Diane Inbody

I would have to say, maybe first and foremost was just the way that I was brought up in a family where morals and ethics are very important, that your word is your bond, and when you make a promise, that you keep it. Second most important is I took two years off after college before I went to law school, and I worked in city government in a human resources agency that was run all by women. I was blessed to have some very, very good female mentors that certainly helped me on a path that has been very, very supportive of what I do. And now the agency I work in, we are predominantly women, and they have been my village - very supportive. That has been what's made me not only good at what I do, because I get a lot of support, but also have my work be a place that I want to come to every day.

It came from my high school English teacher. At the time, I wanted to be a photojournalist and travel all over the world and shoot safaris in Africa and everything, and she said, you need to use that brain and go to law school. She was someone that I respected very much, and in the age - and you have to remember, when I was in high school, it was in the 70s, and Title IX had just come around, and I competed in forensics, and she helped me write a speech about women's changing role. She definitely was someone who impacted me in a way that when she said, you need to use that brain and do this, I listened. There's no lawyers in my family, there's no history of lawyers in my family, and my kids have indicated that they are not going to be lawyers, so nobody that I followed from that, but she was definitely a big influence, and probably was the one that kind of made me look at things a little different as to what my trajectory was going to be. I did connect with her, I guess it was a year or two in that off year, the one I took, the two years I was off and working in between college and law school. She was retired at that point, and I did tell her, and I got the chance to tell her, you know, this is all your fault because you told me that's what I should do. I was glad that I had that opportunity because she passed away, I think, 2 or 3 years after that.

I would say if your heart takes you to family law to stay there, and also that there's so many avenues connected to that field that you can find your niche. When I first started out, I would walk into the trial part or a courtroom, and there were not very many female faces, there were not many faces of color. What has always guided me is so much of your effectiveness as an attorney - sure, your background, where you went to school, da-da-da, but at the end, it's the relationships that you create in the areas that you work, and in the rooms that you are in. And that's always served me very well, that I approach the other attorney as another person. They come to court, who knows what happened before they got there. Same with my clients. And to treat people as a person first, and to kind of tilt that lawyer hat a little bit, and deal with your colleagues, and deal with your clients as people first, and I think that the results are usually much better.

Strong ethics, integrity, reliability, respect for others, collaboration, empathy, and maintaining meaningful professional and personal relationships.