Attorneys who practice in the area of family and juvenile law frequently see their clients at their most distressed: they represent parents who have lost custody of their children (to the state or to the other parent), children who have been arrested and are being prosecuted as delinquents, or families who are worried about an elderly relative's ability to continue caring for herself -- to name just a few common issues. But these lawyers also help clients achieve great joy, when handling an adoption, or helping a same-sex (or infertile) couple make legal arrangements for artificial reproduction, or upon resolving one of the aforementioned distress-provoking matters. Family and juvenile lawyers must be fluent in substantive law and the procedural rules of many different courts, adept at counseling clients who can be justifiably quite emotional, skilled at negotiating favorable resolutions in extraordinarily high-stakes matters, and comfortable with trial lawyering, often in a context of great uncertainty.