Tara Diamond, Esq.

I attribute my success to myself. I've worked incredibly hard to be where I am. What was important to me was being sure I had a place where being a mother would be allowed to be first. I managed to create that for my firm. I have 3 children, and after each one of those children, I took maybe a week off, but the partners I had and the job I had created for myself allowed me to take my kids with me to work for that first year. They still come to work with me throughout the years. Creating a firm where motherhood could be the top priority, and I could still focus on my career and success as a working mother, that was so important to me. I envisioned what I wanted, and I worked incredibly hard to make it happen. I knew I wanted to be a lawyer, do family law, be involved in that intimate family aspect of people's lives, because if that's going wrong, nothing's going to be okay. I also knew as a young woman that I wanted to have a family and be involved in raising my children, and I knew I needed to run my own business because I do not do well following rules of other people. It's just much better for everybody if I'm able to set my own schedule and be where I'm supposed to be when I'm supposed to be there.

The best career advice I received came from my father when I was exploring what to do with my interest in people's relationships. I had always been interested in people's relationships, and starting in high school, I used to try to match friends together. By the end of high school, I was charging people to match them up with other people, and when I went to college at Florida, I continued doing the same thing. I found it really interesting to figure out what's going to make two people match, where they complement each other, where they're different from each other. Initially I thought maybe I wanted to be a marriage therapist, but my father said to me, 'If they need a marriage therapist, they're going to need a divorce lawyer next. So maybe, since you're starting now and you're so young, you might want to go into family law. Maybe that's something that would scratch the itch for you.' That guidance helped me find the career path that has defined my entire professional life.

I think the most important advice I would give is to be yourself. Find what works for you to find your voice, and use your voice, and not let that be influenced by others. I find that if you can find a job where you can be you, that's the best career path I think that you can have. It doesn't feel like you're working. When you're trying to pretend to be somebody else, or you see one attorney do something and you try to emulate that too much, it might not be you, and that's okay. I think you have to find what works for you and be honest with yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not just because you see another attorney doing things a certain way. Find your own authentic voice and approach.

One of the biggest challenges and opportunities in family law is helping clients fundamentally change their behavior to become better parents, even when they start out acting in ways that are not child-centered. I had a case that really exemplifies this. I was assigned to represent a woman as her fourth or fifth attorney through the assigned counsel plan. At the time, she was acting in ways that were not child-centered, conflict-inducing, no worse than the child's father, but equal to it. Both of them were more concerned with fighting with each other than making sure the child had what he needed. During the pandemic, she refused to allow the child to have contact with the other parent, which was illegal. When I told her she needed to allow the child to spend time with his father and she refused to follow my advice, I filed a motion to be relieved as her attorney. The court denied my request and told the client she needed to figure out a way to work with me. From that moment forward, we had a different relationship, and she did follow my advice. To see her as a parent now, we went through order of protection trials and custody and visitation trials. Ultimately, she was awarded sole legal and physical custody because her behavior had changed so positively. The more she worried less about the father and more about the child, the better parent she became, and the worse parent the father became. The father dug himself a hole so big that he no longer has contact with this child because he couldn't even be around the child without telling the child how terrible the mother was. She followed my advice, took the high road, and I even got her to testify why the child was so fortunate to have him as a parent, which I don't think anybody thought she was ever capable of doing. To see her make those changes over the course of several years that I've represented her, I think that's probably been my proudest moment. When I started working with her, she was just as bad as him, telling the child 'your father's this, your father's that, you're not gonna see him today.' Once we had our argument and I told her 'I'm not telling you to do anything that's not gonna help you, I can't win your case if you don't follow my directions,' that finally clicked for her. Her relationship with this child has become so much closer because now she's a source of stability and love for this child. She's never going to say something bad about the child's father, no matter what he does, because she's been rewarded for not doing that. She is now seeing him be punished for continuing to behave the same way that she was previously behaving.

The values most important to me in my work and personal life are honesty, transparency, and collaboration. These principles guide everything I do, both as an attorney and as a person. I believe in being direct and honest with my clients, even when it means having difficult conversations or telling them things they don't want to hear. Transparency is essential in building trust with the families I work with, and collaboration is key to helping parents move forward in healthier ways after divorce. These values have shaped how I practice law and how I've built my firm to prioritize what matters most.