‘Our Job Is to Feel’

There’s enough going on in Jeralyn Lawrence’s Watchung law firm to dazzle a visitor before they even get to Jeralyn Lawrence.

First there’s the landscaping. “That’s all sod, baby,” Lawrence says with pride as she shows off the exquisite slice of green leading up to Lawrence Law, as well as the vivid, fiery mums in the flowerbeds. A beautiful spiral staircase in her office leads to a loft that sits above Lawrence’s desk. She had it built
as a study and computer space for her three kids, a manifestation of the family law attorney’s credo of putting parenting above all else.

And you can’t miss the life-size cardboard cutout of Taylor Swift in the corner. Lawrence caught the Eras Tour in Florida with her two daughters, but it was mom’s second go-round, much to the chagrin of her teenagers; Lawrence caught Swift in Cincinnati with her best friend earlier in the year.

Then there’s Lawrence herself. Warm, funny, sometimes vulnerable, at all times strong in her convictions, unafraid to seek connection in a world where many do the opposite.

“Our job is to feel, and to make people feel us,” she says. “To feel that we are there with them, that we’re walking the walk with them, that we’re breathing with them. I don’t think our clients will remember this one thing I said or did, but they will remember how I made them feel. That’s the only way we know how to do things here.”

Lawrence can still recall the moment the course of her legal career shifted. Originally interested in pursuing work as a prosecutor, in 1984 Lawrence watched the TV film The Burning Bed, centered on the real-life case of Francine Hughes (Farrah Fawcett), who, after a decade of abuse at the hands of her husband, Mickey (Paul Le Mat), burned down their home with Mickey in it, killing him. During the trial, Francine’s lawyer leaned on the then-novel battered woman defense.

“I grew up in the kind of very lovely home where I didn’t even know domestic violence was a thing,” Lawrence says. That film, coupled with the high of arguing a motion for child support as a member of the family law clinic in law school, sealed the deal. “I gave someone a voice who didn’t have one,” she says. “There was no going back for me.”

Lawrence was on the prosecutorial track thanks to her dad, Jerry Lawrence, who was a detective in the small town of Wayne, where she and her four siblings grew up. “That’s where I developed my love for the law, by talking with my dad since the sixth grade about his experiences as a police officer,” she says. Her father would engage her in such a way that she felt invited to the grown-up table to dig into ideas of justice and law. “He always invited a discussion on both sides of an argument,” Lawrence says. “To this day, he’s still my go-to guy, whether it’s questions about running my law firm, renovating the office, or managing a significant case.”

Her mother, Carol Lawrence, was the “unofficial mayor” of the Wayne Township Public School District, Lawrence says. She dedicated a great deal of her life to volunteering for the PTO in between part-time jobs like driving a school bus. “She instilled in me the benefit of being joyful, having fun while in service to others, which is something we live out at the firm,” she says.

She laughs and adds, “I had the school bus driver as a mom, and a police officer as a dad. Anything and everything that me and my siblings did got back to my parents rather expeditiously, which was particularly impressive in a pre-cellphone world.”

An adept pros-and-cons list-maker, Lawrence spent some time scribbling before deciding where to accept her first job after a family court clerkship in 1996. She eventually chose Norris McLaughlin. Just three months in as a baby lawyer, Lawrence saw the partner she worked for get married and move out of state.

“I don’t think our clients will remember this one thing I said or did, but they will remember how I made them feel.”

“She gave me her book and said, ‘Figure it out,’” Lawrence says, laughing. “I remember driving home in a daze, it was Christmastime, and literally just lying on my bed crying. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do. My mother said to me, and I repeat this all the time, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ So that’s what I did. I have a strong work ethic. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I try to work the hardest.”

She read everything, showed up at every Bar event, and made the right connections. She took everything that walked in the door: from domestic-violence complaints to divorce trials to post-judgment matters to custody.

What spoke to her the most was helping victims of domestic violence.

“I thought I would specialize in domestic violence and take down all the bad guys and bad women on behalf of victims, for which there is no boundary—rich, poor, white, Black, educated, uneducated; anybody can be a victim,” she says. “But what you quickly learn is a lot of the true victims of domestic violence will never avail themselves of our law because they have no confidence that a piece of paper, a restraining order, will save them. And oftentimes, there are people that trivialize the true plight of victims of domestic violence, and misuse and abuse the statute, and get a restraining order to gain an advantage in a divorce litigation because the consequences are significant.”

Lawrence found herself filing for a temporary restraining order at one point in her life. It’s not something she often, or easily, talks about.

“I know about the cycles of domestic violence. The history of it. The statistics of it. But I also know the terror of it. The out-of-control-ness of it. How something a partner does that you first think is cute but that later is alarmingly controlling. When people ask me, ‘Shit, Jer. How did this happen to you?’ I don’t know what to say because the truth is, ‘Hell if I know.’

