I was already coaching them. I just wasn't allowed to.
I was already coaching them. I just wasn't allowed to.
I was a family law solicitor with ADHD.
Which meant I recognised the traits in my clients long before I had language for what I was seeing.
The Form E is thirty pages. For most people it's dense. For an ADHD brain, it's a wall — no clear "why," just section after section demanding financial history most people can barely locate, let alone retrieve on command.
So I stopped just sending the form. I started explaining it — not the legal drafting, the reasoning: This section shows the court your outgoings are realistic. This one is why the pension question matters. Once someone could see what each piece was for, they could engage with it.
Then I'd break it down further. Not "documents by the 15th" — microtasks, each with its own date, spaced ahead of the real deadline. I'd set myself reminders to nudge, gently, before anything became urgent. Not chasing. Scaffolding.
It worked. Every time.
It also wasn't my job.
I didn't clock it then, but I was coaching — executive function support, dressed up as "good client care."
It was genuinely necessary for the clients who needed it. But a solicitor doesn't have capacity to build a microtask calendar for every deadline-sensitive client. A cost estimate has no room for it. It was never costed, never trained for, never sustainable.
I tried workarounds anyway — my assistant sending accountability reminders we didn't charge for, under-billing for time that was really coaching, not advice.
Neither was fair.
Not to the client, who deserved support I couldn't properly resource. Not to me, quietly absorbing a second job I was never paid or trained for.
That gap is why I left.
Not because family law stopped mattering to me — because I could see exactly what these clients needed, watch it work every time I gave it, and couldn't give it properly from inside a solicitor's retainer.
There's a cost to that gap, and ADHDers going through divorce are paying it — in fees for time spent managing them instead of advising them, and in outcomes, when instructions arrive too late to argue the case as well as it could've been argued. I call it the ADHD tax. It's real, and largely invisible.
I built Awaken Potential because that gap shouldn't be the client's to carry alone — and it was never the solicitor's to carry either.
