Lawrence R. (Larry) Maxwell, Jr. was born in 1937 in Dallas, Texas. He grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, attending public elementary school and graduating high school from St. Martin’s Episcopal School. He returned to Dallas in 1955 and obtained his B.A. degree in 1959 and L.L.B. in 1962 from Southern Methodist University. While in law school, he served as Associate Editor of the Southwestern Law Journal (now SMU Law Review).
His law practice began in 1962 with the Dallas law firm of Turner, White, Atwood, Meer, and Francis. In 1968, he began his own law firm and engaged in a civil trial and appellate practice with several outstanding colleagues for many years. With the passage of the Texas A.D.R. Act in 1987, he expanded his practice to include mediation, arbitration, and other alternate dispute resolution processes.
With the encouragement of a colleague, in he took training in a dispute resolution process known as Collaborative Law, which at the time was becoming widely used in family law. He became intrigued with the non-adversarial approach to resolving civil disputes based on cooperation and teamwork, honesty and integrity, respect and civility, and parity of costs.
In 2004, with a small group of other like-minded lawyers in Dallas, he established the Texas Collaborative Law Council, a 501(c)(3) Texas non-profit corporation. The organization continued to grow, and in 2009 the Board recognized that the collaborative movement was international. The name was changed to Global Collaborative Law Council, and membership in the international organization continues to grow, now counting members from coast to coast in the United States and Canada, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Brazil, and Mexico. Larry s current mission is to continue working with colleagues in this country and worldwide, to expand the use of the collaborative process for resolving civil disputes in all areas of civil law.