Which Blueprint through the
Legal Divorce Will You Choose?
1. Agree to work together and not retain attorneys. Mutually cooperate and maintain control over your process. Be fair. Save thousands of dollars. OR Refuse to speak to one another or work together. Be unnecessarily mean to one another and seek revenge. Retain attorneys, lose your power, be intimidated, and coerced through fear. Manipulate the law to try and win at the other’s expense in a fight you will ultimately lose. Spend about $10,000 on paperwork before your divorce even gets started.
2. Go to a number of professionals. Ask Questions. Gather Information. Become informed. Make decisions with the right information. Create a strategy. OR Retain attorneys and get very little information. Make decisions in the adversarial vacuum which means you will not have the right information to make informed decisions to protect your future.
3. Agree on as many issues as possible first. Mediate the issues you cannot agree on. Get counseling/self-help. Hire an attorney by the hour if necessary. OR Retain an attorney. Pay a huge retainer fee for unnecessary paperwork and have nothing to show for it. Get embroiled in the adversarial system and be baited against one another making it virtually impossible to agree on anything. Communication breaks down. Conflict increases. Anger escalates. Battle it out making your lawyers richer, and you poorer.
4. Work on designing your Separation Agreement together after you know what needs to be in the Agreement and are aware of all the options in order to protect your future. Get it reviewed by more than one professional. OR Have no idea what should be in your Agreement or how to protect your future and expect your lawyer to tell you. Deal with motions that your lawyer can file without your permission. Go to pre trials that your lawyers can schedule without your permission. Be forced to settle, and you are still without an Agreement.
5. Once your Agreement is drafted, file it in court with other documents you can get free at the court. You now should have an uncontested no-fault divorce based on an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. OR Spend years in an attorney’s office battling out. Attorneys cannot make you decide anything. OR Have an expensive trial. Go before a judge who will decide your fate. It won’t be pretty.
6. Save extreme emotional duress, major financial loss and valuable time by going around the system and having your divorce end at the courthouse. Post-divorce conflict will be less likely. OR Have your divorce begin at the court house. Mark years off your life. Suffer major financial loss and risk permanent emotional damage to you and your children by going through the adversarial system. Post-divorce conflict very likely.
Sherman, Ed. (2003). Divorce Solutions. California: Nolo Press.