Today we’d like to introduce you to Del Dickson.
Hi Del, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I was born and raised in Vernal. I always knew that I wanted to do something in public service, which is likely because I come from a family of teachers. For a whole host of reasons, I moved out of Utah as soon as I could after turning eighteen, and attended Pomona College in California. After graduating, I went to law school back east at Harvard Law School. During the first seven years of my legal career, my goal was to become a federal prosecutor. However, after about a year into that job, my husband and I had a failed adoption that led us both to rethink what we wanted out of life completely. We ended up moving to Millcreek to be closer to family as we knew we would try to add to our family again via adoption. At this same time, I decided to become an adoption attorney. That path ended up leading me into assisted reproduction technologies law as well, and, ultimately, connected me with my current team where I do that legal work as well as representing children in high-conflict custody cases after being appointed by the court to do so. This work is also what led me to become a social worker because, although I think lawyers can do good work in this space, it is the social workers who help people the most in these circumstances. Right now, I feel beyond blessed to be able to have a career where I am able to serve as both a lawyer and social worker, while also having an amazing husband and two incredible kids.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
In many ways, it has been a smooth road. However, there is an irony that the hardest, most painful, thing I have ever gone through in my life – which is that failed adoption – is also how I ultimately came to have the things that mean the most to me in life, which are my kids, my husband, and the work I do as an attorney or social worker.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Right now, I am best known for being an attorney who does a lot of surrogacy work and represents children in high-conflict custody cases who also made the crazy decision to go and become a social worker too.
What I am most proud of in my career is that I am able to act in a number of different roles to help families – and especially the kids within those families – through the difficult experience of family separation or infertility.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I generally am not a risk-taker, but when I do take risks I tend to lean all the way in. For example, it was a huge risk for me to leave what I had thought was my dream job in 2015 after the failed adoption and move back to Utah with my California-born husband, and it also was a significant risk for me to leave the more comfortable commercial litigation work I was doing before becoming an attorney who represents kids in scary situations. However, in both of those situations, what I think led me to take on these risks is that they made sense to me logically, as well as on a gut-level. In general, I think that is also a good approach to thinking about whether taking on a particular risk is worth it.
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