How to Work With Your Divorce Lawyer
Thursday, April 30th, 2009A divorce can be an emotionally and financially devastating event. Many spouses make the common mistake of believing they should simply turn their case over to a lawyer who will 1960’s toys be solely responsible for doing all of the investigation of the case and make all of the important decisions in the case for them. The results for such an uninvolved client will almost always be significantly more costly and less satisfying for the client.
Understanding the numerous ways a spouse may be actively The Flash in managing his or her case will significantly lower that spouse’s attorney fees, will allow that spouse to make better informed decisions regarding the issues involved in the case, and will result in more intelligent decision making by both the client and the divorce lawyer.
It is the lawyer’s obligation to fully explain all of the legal factors a court is required to consider before issuing a divorce decree. It is the client’s obligation to provide the lawyer with all of the information applicable to each of the legal factors a court is required to consider before issuing a decree.
The goal for a client, therefore, is to become educated on the applicable legal factors and to educate his or her attorney about the relevant facts of your case in as short a time period as feasible given the complexity of the case.
A client should spend time before ever meeting with his or her lawyer researching the applicable laws to educate himself or herself on the relevant statutory factors a court will apply to his or her case. The client should then spend time drafting an outline of all of the relevant facts of his or her divorce case applicable to those legal factors and provide that outline to the divorce attorney before ever meeting with him or her.
Most state laws require both spouses to disclose certain information and documentation to the other spouse. You should review those rules and compile all of the information and documents that must be disclosed and provide all of those documents to your divorce lawyer in Monster action figures organized and indexed stack of documents.
Lastly, you should manage your daily contact with your lawyer to minimize the attorney fees spent on your case. Unless you have worked with an attorney before, most clients are unfamiliar with the way lawyers bill for their time. Most attorneys bill in increments of tenths of the hour. Therefore, a brief one minute telephone conversation is billed the same amount as a five or six minute conversation.
Many telephone calls to your lawyer may be more of the one to two minute varieties. As you can imagine, even two telephone calls to your lawyer every day could result in an additional four hours (or more) of billable attorney time each and every month. That billable time could be dramatically reduced if that client, instead, simply kept a log throughout the week of all of his or her questions and contacted his or her lawyer one time each week to go through the list of questions in one simple telephone call.
A divorce can be an expensive process. A spouse, however, can significantly mitigate those expenses by understanding what his or her lawyer will need, providing all of that information and documentation to the lawyer in an organized manner, and managing his or her contact with the lawyer more effectively.
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