The Heart to Serve

Kyli Willis had a plan.

She was going to graduate college with a degree in criminal justice and head straight to law school. But then as graduation neared her senior year, she experienced the kind of loss that can send everything off track. “I was grieving in a really bad way,” she says. “My mental and emotional health were not in a place where I’d be successful academically. In an effort to not screw up my future, I had to take a break.”

As Willis considered her next steps, she thought about the things she loved studying most—psychology, criminal justice, political science—and she also took a long look inward. “I knew I had the heart of someone who wanted to serve,” she says. Even without a law degree, she still wanted to do the kind of work that would help spur change and forge new beginnings. She realized she could do that within the prison system, and so she became a counselor at a maximum security men’s prison.

Willis did the work for a couple of years and, while the work was fulfilling, it wasn’t a good fit, and it didn’t pay well. “It also turns out that for a 24-year-old female, a men’s prison is a tough environment,” she says, laughing.

In 2005, when she was still working for the Indiana Department of Correction, the state’s Department of Child Services was established. Feeling pulled to serve children and families, she applied to the new department and was hired as one of its first employees.

One branch of her work within DCS involved investigating child abuse and neglect. “You hear the most horrible stories,” she says. “When you’re investigating child abuse or neglect, nobody wants to see you or deal with you or talk to you. At one point, I was investigating child fatalities, and people wanted to speak to me even less.” With abuse and neglect, there are ways to force them to speak, but ideally that wouldn’t be required. With fatalities, it was even more difficult to navigate, so Willis approached them with empathy. “You’re intruding on the worst, most sensitive part of someone’s life. … It’s very delicate, because you’re there while they’re grieving and they don’t want to be accused of doing something that caused their child’s death. It’s really rough,” she says.

It was the work with DCS that brought her back to her original path. “There were so many different things I could do for these families in a more overreaching way than what I was doing,” she says. “I felt like the impact on children and families that I really wanted to make was only possible if I went to law school and practiced family law.”

“This was the goal. this was what i wanted to do, and I’m so happy where i am right now.”

After graduating from Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in 2010, she is now with Buchanan & Bruggenschmidt in Zionsville, where she handles family law matters. Willis is particularly passionate about advocating for LGBTQ+ youth, an interest forged the summer after she graduated from law school. She was doing pro bono work for the Marion County Juvenile Court and was assigned a case she’s never forgotten. Her client was a teenage boy on the cusp of transitioning. “He was facing incarceration for stealing women’s clothes. No one in his family would purchase them because they weren’t supportive,” she says. “He had the added two issues of being gay and HIV positive. And when you incarcerate a teen boy in a boys’ facility and he is feminine-presenting, HIV positive and also gay, that’s a risk for everyone. I recognized the danger in that.”

Willis advocated for the teen to be sentenced to a specialized treatment center instead of the juvenile detention center, but she was not successful. “That case had such a profound impact on me that I’ve wanted to help kids and adults in the LGBTQ+ community ever since,” she says.

Over the past few years, she’s helped more and more gay couples adopt children. Considering the current political climate, Willis says, much of her work involves protective planning—securing marriages, birth certificates, and parental rights for same-sex couples. “Not every family law lawyer is LGBTQ+ friendly,” she notes, which is why she strives to be a trusted referral.

She also focuses on domestic violence work and guardian ad litem work, which allows her to advocate directly for children in custody and divorce cases without getting mired in the emotional drain of litigation.

Working in family law is rarely easy. “We deal with people in the most difficult times of their lives,” Willis acknowledges. “But this was the goal, this is what I wanted to do, and I’m so happy where I am right now.”