“If one person is impacted by me sharing this story, I will.”

For more than 20 years, Lawrence grew her practice at Norris McLaughlin, handling more and more complex matrimonial matters, including representing celebrities, professional athletes, and other wealthy individuals. One summer, she put all hands on deck at her office for weeks in a mad scramble to help return to the U.S. a baby who had been kidnapped and taken to Greece.

But she feels her peers will most remember her work as chair of the Bar’s family law section, where she was one of the architects of the Alimony Reform Act signed into law by former Gov. Chris Christie in 2014. The act renamed permanent alimony to “open durational alimony with durational limits,” added more specific guidelines for cohabitation, and allowed judges to lower alimony if the payer was unemployed, among other changes.

“We [lawyers] were fine with revisions to the alimony statute, but we just wanted to make sure they were fair for both sides,” Lawrence says. “We were fighting against, generally, men’s rights groups that wanted to be unfair to dependent women who needed alimony, and our point was simple: We needed a statute that’s fair. In the end, we negotiated a significant amount of revisions to one of the most important pieces of legislation that family lawyers deal with every day.”

“I gave someone a voice who didn’t have one. There was no going back for me.”

State Sen. Troy Singleton was one of the lawmakers who worked with Lawrence on the act. “We started out as adversaries,” he says. “But we ended as close friends.”

Singleton gathered state lawmakers and a host of lawyers together to talk. “The meeting was probably more combative than it should have been,” he recalls. “One of the things that Jeralyn did that I value her for is take thorny issues and contentious situations and turn the temperature down, giving people the chance to really listen to each other. I learned from how she handled those early meetings and our conversations to become a better active listener. Thanks to her leadership, we were all able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to create … a consensus piece of legislation that I believe to be a model in how we should look at alimony in any state.”

Singleton adds, “She doesn’t come to you with opinions that have not been thoroughly researched and vetted, which gives her the ability to argue issues and points from a position of fact and not emotion.”

Lawrence’s decision to open her own firm in 2019 was similarly well-researched. “I set my roots down there, and I loved it there, but it was time,” she says of her departure from Norris. When she told her staff she was leaving, they said they were coming
with her.

Lawrence Law, ranked by NJBIZ as one of the best places to work in the state, operates on the M.O. of Lawrence’s mother:

Find joy. Lawrence builds play into the schedule for her employees: trivia nights, paint-and-sip functions, cornhole tournaments. “Workplace culture and attorney wellness are things I really care about,” she says.
Fellow family law attorney Amy Shimalla can attest to that. The two met not long after Lawrence joined Norris McLaughlin and became fast friends. “We’ve been on the opposite side of cases, but both had a mindset to help people resolve their case amicably if at all possible,” she says. In 2021, after Shimalla’s firm dissolved, she joined Lawrence Law, working in the Watchung building, which Lawrence bought and renovated in 2023. (The firm also has an office in Red Bank.) Shimalla recently retired.

Another nod to building culture: Each season, passersby stop for selfies at whatever holiday décor Lawrence has dreamed up for the Watchung front lawn. “This is a very hard job that often smacks you around,” she says. “Which is why it’s so important for me to work hard, play hard.”
While the perks are fun, they’re also Lawrence’s way of addressing a systemic issue that became her platform as president of the New Jersey State Bar Association in 2022: lawyer wellness. She formed a task force to delve into, among other things, the alarming rates of mental health issues among lawyers. “We learned 10 percent of our colleagues are suicidal,” she says.
“There is no question our profession is in crisis.”

As a result, critical changes are being made, like the newly formed Supreme Court Committee on Wellness, a recently adopted path back from disbarment, and the rewriting of question 12B on the character and fitness exam given to law students, which asks if they are currently seeking help for a mental health condition. “When you talk to law students and they tell you they’re not getting the help they need because they’ve heard they have to answer question 12B on their character and fitness exam, and that a ‘yes’ can prevent them from being a lawyer, something needed to change.”

Shimalla says, “I’ve seen a lot of presidents of the state Bar come and go, and they all do wonderful things, but she was special. The changes she brought about are incredible.”

Lawrence cares for her own mental wellness in many ways, like by spending time with her husband, John, and children, Abigail, 19, 14-year-old twins Amelia and Lawson (so named because he is a lawyer’s son), and stepchildren Kyle and Carson. She coaches Amelia in basketball, and likes to spend summers at the family beach house in Belmar. She won’t turn her nose up at a lobster roll. And, of course, there is Taylor Swift.

“The trip to Miami with my daughters was so special,” she says. “They were singing at the top of their lungs. I think it’s so important to find this balance where you take this time, and not just for me, but for everyone I work with.”

Her favorite Swift song? “All Too Well.”

“The 10-minute-breakup song,” Lawrence says. “It’s so therapeutic.”