Lani Baron

Lani Baron focuses her practice on California family law, with particular emphasis on premarital and postmarital agreements, marital settlement agreements, and the stipulated judgments that bring a matter to a close. She earned her Juris Doctorate at Whittier Law School on a full-tuition merit scholarship, graduating magna cum laude in the top four percent of her class with a concentration in family law and children’s rights. She studied dispute resolution at Pepperdine University’s Straus Institute before law school, and holds a Bachelor of Science in Paralegal Studies from Nova Southeastern University.

At Whittier she served as a Fellow of the Center for Children’s Rights and as a Dean’s Fellow, sat on Law Review, and competed in moot court, advancing to the octofinals of the national child welfare and adoption law competition, where she argued an adoption question before the Ohio Supreme Court.

Before joining Nelson Kirkman, Ms. Baron founded and led Alternative Divorce Solutions, a Newport Beach divorce mediation practice she built to five offices across California and sold in 2023 to realign her professional life with family priorities. She mediated more than 2,400 family law matters over twelve years there, experience that shapes how she prepares a case now. She also founded the ADS Institute for Divorce Mediation, through which she trained attorneys from around the world in the mediation process. Having spent twelve years on the other side of the table, Ms. Baron reads an opponent’s position early and drafts every agreement on the assumption that a judge will one day be asked to enforce it.

While running Alternative Divorce Solutions and afterward, Ms. Baron spent five years as an adjunct professor of law at the Santa Barbara and Ventura Colleges of Law, teaching dispute resolution, mediation, contract law, wills and trusts, legal writing and analysis, and the capstone writing portfolio project. She has taught continuing legal education for Lawline on bringing forensic accountants into complex divorce matters, and she co-hosted Divorce Demystified, a twenty-seven-episode podcast on resolving family disputes. Super Lawyers has named her a Rising Star every year from 2019 through 2023.

Ms. Baron came to family law by way of her own parents’ high-conflict divorce, and she has spent her career building the process she wishes her family had been offered. That is the motivation behind the level of service she gives her clients, and behind her emphasis on helping people make the choices that do the least harm to their families, during the divorce and long after it.

That same commitment to healing carries into her life outside the law. After her own battle with breast cancer, Ms. Baron received what she describes as a spiritual message to return to horses. She brought home Happy, her horse, and through that journey found Medicine Horse, a Boulder County nonprofit that has offered free and donation-based equine-assisted psychotherapy since 2000, with a mission of Horses helping Humans: Healing through the empathic power of the horse. She now serves on its Board of Directors. Ms. Baron believes deeply in the organization’s work with others seeking healing, and she brings a special commitment to its programs for breast cancer patients and survivors, who she knows firsthand can find strength, connection, and peace alongside a horse.