Help Us Help You
How to Minimize Stress and Fees Most family law matters are stressful, emotional, and costly.
To help manage your case, and your stress, your attorney’s job is to advise you and keep you informed.
Your job is to listen to their advice.
Whether discussing deadlines, or the dos and don’ts of your case, you should heed your attorney’s advice. Besides alleviating stress, listening to your attorney can help minimize costs. We want to give you some divorce lawyer tips. You and your spouse will ultimately decide how complicated your divorce will be.
Consider the following example:
Let’s say we give you a financial affidavit to fill out.
A financial affidavit is a document stating all your income and deductions based on your current living situation.
Clients usually fill out a rough draft of this document, which we review, and file with the court. We will also tell you when it needs to get back to us to submit to the court.
Pay attention to these deadlines!
Get them done when they need to be done by. Don’t worry! You have plenty of time to fill them out, and we are always here to help answer questions.
To avoid the dreaded escalation of costs, help yourself by abiding to the deadlines in a timely fashion. The more you put something off, the more work that will have to be done to compensate for that lost time. If you avoid filling out a draft of a financial affidavit because it looked long and boring, there could be some detrimental effects in the future.
If the document is not submitted in time, we may have to file a motion for extension of time, to ask for more time to fill it out (that costs money to draft, and file). Then we will have to get a hearing for that extension of time by filing a notice (the notice costs money to draft and file, and the hearing costs even more to attend and tell the judge why we need more time to fill out the necessary financial affidavit).
There are other situations that come up where clients think that they are doing something harmless, in lieu of their attorney’s advice.
For example, during a dissolution of marriage, when we tell you not to date anyone yet, simply do not date.
Though there are no laws against it, it’s a NO FAULT state here in Florida, BUT we have seen this have a detrimental effect on both parties to the divorce.
Once the opposing party gets word that you are dating (and they always seem to find out), they will make it their goal to retaliate with any means necessary.
This may mean drawing out your divorce as long as possible by being overly uncooperative during mediation attempts, or fighting over assets they don’t really want.
The longer your case drags on, the more costs it will have on you. You can help manage the stress by listening to your attorney’s advice.
Ultimately, the decision is up to you, but know that our advice is being given with your best interest in mind.
