Good People, Worst Behavior: A Guide to High-Conflict Family Law Cases

Welcome back to Latte with a Lawyer—the essential podcast for attorneys navigating the industry's most personal and high-stakes battles. In this episode, Kumudha Kumarachandran, a lead litigator with the national family law firm Cordell & Cordell, shares her playbook for a practice area she once vowed to avoid. Drawing from her own parents' contentious divorce, Kumudha explains why family law clients are often "good people on their worst behavior" and how she authored a litigation guide so effective it was picked up by Harvard Law's library. Kumudha pulls back the curtain on the world of child abuse and neglect cases, recounting a "tearful" victory where she proved a newborn's injury was caused by a hospital error, not parental abuse, and reunited the family. She breaks down her strategy for winning multi-day bench trials where credibility is the only currency, emphasizing the power of "optics"—from coaching clients on testimony to reading a judge's subtle cues. With a caseload of 40-50 clients, Kumudha gives a candid look at a practice where she manually sifts through hundreds of pages of text messages to find the crucial piece of evidence. Linkedin:   / kumudhakumarachandran   FIRM Website: Learn more about EmotionTrac and our AI-driven Emotional Intelligence Platform: https://legal.emotiontrac.com/