Gazing into a crystal ball is an innovative way to resolve legal conflict.

Lucy Hickman looks at how law firms in the UK are embracing alternative approaches to legal practice

With a new collaborative family law project hitting London and one former lawyer offering lawyers special coaching services, 2004 is looking like the year in which holistic approaches to law take root in England and Wales.

Holism is the view that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and holistic law means different things to different people.

Practitioners in North America incorporate all manner of practices and beliefs into their approach to law, such as astrology, yoga, and even face-reading, which can apparently help when selecting juries.

There is a law professor in Texas who uses astrology in mediations, predicting events and choosing favourable times for decisions and deals.

In Vermont, there is the Holistic Justice Centre, which has as much of a non-confrontational approach to the law as possible and will not represent clients who do not share the philosophy.

These practices fly under the all-encompassing banner of 'holistic lawyers'.

But according to John Hunt, named principal at north London firm JF Hunt & Co, being a holistic lawyer does not mean you have to be 'weird'.

Mr Hunt's 'bread and butter work' is conveyancing but for years he has acted for holistic organisations on projects such as introducing a course in miracles to the UK, bringing 'rebirthing' to this country and starting the London branch of the Centre for Attitudinal Healing.

He is also on the board of several groups such as the Wrekin Trust, a holistic education charity, the Miracle Network - a group with a psychological and spiritualist approach to life - and Ecologia, a Scottish charity that supports community villages for Russian orphans.

Mr Hunt says he never refers to himself as a holistic lawyer but says taking a holistic approach to law can be useful.

'It involves accepting that there are different approaches to a problem.

Law can involve taking a narrow view.

Clients often want lawyers to tackle the minutiae and get the narrow evidence that will win them their case without taking into account all the circumstances.

They may think about the win rather than considering, for example, how they will get on with the neighbour later on.

'Some people would think that a holistic lawyer has to believe in a new-age philosophy.

I don't have a problem with this stuff - if people choose to get into crystals and so on, then so be it - but there's no way I would do it.'

US lawyer Nora Kalb Bushfield is president of the International Association of Holistic Lawyers (IAHL), which has 275 members throughout the world, including lawyers from US, Canada, Japan, Africa, Brazil, Holland and the UK.

She says: 'Holistic law means considering the client and legal situation as a whole, not just considering the issue the client brings before you, but all of the surrounding circumstances and the people themselves.

'There are numerous common threads that bind holistic lawyers.

We encourage compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness and healing.

We advocate the need for a humane legal process that will contribute to peace building at all levels.

We strive to return an enjoyment to practising law and to help lawyers learn to heal themselves as well as their clients.

We see lawyers as counsellors of law.'

The concept of lawyers enjoying what they do often comes secondary to the everyday graft, a fact recognised by the American Bar Association.

In 1999, it published a book called Transforming practices: finding joy and satisfaction in the legal life.

Ms Bushfield, a sole practitioner based in Atlanta, Georgia, specialises in collaborative family law (CFL) - a US concept that only hit the UK at the beginning of this year - in which the parties and their lawyers agree to resolve the conflict without resorting to court proceedings.

If the process breaks down and one of the parties wants to go to court, both lawyers must quit and the parties must engage litigators.

'Collaborative law is especially well suited for a holistic practice because the core values track one another, but there are many IAHL members who practice in traditional law firms, or situations, such as criminal law.

'A holistic approach applied to a traditional case would allow the practitioner to listen deeply to gain a complete understanding of the issue.

While acknowledging conflict, the holistic practitioner honours and respects the dignity and integrity of each individual.'

Ms Bushfield says that every range of belief and practice can be part of holistic law, which is what makes holistic practice 'so exciting'.

She says: 'If you are a Buddhist, then you bring that to the table in a special way; you do not exclude such an integral part of your being.

For example, I am a lawyer and a trained therapist.

In a traditional case, I may have been reluctant to apply these skills in a practical way to help resolve a case.

