Divorce Lawyer: Personal Experience Is Valuable

Personal experience can really help a divorce lawyer in practicing family law because the experience could help an attorney be able to explain the legal process in a way that makes it so that the client understands their options better. This article is not advocating that you should go out and breakup your marriage in order that you will be a better family law practitioner. Rather, it is an attempt to greater the awareness of the feedback from people who have gone through a breakup of their marriage in order to understand more about how the attorney may communicate with their clients better.

One of the things that people report back from having learned from the end of their marriage is that the divorce lawyer has multiple different types of procedures at hand. Perhaps the least well known is the collaborative procedure, whereby each party is represented by their own attorney, yet they subject themselves to an involved mediation process. This mediation technique includes therapists and financial planners who help counsel the parties to reach an agreement.

If the divorce lawyer is not comfortable with this alternative approach (and a lot of attorneys do not like it because of its deficiencies), many clients report back that they would have wished if the final price could be clearer, and wish that their attorneys had advised them to produce everything that is needed upfront. Concerning the first point, it should never be your intention to bill excessively for your services. If you need to make more money, reduce your take home pay, and spend more money advertising. With this being said, it is too difficult to give a final price for it to be worth it. Instead, reassure your clients that you are keeping the price as low as possible while maintaining their best interests. A low hourly rate should help support this. Related to this is getting your client involved in their case. The more involved that they are the less work that you should have to do.

Many people also state that going through the divorce lawyer to communicate with their spouse is an inefficient means of communication. Perhaps a better strategy is for both sides to sit with each other at a coffee shop and lay out the issues of disagreement that they have. Surely, because the spouses are not use to going through the breakup, they will not go through all of the issues in depth, nor is it required that they should. Rather, it is a great start simply to have a general agreement concerning most of the areas of disagreement. While this may sound difficult for people who are fighting, many spouses are open to discussing how they will end their marriage with the other spouse. (Clearly, this approach should never be taken, if there is a concern for domestic violence).

The above material is intended for information purposes only. It is not intended as professional legal advice and should not be construed as such. Attorney William H. Beaumont practices in New Orleans, La.