INDUSTRY INSIGHT
FAMILY LAW
SPONSORED CONTENT
DIVORCE:
PROTECT YOURSELF AND YOUR CHILDREN – Part 2
In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about the initial efforts you need to make in determining whether you should have a divorce attorney, how to choose the best attorney for you, and the importance of the initial consultation. Now that you have selected your advocate, you must communicate important details of your case. Since you, with your attorney’ s recommendations, are going to start making decisions that shall affect your post-divorce life, open, honest and complete communication is vital. There are many pieces of information and documents you must give to your attorney. This information and the exchange of documents will occur early on, perhaps at your initial meeting once you have retained / hired your attorney. This information will enable him or her to be better situated to help you make important preliminary decisions.
We recommend that you talk to a lawyer before speaking with your spouse about divorce. Since you are becoming an individual, versus a couple, you must protect yourself. Don’ t be naïve enough to believe that your spouse and his or her lawyer will look out for your best interests when it comes time to discuss division of property, money, and child custody.
Despite all your best efforts and assurances from your spouse, divorce can easily become an adversarial process. If you choose to begin preparing or copying documents before you approach your spouse about getting a divorce, we recommend you keep these documents in a safe place to which your spouse does not have access. Perhaps somewhere other than your home. We recommend electronic copies wherever possible. Additionally, get a new, safe, private email account with a password and“ secret questions” that your spouse would not easily guess.
The first document filed is the Divorce Complaint. The paragraphs in the divorce complaint are standardized wording required by the court. So if your spouse has been the first to file, do not get hung up on the wording. There are certain requests called“ Counts” that must go in the initial document without having the expectation that all of the Counts will be granted by the court. The next document generally filed by your spouse’ s attorney is called a Petition Raising Claims or sometimes it is called an Answer and Counterclaim. This document additionally contains Counts to protect all possible interests your spouse may have. Again many of the Counts are included because if not, they might not be permitted to be added at a later date.
Once the Divorce Complaint is filed, you and your spouse enter the pretrial stage of your divorce. For the next few months you and your attorney will be involved in the“ discovery process.” This is a period of time where you must provide the opposing party all relevant tangible documents, such as tax returns, bank statements, and credit card statements. These documents are provided in response to a formal discovery process called a Request for Production of Documents. You, via your lawyer, will also serve these on your spouse. Your attorney will advise you what discovery requests should be answered and which are burdensome, unreasonable and may safely be objected to.
Another discovery method that attorneys use is called“ Interrogatories.” Interrogatories are written questions that one party asks the other party to answer under oath. Interrogatories will be used to flush out details that may be relevant to a party’ s case or defense.
As information becomes available to both parties, your attorney may try to mediate and negotiate a settlement, hoping to avoid the final trial. If both attorneys are amenable to settling and can support the spouses to agree, the time involved, the costs, and perhaps more importantly the emotional strain, can be reduced and the matters resolved to mutual agreement.
Hopefully you selected an attorney who wants to help you reach a fair settlement. Many attorneys are hungry to try cases; however, that does not describe us. Most cases, unless highly unusual for some reason, can and should be settled without going to trial. Strive for this goal knowing you have a highly competent person representing you.
For a free consultation call my office at 412.848.9181.
This Industry Insight was written by Deborah Luteran Iwanyshyn of Iwanyshyn & Associates. She has been focusing her practice on the family law area for more than 30 years and was a practicing CPA for several years prior to attending law school. Deborah is also an accredited business appraiser through the American Society of Appraisers. Her goal is the“ No Drama” divorce. She strives to obtain the correct values and budgets for each of the parties and then negotiates fair settlements protecting both spouses. She is also a trained mediator and collaborative lawyer and an adjunct professor at Carlow University teaching master’ s degree students in the Fraud and Forensics program. Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
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