'In collaborative law - a holistic practice - I am free to incorporate all of my skills and apply them to problem solving for the benefit of everyone involved.'

The first collaborative family law cases only began to be taken on in the UK at the beginning of the year after intensive work by the Solicitors Family Law Association (SFLA) on the infrastructure and systems following training last September.

James Pirrie, an SFLA member and solicitor at the London-based Family Law Consortium, says the approach will be different from the usual 'lawyerly' attitude and it will take a lot to re-educate lawyers.

He says: 'Family lawyers who think CFL is what they have been doing for years with a new name - and a prohibition on subsequent representation - are deluding themselves and are likely to fail.

To offer clients the best of processes, there must be what our trainer calls a "paradigm shift", denoting the change of focus and approach.

'This approach is probably better than round-table settlements generally, because round-table meetings are the entire focus of this product whereas in a traditional process they can be a side-show that participants attend with different levels of commitment.

The participation agreement also binds the client to the negotiations and to deal with them in a respectful, transparent way.'

'CFL as it should be practised should mean freedom from all those shotgun-style settlements, where agreement is extorted because the litigated outcome is too far away and the process is intrusive, uncertain and prohibitively expensive.'

'Our training as mediators helped us better to understand how raw were the emotions of those receiving our communications and how many deals had to be built painstakingly - like card-pack castles - so CFL training provides a new generation of challenges.'

He says that CFL is not for everyone and not suitable for every situation, with the possibility of power-balancing problems between participants arising.

He adds: 'And what of the determined non-discloser? The process may be less forensic than the shadow of the court process and there is the possibility of a breakdown in discussions and then you have to start again.

Clients may also think that it is entirely about self-determination, but what they get is steered towards the outcome the lawyers regard as the norm.

'I have never said this is a panacea - people will only select it after considering the options and deciding that this will work for them.'

He says the process seems to be popular with clients as it 'addresses the anxiety of uncorking the genie of legal costs'.

They also welcome the control they have, he says.

Kimberley Williams left her associate post at north London firm Hodge Jones & Allen in November last year to set up Williams-Wroe Ltd, a company which specialises in coaching professionals - so far mostly lawyers - to take a holistic approach to work.

She says: 'I try to encourage clients to take a holistic approach.

You need to be in touch with yourself as a lawyer in order to do justice to your clients.

You face so many emotions in dealing with clients, so you have to be really grounded as a lawyer before you can help them.

'Coaching is the relationship between the coach and the client, and is about opening the client to the realisation that they can achieve their goals, whatever they are, personal or professional.

It's about focus, intent, commitment and enthusiasm, and gets results that can be experienced, measured and quantified.'

She says that although most of her clients are currently lawyers and law firms, this was not a deliberate strategy but something that arose in part because lawyers accept her as one of their own.

'I have one client who is respected in his field and knows the law backwards but is not comfortable with networking and management aspects.

I met him at a breakfast and he relaxed noticeably when I said I was also a lawyer and knew where he was coming from.'

She adds: 'The qualities that make a good lawyer do not always translate easily into sympathetic management skills and to running an efficient, profitable department.

'Many lawyers are promoted to management status by default - particularly in smaller firms where they are thrust into dealing with situations that they are not equipped to deal with simply because they have been there the longest.'

Ms Williams says she is currently pushing for the Law Society to consider adding coaching and mentoring to its professional skills course for trainee solicitors.

'The real challenge for me is to get senior lawyers with management responsibilities to work with their people to develop a "coaching culture" in their organisations, so coaching is available to all employees at all levels.

I hope that as well as providing access to coaching, law firms will commit to the training of their employees as coaches so that they can continue to benefit from the coaching process.'

Perhaps some of this holistic stuff can sound, well, a bit American on this side of the Atlantic, and it is easy to mock.

But it is not all star-charts on the wall and crystal balls on the desk - there must be worse things than an approach to law that leaves both the lawyer and client happy and enhanced.

LINKS: www.iahl.org

Lucy Hickman is a freelance journalist