Charlie Asher

Charlie Asher is an honors graduate of both Earlham College (B.S. 1974) and Indiana University School of Law (J.D. 1977) and an AV-rated attorney.

For 20 years Charlie concentrated his practice in criminal defense, earning annual recognition in The Best Attorneys in America.  Then in 1997 he stopped taking new cases except for select pro bono ones and dedicated his professional time to leading the creative teams of three free resources for better legal service to the public.

1. In part due to witnessing the ways in which contentious family breakups often injured children and led to the involvement of many of them in an array of self-destructive behaviors, Charlie has led the team creating and constantly updating UpToParents.org.This ground-breaking free and bilingual website has been used by more than 250,000 separated, divorced, and never-married parents to build their better futures by focusing on meeting their children’s needs, especially their need for peace in their family.The website’s unique personalization and interactivity have earned it many prestigious awards, including the ABA Dispute Resolution Section’s “Lawyer as Problem Solver Award” and the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC)’s “Judge Irwin Cantor Innovative Program Award.”
2. Charlie has lectured to judges and bar leaders in over 300 counties about the development of comprehensively cooperative systems of family law. Charlie gathered the lessons from those collaborations into AssessFamilyLaw.org, a free tool jurisdictions can use to assess and improve their family law systems.
3. Beginning about four years ago Charlie decided to use the successful experiences with UpToParents.org and AssessFamilyLaw.org to circle back to his roots in criminal defense to lead the development of DefenseMap.com. This is a newly launched free tool allowing accused persons (adults and minors and English- and Spanish-speaking) to answer a comprehensive set of questions about both their cases and themselves. The clients work on their own without attorney time. The website then screens each client’s information for special issues, defenses, and mitigation and creates a concisely organized Defense Map on both the defenses and mitigation in the legal cases and also the personal options in the client’s life.

Currently Charlie concentrates his professional time presenting about these websites, helping with their implementation, and consulting on criminal cases where clients have used DefenseMap.com.