Making Room: A Memoir of Faith, Law, and Endurance

A practicing attorney’s unflinching account of what fifty years of representing vulnerable people actually costs. In 1956, a six-year-old boy in a Sacramento Catholic school classroom scooted over in his desk—physically moved his small body to the right—to make room for his guardian angel. Seven decades later, Michael Hackard is still making room: for dying clients the legal system has forgotten, for a faith practice tested by crisis after crisis, and for the grace that arrives in forms no one expects. Making Room: A Memoir of Faith, Law, and Endurance traces the arc of a life shaped by Irish Catholic formation, generational hardship, and a legal career that took Hackard from a brush with the Manson family during his earliest days in law to becoming one of California’s most recognized elder law attorneys. Along the way: brain surgery at forty-two. Pharmaceutical poisoning at forty-four. The death of a law partner. Fifteen million dollars in debt during the 2008 financial collapse. Twelve years of litigation that shadowed every case he took. But Making Room is not a story of triumph.