have a moral obligation to actually help with the divorce in order to protect rights and assets.

“I thought the thing to do is represent respondents and do what I can to avoid filing divorce action,” she said.

She also recognized the need to offer couples entering marriage advice on the front end of marriage in the hopes they don’t end up in divorce court.

“In the hundreds of divorces I’ve done, I’ve probably seen one that would be morally justified,” she said, recalling a mother of five whose husband had tried to drown their children.

“Most of the divorces I see boil down to one single, common denominator, and it is selfishness usually bred from an unrealistic expectation of marriage which leads to an unrealistic expectation of divorce,” she added.

By trying to focus her practice on marriage education and marriage preparation, she said she is taking a proactive stance against divorce. A member of the St. Thomas More Lawyers Society in Wisconsin, Dodd has spoken to the group about being a good Catholic and a good divorce lawyer. She published an article in the Wisconsin Journal of Family Law about divorce and the Roman Catholic Church and she said her approach is starting to develop momentum in the legal world.

It’s an approach she can share with her students at the Marquette University Law School where she is an adjunct professor.

The value Dodd places on marriage has taken on even greater meaning in the last month when her husband of 13 years, Jeff, a freelance writer and Mr. Mom to the family, was diagnosed with Stage IV Metastatic Melanoma. A vibrant, athletic 34-year old, Jeff had a superficial melanoma removed from his chin 12 years ago. In the years since, he has had regular exams and blood tests to monitor the possibility of recurrence. Before Christmas, he discovered a small lump on his chest and another on his hip.

Much to the couple’s surprise, on Jan. 11 doctors determined it was cancer and had spread to his liver and kidney.

Since then, Jeff has been in Houston receiving treatments at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. His four months of treatments are scheduled to conclude the same week the couple’s fourth child is due.

Dodd plans to spend the next months, with the help of her family, including Bishop Olmstead’s sister and mother — her mother-in-law and Jeff’s grandmother – traveling between Wisconsin and Texas to be with her husband and tending to the couple’s children.

“When I see couples who are fighting about things that are so petty and indiscriminate, I wish my husband was here to annoy me,” she said.

Reflecting on the challenge the cancer has brought to their lives, Dodd described one of her favorite books, “Screwtape Letters,” by C.S. Lewis. It includes a passage where two devils are discussing their frustration with the fact that although they are perceived as having superior powers to inflict pain and suffering, even they have not been able to use suffering the way God does.

“The book hypothesizes that God chooses those he loves the most to suffer the most in order to vex the devil. God chooses his favorites to bear unimaginable suffering and pain because he knows that, even then, they will not turn from him,” she said, describing how she believes those who are suffering draw closer to God during their time of need.

During her spare time, Kelly Dodd is a singer with the local rock band, Rabid Aardvarks. The band will hold a benefit performance for the Dodd family on Sunday, March 25 at the Coach House Grill, W233S7260 Vernon Lane, Big Bend, from 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. For updates on Jeff Dodd’s health, visit Kelly Dodd’s blog.