Kim Wright received her Bachelor of Arts from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC, and a Juris Doctor from The University of Florida, Levin College of Law, Gainesville, Florida.
Never one to back down from a challenge, Kim started law school as the mother of seven children while running the family taxi business. Her experiences in law school led her to eschew the practice of law. (Too rigid and adversarial!) Instead, after law school, she was the director of a domestic violence agency and pursued other nonprofit work. Then, she met a lawyer who offered a different possibility for what it meant to be a lawyer: he shared that he saw his role as a peacemaker and that as a divorce lawyer, his job was to help clients learn to get along so they could raise their children amicably.
Inspired, Kim opened a practice as a family law attorney, focused on peacemaking models like mediation and collaborative law. As early as the 1990s, her holistic law practice included a social worker, counselor, and mediator. She was a pioneer in collaborative practice, restorative justice, therapeutic jurisprudence, and other models that came to be known collectively as Integrative Law.
In 1999-2000, Kim created a website that showcased the peacemaking approaches and cutting-edge approaches in law. She became a spokesperson, coach, and ardent advocate for new models of law practice. In 2007, she helped organize several conferences and spoke at 15 different events. She saw a budding movement and realized she could be part of nurturing its growth.
In 2008 Kim gave up her home and office to become a digital nomad. She traveled around the world, speaking and training legal professionals and entrepreneurs on six continents. She created Cutting Edge Law Enterprises, Inc. as a vehicle for fulfilling her vision for the legal system. She also co-created the Conscious Contracts(R) model of relational, values-based contracts. Conscious Contracts are now offered in 20 world languages.
Kim has published and contributed to several books, including three published by the American Bar Association. She is co-editor of Trauma-informed Law, a primer for lawyer resilience and healing (ABA 2023). She is the author of Lawyers as Changemakers: The Global Integrative Law Movement (ABA, 2016) and Lawyers as Peacemakers: Practicing Holistic, Problem-solving Law (ABA, 2010).
(Peacemakers and Changemakers are currently in the process of being edited and second editions will be released in early 2026.)
In 2023, Kim settled back in North Carolina and became the founder and director of the Integrative Law Center, in Burlington, NC. She works with legal clients to align their businesses, practices, and legal documents with their values. Her offerings include Conscious Contracts(R), Conscious Wills, and more.
For more than 30 years, Kim has maintained a small coaching practice, never more than 5 clients at a time, through which she coaches lawyers on designing their law practices to integrate their values, personalities, and preferences. (The work is deep and she prefers to hold space for only a few at a time.)
She is also a clinical professor and Senior Fellow at Quinnipiac School of Law Center on Dispute Resolution, Project on Integrative Law & Legal Education.
And, most recently, she is on the core team for the TED.com/Law project.
“TEDLaw brings human-centered legal learning to life through immersive workshops designed for the realities of modern practice. We help lawyers strengthen judgment, navigate complexity, and lead with clarity in a legal landscape shaped by AI, uncertainty, and rising expectations.”
