Stephens & Stevens Marital & Family Law

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know it’s always been more than a legal resource.

Yes, there are Squibs — 21 years of them now. Yes, there are case law updates, ethics articles, and CLE content that I genuinely believe makes attorneys better at what we do. That work matters to me deeply, and it’s not going anywhere.

But if you’ve scrolled far enough into the archive, you’ve also found the other stuff. The Jiu Jitsu essays. The backstage stories. The personal reflections that don’t belong in any law journal but belong here anyway. You’ve found a person hiding, not very successfully, behind the professional record. That person decided it was time to stop hiding.

I am proud to announce my newest project: Core Memories — a memoir-in-progress, published as a living WordPress blog, one chapter at a time.

It is not a law blog. It is not a self-help book. It is not a carefully branded personal narrative designed to make me look good.

It is the story of how I got here.

The full story. The one that starts long before law school, before Squibs, before board certifications and community awards. The one that starts in Miami, in a house shaped by addiction and loss, with a boy who was labeled a problem before he was ever given the chance to be a solution.

There are more than 20 chapters published already, some I have teased here, with more coming. Some are memoir. Some are open letters. One is fiction involving alien abduction. It is a living document in the truest sense — unfinished, honest, still becoming.

People who know me professionally know the credentials. Board Certified. AV Preeminent. Best Lawyers. Super Lawyers. 29 years of high-conflict litigation in Palm Beach County. Founder of Stephens’ Squibs. Vice-Chair of the Center for Child Counseling. 

All of it real, all of it earned.

But credentials are evidence of output. 

They don’t explain why.

They don’t explain why I became a trauma-informed attorney — not as a strategy, but as a conviction. They don’t explain why I care so deeply about ACEs, about breaking intergenerational cycles, about asking what has happened to this person instead of what is wrong with this person. They don’t explain why I’ve spent 21 years writing Squibs at midnight and donating the proceeds to the Center for Child Counseling rather than putting them in my pocket.

The why lives in Core Memories.

Here is what I’ve come to understand after 29 years of practicing family law:

The most important thing I bring into a courtroom isn’t my knowledge of case law. It isn’t my trial experience or my board certification. It’s the fact that I know, in my body, what it feels like when the ordinary world ends without warning.

I know what it feels like to be the kid in the system who nobody quite knows what to do with. I know what it feels like to lose the person who was supposed to be your foundation. I know what it feels like to build yourself from the rubble of someone else’s choices — and to do it largely alone, until the right people showed up and refused to look away.

My clients are living inside versions of that story every day.

When I walk into a courtroom, I’m not just representing a legal position. I’m representing a person in one of the most destabilizing moments of their life — often carrying trauma they’ve never named, grief they haven’t processed, and fear about a future they can’t yet imagine. That context changes how I practice. It changes what I notice. It changes what I fight for.

Core Memories is the story that explains that context. It’s the backstory that makes the professional story make sense. If eddiestephens.com is about what I do — this blog is about who I am.

And coremememories.com is about how I got there.

If you’re an attorney who has followed this blog for the Squibs or the CLE content — thank you. Genuinely. That community has meant more to me than I’ve ever said out loud.

If you’re a client, past or present, who found this blog while trying to make sense of what you were going through — I hope something here helped.

And if you’re someone who simply wandered in and found something that felt true — welcome. You’re the reader I didn’t know I was writing for.

The Epilogue of Core Memories ends with something I mean completely:

“I am still here. I am still becoming. And the ordinary world, though it ended once, has been remade. Not perfectly. Not without scars. But with intention.”

Maybe that resonates with you. Maybe it doesn’t — yet.

Maybe you’ve been reading this blog for years and never quite knew what to make of the person behind the Squibs. Maybe you’re going through something right now that you can’t fully name, and you stumbled here looking for something you couldn’t articulate.

Maybe you’re just curious. That’s enough.

So here’s my invitation: come find out how a kid labeled a problem became an attorney who asks what happened to you.

Come find out why a courtroom, of all places, became the place where I learned that stories matter more than verdicts.

Come find out where all of this came from.
The memoir is live. The chapters are waiting. And if even one of them gives you a moment of oh — that’s where that comes from — for yourself, not just for me — then it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Core Memories is available now at coremememories.com.

What are yours?

Click HERE to access Eddie’s Core Memories.

-Eddie

Eddie Stephens is a Board Certified Marital and Family Law Attorney at Stephens & Stevens, PLLC in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is Vice-Chair of the Center for Child Counseling, founder of Stephens’ Squibs, and the author of Core Memories. His personal motto is “Do Something That Matters.”