Katherine Miller is the founding attorney of the Miller Law Group – an established family law practice in Westchester County, NY and New York City. She has always had a keen interest in people and comes from a family of therapists. She thought of herself as being too opinionated to become a therapist, so she decided to pursue another passion – justice. Once enrolled in law school, it didn’t take long for her to realize that law school is not about justice, so she returned to her interest in people, and focused her education and career on the intersection where the law meets people in their everyday lives.
Her early career was at a firm where about half of the practice was matrimonial work and the other half was child welfare litigation. As she gained experience in family law, she quickly realized that there had to be a better way to help people settle divorces than what she and her colleagues were doing. When she took her first mediation training in 1990, she was hopeful that this was the solution she was looking for. By integrating mediation ideas and skills into her divorce negotiations, the possibility to find mutual solutions that didn’t create long-term division, was much more likely.
After 10 years of serving divorcing clients, she found herself going through her own divorce. She’d like to say that she applied all the lessons she learned from going through this process so many times as a lawyer, but she did not. She felt a tidal wave of fear for the well-being of her son and daughter. As a litigator, her observation had been that it was impossible to keep children out of the middle, no matter how much everyone said they wanted to protect them. More times than she wanted to admit, she’d seen children used as bargaining chips — viewed without a voice or needs of their own. She was unwilling to take that risk with her children. When she saw the risks to her children, it came home to her how destructive divorce litigation can be for children. So much so, she got out of the field altogether.
She quit her job and began taking an intent focus on investing in the one person she seemed to be ignoring her entire life — herself. She realized she had been going through life doing everything she thought she was supposed to, without being in touch with what she really wanted. She had become a guest in her own skin. By grabbing hold of her own reins, she found freedom and hope in herself. That’s what empowered her to take control of her life and her future. It is that venture that led her to form the Miller Law Group, because she wanted to run a law firm where she thought about the clients as people first and truly protect the interests of their children. This is where true strength and advocacy lay and this is why her firm is able to help clients get the best possible results.
She is also a director at the Center for Understanding in Conflict, where, for more than 15 years, she and her colleagues teach other professionals, mediation, collaborative law and other conflict resolution skills.
Her radio show “Divorce Dialogues ” is aired bi-weekly on WVOX (1460 AM/New Rochelle, NY) , where she talks with her guests about relationships, kids, relocating, dating after divorce, and so much more. Her passion and her mission is to find appropriate “out of court” resolution and to help people divorce with dignity.
In addition, she is co-author of the #1 Amazon bestseller “A Cup of Coffee with 10 of the Top Divorce Attorneys in the United States” and the author of the “New Yorker’s Guide to Collaborative Divorce.” Her many media accolades include interviews on CBS New York, NBC New York, as well as features in New York Times, Newsday, Money Magazine, Splitopia, TheStreet.com, Huffpost, to name a few.
View Katherine’s CV