Lawyer to Peacemaker Doug Noll

I've often been asked, "Weird a peacemaker? How did that happen?" Well, let me tell you the story. I graduated from law school 40 years ago. Actually, yeah, 40 years ago. And got a job working for a judge and then after that for one year, I did it for a year, and then after that joined a medium-sized law firm in Central California and they groomed me to be a trial lawyer. In fact, they groomed me so quickly that 6 weeks after I joined the firm, I tried my first jury trial, and about 6 weeks after that, I was helping out one of the partners try a $36 million securities fraud case in San Diego. And ever since that time in the late 1970s, I tried all kinds of cases all over the country, big and small. Won big, lost big. I was the epitome of the hardcore trial lawyer. Well, in the 1980s, I took up the martial arts. For reasons unrelated to my professional career. And at first I was really, really crummy as a martial artist. I was learning a Northern Chinese kung fu style, which is a very vicious form of street fighting. And our motto was, "We break bones, not boards." So I got into it and studied and practiced and trained really hard, and eventually I got my second-degree black belt. Took me 5 years to get my second-degree black belt. Right after I got my secondary black belt, my teacher called me in and he said, "Noel, you're done here. You're too arrogant. You're too dangerous. You're a trial lawyer that takes no prisoners, and now you're a secondary black belt where a fair fight for you is 5 guys with knives. I'm done teaching you. You are going to hurt yourself. You're going to hurt somebody else." I sort of sat back and, "Whoa, what was that about?" But I listened, and he said, "What you need to do and what I'm telling you to do is to go learn Tai Chi." And in fact, I'm not going to teach you anymore until you master Tai Chi. Well, little did I know that you never master Tai Chi. It's like the onion that you keep peeling and peeling and peeling and peeling, and you never get to the core of it. So it was really a death sentence, and he knew it, but I didn't. I found a Tai Chi teacher, and I started studying Tai Chi. And one of the first lessons I learned were two paradoxes of Tai Chi. The first is, the softer you are, the stronger you are. The second paradox is, the more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are. Soft to be strong, vulnerable to be powerful. Well, this just didn't compute with me. I mean, I'm a hardcore trial lawyer, second-degree black belt. Being soft and vulnerable to be strong and powerful? No way. But just like the hard martial art, the kung fu, I stuck with it and eventually I began to master Tai Chi a little bit until one day in the late 1990s I was in the courtroom and I was cross-examining somebody in my own inimitable style and the thought came into my brain out of the blue, "What the heck am I doing in here?" So I put that thought aside, finished the trial, and I had a vacation planned. So I took off with a bunch of friends and we went on a whitewater rafting trip up in Idaho for 10 days. And on that trip I was in my raft all by myself powering through these big waves on the main Salmon River thinking about how many people I really served as a trial lawyer for— at that point it had been well over 20 years. And as I thought about it, I recognized that I had only served about 5 people of the hundreds of clients I've had and the hundreds of cases that I handled. That really only served 5 people, where I thought they came out of the system better than when they went in. And I said to myself, you know, I don't want to go another 20 or 30 or 40 years and maybe say at the end of an illustrious trial career that I'd only really helped 15 people. That's not where I'm at. So I kind of decided that maybe being a trial lawyer wasn't my thing anymore, but I had no clue what I was going to do. So after the trip, I came back. I live in the mountains above Fresno, California, near Yosemite, and was driving down to my office when I heard what happened to be the one and only public service announcement for a new master's degree program in peacemaking and conflict studies being offered at Fresno Pacific University, which is the West Coast Mennonite University. And it turns out that the Mennonites are one of the three Protestant peace churches Well, that PSA caught my attention for some reason and I made a note of the number, called down there, found out when the orientation was and showed up. And I talked to the people and I thought, "This sounds pretty cool, this peacemaking stuff. I wonder what this is about." So I decided to enroll. So at that point, which is 1998, I became a full-time master's degree student, a full-time trial lawyer, and a 3/4 times law professor. I was a pretty busy guy for a couple of years. Well, a really interesting thing happened. The second week of the— of my coursework there, I was taking the basic introductory class in peacemaking and all of a sudden I had this epiphany that this is exactly what I felt was missing from the law. I was understanding for the first time the full range and depth of human conflict and recognizing that the law had some very serious limitations. The legal system is really good at dealing with certain kinds of disputes, but it's really poor at everything else. And that was, I think, the frustration that I was feeling. So after the second day of class, I went back to my firm and I had my business card and it said Douglas E. Noll, Attorney at Law, and I scratched out the attorney at law part and in blue ink put peacemaker. And I handed it to our firm administrator and I said, John, I need new business cards. He said, oh sure, I'll order you some. How many do you need? I said, no, no, no, no, no. I need new business cards. See? And he looked down at the card like this and his face went white. He said, "I can't do this. There's no way I can do this." I said, "John, come on. I'm a senior partner here. You can do this." "Uh-uh. No, I can't do this." So of course there was a partners meeting called and I told everybody, I said, "Hey, I think we have an opportunity here to do something really innovative and unique in the law practice and that is open up a problem-solving and peacemaking practice, and I'd like to do that. Well, half my partners thought it was a wonderful idea, half of my partners were horrified. And it turns out that the people that were horrified won ultimately, and I left the firm in 2000. Actually, what happened was the partner in the firm who was the managing partner came to my office on a Friday and said, no more paychecks until you cut out this peacemaking stuff. And I said, "Oh, really?" Thought about it over the weekend, came back on Monday morning and said, "I quit." And I walked away from $10 million on the table in the firm that I put in with fees that I hadn't taken out, and a week later I opened up my own peacemaking practice. November 1st, 2000. It was the best decision I ever made. I've done more good things for people in a week than I did for people in 22 years as a trial lawyer helping people out. And I've been able to see some of the most amazing transformations And then of course the Prison Project came along in 2009-2010. So, again, this is a lesson learned. Follow your heart. Don't worry about the money. Life will unravel in some of the most amazing, incredible ways and you will be able to have the fulfillment and satisfaction and happiness and integration that most people only dream of. And I'm very blessed to have that life.