Author is based out of Santa Barbara County, California
Jude is a Certified Family Law Specialist, certified by the California State Bar Board of Legal Specialization. He graduated law school at the University of California, Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law in 2004. While working at a major international law firm in San Francisco doing civil litigation and land use work, he wrote his doctoral dissertation in Jurisprudence and Social Policy also at Berkeley, having spent the better part of 4 years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory conducting research. Dr. Egan has litigated hundreds of family law cases of all different types. His practice serves English and Spanish speaking clients in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties.
After going through a custody battle himself, he became a divorce lawyer kicking and screaming. He was a writer at heart as his numerous academic publications can attest. His academic work was about storytelling – the way ways of performing work, especially highly hazardous work, are passed from one generation of workers to the next. He has come to see that, at some level, lawyers are a type of storyteller as well. He continued to tell people’s stories as a lawyer, now divorce stories, in the form of declarations and complaints to the court.
Dr. Egan has published internationally in peer reviewed legal, trade and academic journals. He has taught disaster law and business law at the Louisiana State University, E.J. Ourso College of Business, where he was commended by the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster for his work drafting the National Nonprofit Relief Framework, by Catholic Charities USA for a policy paper ultimately adopted by the Centers for Disease Control, and for work with the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, as well as at UC Berkeley and Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo, where he also taught public law.
He has approximately a dozen peer reviewed publications on disaster and hazard management and weapons work. These publications come from hundreds of interviews and in-the-field observations of work in progress including observing disaster and emergency managers under stress. His divorce work comes from more than 1,000 cases of every sort with clients ranging from tech millionaires to undocumented migrant workers, gays and lesbians, death and probate cases, three parent households, Hague Convention cases, appeals and high-asset cases, cases he’s litigated against named partners in mega San Francisco law firms and country lawyers from night schools and all manner of lawyers in between.
His divorce work comes with the basic proposition that although traditional divorce mediation is usually a recipe for one side being taken advantage of, most cases can and should settle through targeted negotiation, a basic understanding of divorce law and an understanding of reasonable goals in any divorce case. Settling a case can save many tens of thousands of dollars and months and even years of life that can never be retrieved. The book, the first of several on negotiating your own divorce even against a divorce lawyer, teaches negotiating strategies, peppers the discussion with divorce stories and provides practical guidance for determining a reasonable outcome and driving negotiations toward that outcome, even against a seasoned legal professional.