Effective Strategies in Working with High Conflict Personalities

Seminar Overview
This engaging and practical seminar explores effective approaches to working with high conflict personalities. Legal professionals frequently encounter clients or opposing parties whose behaviour escalates conflict and complicates legal processes. This training provides insight into the nature of high conflict personalities and equips participants with tools to manage these challenging dynamics more effectively.

This presentation will draw from the following topics:

• Recognizing potential indicators and key characteristics of high conflict personalities
• Managing professional roles and responsibilities when collaborating with other professionals (e.g., custody assessors, child protection workers, therapists)
• Understanding relevant personality disorders (e.g., borderline, narcissistic, antisocial, histrionic)
• Implementing hostility reduction strategies and identifying intractable or high-risk situations
• Maintaining impartiality, managing personal triggers, and applying self-care strategies
• Exploring legal and clinical interventions for navigating complex and high-conflict cases

This seminar is ideal for lawyers, mediators, and professionals working in high-conflict environments who are looking to build confidence, develop specialized skills, and foster more effective outcomes in their practice.

Seminar Presenters
Howard Hurwitz, MSW, RSW, AccFM (Ontario)

Howard is a social worker in private practice, specializing in supporting families navigating separation and divorce. He is also a certified family mediator. With a Master of Social Work and more than 46 years of experience in child protection, children’s mental health, and family counselling, Howard has held senior roles, including 16 years as Director of a child protection agency in Toronto.

Howard founded and chaired the High Conflict Forum, a community-based network bringing together lawyers, judges, mental health professionals, and child protection staff from over 30 agencies to support high-conflict families experiencing separation or divorce. This model has been so successful that it has been adopted in five other Canadian cities.

An experienced trainer, Howard regularly delivers training to professionals in the child protection, children’s mental health, and family law sectors. He has presented at international conferences in the United States and the Netherlands and is recognized by the courts as an expert in working with high-conflict families and cases involving parental alienation. He is frequently consulted by professionals across disciplines on these matters. Howard is also co-author, with Dr. Barbara Fidler and Professor Nicholas Bala, of Emotional Harm and Parent-Child Contact Problems in High Conflict Separations.

Howard is a lead clinician in Families Moving Forward, a treatment program designed for children who have disrupted contact with a parent following parental separation or divorce.

Registration Fee
$115.00 ($100.00 + HST)
HST # R108086463

Register Here

CPD Credit
2.5 hours