About Servant Lawyership

Kathleen Clark has practiced law and mediation in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than thirty years.  In addition to her law degree, she has a Masters Degree in business management and a PhD in Social Sciences. Kathleen's dissertation is entitled "Bringing Dialogue and Collaborative Law to Health Care".  Collaborative law and other collaborative practices are cost-effective, non-adversarial processes that provide the space for forgiveness, caring language, listening, and learning from other practitioners and our communities. These practices are increasingly chosen as better alternatives to litigation.   The sooner these practices are called into play, the less likely litigation will follow, or, if litigation becomes necessary, the less adversarial that practice will be.

Dr. Clark is the founder and CEO of Servant Lawyership and an Associate at the Taos Institute, a community of scholars and practitioners committed to exploring, developing and disseminating ideas and practices that promote creative, appreciative and collaborative processes in communities and organizations around the world (http://www.taosinstitute.net/kathleen-clark-phd; http://www.taosinstitute.net).  She is a member of the State Bar of California and the American Bar Association.

Dr. Clark incorporates concepts of law as a healing profession, collaborative practices, forgiveness, transparency, disclosure, restorative justice, non-adversarial conflict resolution, and appreciative inquiry in her work.  Her work includes writing, speaking, advising, consulting, facilitating, mentoring, coaching, and collaborating with others.  Dr. Clark's expertise derives from, among other things, the extensive inquiry underlying her dissertation, which examined the special suitability of collaborative process, versus litigation, for use after adverse medical events.

Dr. Clark designed and facilitated dialogues among stakeholders (including patients, family members, physicians, attorneys, insurers, hospital risk managers, hospital general counsels, medical ethicists, and other interested parties, as necessary) about effective practices; the cultures of law and medicine, their common goals before and after adverse events, and approaches to attain those goals; improved patient safety practices as a result of patient, physician and attorney collaboration; and law as a healing profession.   The purpose of these dialogues was to further open channels of communication across professions and communities, address issues of silos in healthcare, Build community, and rethink how we can best work at the intersection of law and medicine.  They have been held in the U.S., Ireland, Canada, and Colombia, SA.

Kathy Clark-sep 08-Collaborative Law from Dawn Dole on Vimeo.