No, as a lawyer who personally just completed this process, my faith in my profession will never be the same after witnessing the toxic mix of bad faith and incompetence of the opposing lawyer, collusive ineffectiveness of the retired judge we hired to act as mediator, and virtually everything else about the process. The first 10 months were wasted with those two failing to read past page 1 of a critical document to find the operative language and being unable to craft a coherent plan as a result. That was just the start.

The lesson I learned was it doesn't matter how high-minded your rules, principles and processes are, the matrimonial bar and bench seems to be a magnet for just craven incompence, mean spiritedness, and, when you get past all of that, in the best case, indifference to the unnecessary suffering they cause. So while I appreciate the optimism of the article, and in general I agree with the principle that lawyers are unnecessarily "bashed", when it comes to the matrimonial bar some higher level of regulation, self regulation or other form of redress is required.