Meghan Freed thinks the legal system is broken and that divorce can be the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Apparently, several hundred thousand people on LinkedIn agree with her.
There is a specific type of LinkedIn content that gets shared by people who would otherwise never touch LinkedIn with a 10-foot pole. It tends to be honest in a way that corporate platforms generally discourage. It tends to say something true about a human experience that everyone has had but nobody has put quite that way before. A disproportionate amount of it is increasingly coming from a divorce lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut, which is not a sentence anyone predicted.
Meghan Freed is the managing partner and co-founder of Freed Marcroft LLC, a family law firm she built from scratch in 2012 with her partner Kristen Marcroft. The firm has made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies multiple times. It has been named Hartford Magazine’s best law firm for 11 consecutive years, and it recently launched private arbitration services featuring a retired judge, for clients who would prefer their divorce to not be penciled in by an overburdened Connecticut court system.
However, none of this is why you might have encountered Meghan Freed recently. Recently, she wrote a post on LinkedIn about what divorce clients actually need from their lawyers that made you stop scrolling. Or about the psychology of people in the middle of a marriage ending that felt uncomfortably accurate. Or a post about what it means to practice law for the human being sitting across from you rather than the billable hour.
She has a lot of thoughts, and as it turns out, the platform is quite receptive to them.
The philosophy underlying all of this is not subtle; Freed Marcroft does not operate on the traditional family law model, which is adversarial by default, expensive by design, and oriented toward whatever outcome survives the longest court battle. Freed’s model is closer to divorce being a transition, centering around transitions that can be navigated with intention, and the lawyer’s job is to help the person in front of them get to the other side intact.
She draws from frameworks like the Empowerment Dynamic. She has opinions about the Four Agreements. In other words, she is not a typical divorce attorney, which is probably the point, which brings us to the private judge.
Freed Marcroft recently began offering private arbitration services through a retired Connecticut judge, a service that allows divorcing couples to essentially hire their own adjudicator rather than waiting for the state court system to find a slot for them sometime after their kids graduate high school. This is legal, and it is increasingly common among people with the means to access it. It raises questions that people will not be surprised to find ourselves asking: who gets to opt out of the public system, and what does it mean that opting out has become a product?
To be clear, Freed is not unaware of this tension. The pitch for private arbitration is not “justice for those who can afford it.” It’s closer to “the court system is genuinely overwhelmed, your divorce is genuinely time-sensitive, and here is a way to resolve it that doesn’t require your children aging out of the relevant custody arrangements before a hearing date materializes.”
This is a real problem with a real solution attached to it. Whether that solution should exist as a private market rather than a public resource is a question above Freed’s pay grade, and honestly above everyone else’s too.
What is notable is that Freed is operating at the exact intersection where the legal system’s failures meet individual people’s very urgent needs, and she has built something that addresses the gap, rather than just billing hours while everyone waits.
There is something inherently absurd about a divorce lawyer dominating a platform primarily known for “hustle culture” content and executives announcing that they are “humbled and honored” to accept awards from other executives. Freed has looked at that landscape and decided, apparently correctly, that what it was missing was honest content about relationships, client psychology, and what it actually looks like to practice law when a human being’s life is on the line, and the audience has agreed enthusiastically.
When you think about it, it’s very on-brand for 2026. The legal system is backlogged, the therapy waitlists are longer, and the people who are good at explaining complicated human situations clearly and without condescension are out there. They’re just more difficult to find than they should be given all the noise. Meghan Freed has simply made herself findable, one LinkedIn post at a time.
Whether a Hulu show is forthcoming is unknown, but if Connecticut ever gets a prestige legal drama, you know who the call is going to.
The Jezebel editorial staff was not involved in the creation of this content.
