John Crouch is experienced in all four ways of resolving family law issues: negotiation, collaboration, mediation, and litigation. In 1995 he joined and expanded the firm's interstate and international family law practice, and its emphasis on diplomatic, military, civil service and international-organization employees. Having taken every class that William & Mary's law school offered in wills, estates and related tax issues, he added that work to his practice, starting with divorced people and diplomatic families and the specific concerns they face when making their wills and naming guardians and trustees for their children.
John has always looked for ways to reduce the damage that divorce does to people and improve the system. While still in law school, he was trained as a family law mediator and served as a court-appointed special advocate for children in the Newport News Juvenile Court. He has co-chaired the American Bar Association's Child Custody Committee, and was Chair and lead drafter of its Committee that wrote standards for child representation in custody cases, which later became the Uniform Representation of Children in Abuse, Neglect, and Custody Proceedings Act. He has also chaired the Arlington County Bar Association's Family Law Section.
John was the first Virginian to join the movement for Collaborative Divorce and one of the very first Virginians to get trained in collaborative law and began practicing it. He has served as president and in other positions in the regional collaborative practice group, which is now known as the Collaborative Professionals of Northern Virginia. He has also been involved in the healthy marriage movement, which works to give couples the knowledge, tools and opportunities to try to save and improve their marriages. John recently became a Fellow of the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Having long been active in the International Family Law Committees of the American Bar Association, he is also a member of the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals and the International Society of Family Law.
Richard Crouch had a strong and varied litigation background even before he began practicing family law full time in the 1980s. After law school, basic training and infantry commander training, he served for four years as a lawyer in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps. Then from 1968-1981 he worked as a legal writer and editor for the legal publisher BNA, writing for Criminal Law Reporter and United States Law Week before becoming the first editor of Family Law Reporter.
Meanwhile he also maintained a general law practice concentrating in criminal law, civil liberties, civil rights and public interest litigation, and family law. His writings and his work in the courtroom brought him increasing recognition as an expert in family law and such emerging topics as child custody jurisdiction and international child abduction. From his work with clients in Northern Virginia, he developed expertise in the special family law problems of military and diplomatic families, including the then-new field of retirement asset division. In the early 1980s he left BNA and began practicing family law full time. In the late 1980s he served on, then chaired, a regional lawyer disciplinary panel. Since then, he has occasionally served as an attorney or an expert witness in lawyer ethics and malpractice cases.
Richard was involved in the drafting of many of the laws that are now used every day in family law, such as property division statutes, the federal law on dividing diplomats' pensions, and the first ethics code for mediators. He has held office in the Virginia State Bar Family Law Section and the Virginia Chapter of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, and is also active in the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. He has co-chaired the American Bar Association's Child Custody Committee and its task force on federal legislation. Since 1991, he has served on the State Bar Family Law Section's Board of Governors and edited the section's newsletter. He has served as a Neutral Case Evaluator for the Fairfax Circuit Court. Richard Crouch is the author of Family Law Checklists, published by West Group, Interstate Custody Litigation, published by BNA,The Legal Status of Homemakers in Virginia, published by the Government Printing Office, and the editor of Negotiating and Drafting Marital Agreements, published by Virginia Continuing Legal Education.
The late Thomas Gordon Crouch practiced in Arlington for many years, specializing in tax law, wills and estates, and died in 2004.
The late Ralph Waldo Crouch died in 1968.