John Crouch is experienced in all four ways of resolving family law issues: negotiation, collaboration, mediation, and litigation. In 1995 he joined and expanded his father Richard Crouch's interstate and international family law practice, and its emphasis on diplomatic, military, civil service and international-organization employees. He often assists lawyers in other states and countries, and other parts of Virginia, as a consultant, co-counsel, or expert witness on international and interstate family law cases. But he also regularly represents clients all over Northern Virginia in all kinds of family law cases and situations — everything that happens before, during, after, or instead-of marriage and divorce.
Having taken every class that William & Mary's law school offered in wills, trusts, 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 planning for the future 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 juvenile court. He 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 is a cofounder and former president of the regional collaborative divorce practice group, now known as the Collaborative Professionals of Northern Virginia.
John’s most distinctive skills and experience are in writing, drafting, analyzing situations, advising and counseling, long-term litigation/negotiation strategies, and managing conflict. As an expert in family law, he has repeatedly taught continuing education courses for other lawyers and held office in local and nationwide professional organizations. He is the editor of Negotiating and Drafting Marital Agreements, published by Virginia Continuing Legal Education; and has contributed chapters to Skoloff, Singer, and Brown's Drafting Prenuptial Agreements, Emery's Cultural Sociology of Divorce, Loveless and Holman's The Family in the New Millennium, and Brown & Morgan's Family Law Update; articles in the American Bar Association's Family Advocate and Complete Lawyer, the Virginia State Bar's Virginia Lawyer and Family Law News, and Fair$hare, and poems in Legal Studies Forum.
Richard Crouch, who retired in 2018, 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 interstate 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. He 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. Richard is the author of Family Law Checklists (West Group), Interstate Custody Litigation (BNA), The Legal Status of Homemakers in Virginia (GPO), and the former editor of Negotiating and Drafting Marital Agreements (Virginia CLE), and the Virginia State Bar's Family Law Section quarterly.
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.
Crouch & Crouch is located conveniently in Arlington across the street from the Courthouse Metro, on the Orange and Silver Lines:
2111 Wilson Boulevard
Suite 800
Arlington, VA 22201
Call: (703) 528-6700
Email