Hawaii Attorney Annabel Murray Esq.
My Passion for Helping People
Ever since my first case, my passion has been helping people make better big decisions. In the 3+ decades since that first case, I’ve seen a lot of wonderful work being done by attorneys and judges… but I’ve also seen a lot of trauma, harm, and suffering arise because of vitriolic litigators, disempowered clients, and uninvested judges. While there are many of us who strive towards a new kind of justice system, there are still many who would rather stick with the old, injurious status quo.
My Own Big Decision
I saw how much people needed a new option, outside the limitations of Family Court. People needed someone to devise a new way of guiding and equipping people to navigate legal decision-making. I decided that someone would be me. Big Decisions Hawaii LLLC was born of my own big decision. The decision to step outside of the box and create a new path towards helping people, a path no one else had created yet.
Professional Imperatives
Restore & Repair
Breaking up is so hard, and the desire to fight can be overwhelming. But fighting is hard on children, expensive and destructive. Fighting extends the heartbreak. Let’s talk about how to move forward in a way that gets you to a healthy and happy place that allows you and the other parent to co-parent your children without high levels of conflict.
I can help you to identify the best co-parenting plan for you and your children and coach you in achieving your goals for peaceful co-parenting. I’m happy to work with one parent or both parents to restore trust and repair your co-parenting relationship.
Empower Clients
My goal is to empower you to help you make the best Big Decision for yourself; whether early in your relationship- before you get married, before you make the decision to have children, before you start sharing your finances, or making big purchases together, or later, when you’re making the big decision to separate, or divorce, and are not sure what direction to go in. My goal is to listen to your story, understand your goals, and provide you with education, advice, and support- to make you your own most trusted advocate.
Healthy Communication
Before you make that Big Decision... I’d love to talk to you, either alone or you and your partner, before you get married, or before you and your partner (unmarried) have a child, or buy a house, or before you become a step-parent.
There are so many legal issues involved with all of the above- just stuff you should know, about finances, parenting plans, custody arrangements, the list goes on. If you’re considering any of the above, let’s talk! And talking doesn’t mean that I think “it’s not going to work out,” of course not! It just means, go into any big decision with your eyes open and a basic understanding of the legal implications of the choices you and your partner are making.
Honesty & Integrity
As a licensed attorney and child-advocate for 30 years, I hold myself accountable and to a high standard of professionalism. I will give you a straight answer, work to fully understand your situation, and then help you to understand how to best advocate for yourself and your children.
Family Court and divorce/custody litigation can become a game of, “the ends justify the means;” meaning parties and their attorneys become vindictive and manipulative in order to get what they want. The fighting becomes overwhelming, and the truth and best interests of your children are lost in the expensive and hurtful back and forth.
Attorneys in Hawaii are ethically obligated to “zealously advocate” for their clients. This obligation is too often used to excuse bad behavior and justify legal strategies that are destructive and high conflict. My goal is to never go there, and to help you to stay in honesty and integrity, even when all out war feels like the only answer.
Avoid Litigation
Family Court is bad for children, and usually not good for parents either. The Family Court is dysfunctional by design, it is set up so that a perfect stranger (a Family Court judge) is given control over your future and your children’s future. And they make these permanent decisions based on the arguments of expensive attorneys who also have control over your future and your children’s future.
The farther you stay away from litigation, the more control you have over your future. To go to Family Court with an attorney is to place your life and the lives of your children into the hands of strangers. Let’s talk about how to maintain your sanity and your financial resources as you move towards a better future with your children without Family Court litigation.
Let's Talk
The first step in making a Big Decision is talking. Let's find a time where we can meet and talk about what's on your mind.
Family Law Attorney Annabel Murray
I have been licensed as an attorney in the State of Hawaii since 1993. In my 30 years of practicing Family Law I’ve been in many different roles. From 1993 to 1999 I worked primarily as a Guardian ad Litem- representing the best interests of abused and neglected children. During that time I trained foster parents, became a foster parent myself, and also began representing parents who were working to reunify with their children.
In 1999 I became the co-creator and lead attorney for Na Keiki Law Center. A project of Volunteer Legal Services Hawaii (LASH). At Na Keiki we focused not just on individual cases, but on the systemic legal issues facing children and their families. We identified systemic issues that we felt needed to be changed, so wrote legislation and testified in favor of the changes we felt needed to be made. Two very important issues for me during that time were maintaining sibling relationships after the termination of parental rights, and the lack of culturally appropriate interventions for families dealing with the ice epidemic. Unfortunately, we lost our funding (there is never enough to go around) so my friend Stacy Fukuhara-Barclay and I decided to open our own child-centered law firm.
In 2006, we began The Children’s Law Center. Our initial focus was on doing court-appointed neutral work; acting as Custody Evaluators, Parenting Coordinators, and Guardian ad litems. In this way we were able to focus exclusively on children; to meet with them and learn their stories, to hear from their parents and important people in their lives, and ultimately, to make recommendations to the court regarding the best interests of the children. Later, around 2013, I began to split my time between neutral work and doing “direct representation” of individual parents. Litigation took me further away from the neutral, child-centered role that I’d always loved, and toward divorce, custody, paternity and TRO litigation on behalf of one parent.
Re-Focusing on Legal Consulting
By 2021, I was finding myself more and more discouraged by Family Court litigation, and wondering whether there was a better way to manifest and support my passion for helping children and their families. I had wonderful clients, and I was so grateful for the opportunity to help them, but the Family Court system, which is geared towards litigation and conflict, and great for people who love the challenge of a good fight, especially, began to feel less than an ideal place for me to spend my energy and time.
After a brief sabbatical, it became clear that I thrive when I’m helping people who are dealing with crises, who have questions, who are confused and sad and don’t know where to turn. Unfortunately, it also became clear that Family Court litigation was burning me out; the way some people treated it like a game, the decisions some Judges made that I just could not understand, the incredible expense born by parents who were stuck in the system because their ex had the money and the desire to keep fighting. I knew that my heart was no longer in it, and I had to find a new way to help clients and their children.
That new way became apparent when attorneys were given the opportunity to offer “unbundled legal services.” This meant I could offer a menu of legal services, including document writing, coaching, consulting, and strategizing without being required to go to Family Court or to engage in litigation. I could still help people in crisis, to offer counsel and advice, to use the experience I’d gained over 30 years of legal practice, but I could also direct people away from Family Court litigation whenever possible. I’m excited to have the opportunity to educate, consult, coach and support people who are making Big Decisions. I started Big Decisions HI to give my clients the information they need to see the choices that they have, so that they can make the best decisions possible for themselves and their children.
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