Welcome! My law and mediation practice is devoted solely to helping people resolve their family law issues—such as divorce, legal separation, and post-divorce custody issues—without a court battle. I help people create quality, lasting agreements with dignity and privacy—and without the often unnecessary misery, time, and expense of court.
If this is something you may be interested in, you can schedule a free initial consultation to discuss your situation, needs, options, and any questions you have. For some, court is the only realistic way to achieve an acceptable resolution. For most, there are other ways to resolve your situation that will better preserve your time, money, relationships, and sanity.
If you think you can’t afford help, I encourage you to make an appointment anyway. I sometimes offer help pro bono (free) or at significantly reduced rates because I believe people should be able to get a little bit of help when going through a difficult situation, regardless of finances.
Why you may want to avoid—or end—the court process
The court process is often lengthy, exhausting, embarrassing, miserable, expensive, uncertain, and likely to increase hostility between opposing sides.
Lengthy: The typical divorce that goes to trial typically takes 1-2 years, sometimes less and sometimes more, depending on the complexity of the case, the attorneys involved, and the level of conflict.
Exhausting: During the lengthy court process, you will not just be sitting back and letting your attorney do all the hard work. You will be planning, reacting, working, and worrying, seemingly forever.
Miserable: The court process is miserable for the parties as well as their friends and family. Children particularly suffer when their parents are in conflict. The court process tends to be backward-looking rather than forward-looking, so you will likely be reliving and fighting over the worst parts of your family’s history. The pain and anger from a bad divorce can linger forever.
Embarrassing: Opening up your lives—again, typically the worst parts—to the scrutiny of a judge and other professionals is embarrassing. Most court proceedings and filings are also accessible to the public. Do you know a lot about a particular celebrity divorce? If so, that’s probably because reporters have attended their public court hearings and/or read the court filings. Other celebrity divorces fly under the radar—they almost certainly settled privately outside of court. You may not be a celebrity, so the public may not care about the embarrassing details of your messy conflict, but wouldn’t you rather keep as much of it private as you can?
Expensive: If your case goes to trial, it may require hundreds of hours of attorney time. Multiply “hundreds of hours” by a typical attorney’s hourly rate. It’s no good. You and your spouse can spend tens of thousands on attorneys to clobber each other… or you can settle out of court and put that money to a different use. An expensive court fight also tends to set the stage for more expensive court fights in the years to come.
Uncertain: Your judge will do their best to decide your case fairly, but they are only going to get glimpses of your life and they have a lot of other cases to work on. They will make decisions based on their incomplete understanding of your situation. You don’t how they will carve up your financial and parenting life, decisions that will impact you forever. You can only guess what those decisions will be. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew in advance what your Divorce Order will look like? You can know, if you help build the Divorce Order yourself.
Likely to increase hostility: Suppose you are preparing for a divorce trial. Perhaps you and your spouse have different visions for child custody or how to split up your property. In order to persuade the judge, you and your attorney will spend a great deal of time trying to make you look good and your spouse look bad. Your spouse and their attorney will do the same. Even if everyone is acting in good faith (a big if), it’s an ugly, painful process. Rather than lowering the temperature and reaching some kind of closure, the court process tends to increase pain and anger, which will likely persist long after the court case is over.
Alternatives to court
If you want to avoid court—or you are already mired in the court process and are looking for a way out—what are the options?
Mediation
In mediation, a trained, neutral mediator helps the parties reach an agreement outside of court in a private, structured, confidential process. Mediators are not like judges—they do not make the decisions. Instead, they help parties get organized, understand and evaluate options, and have productive discussions until a quality, informed agreement is reached and written up.
Mediation can be appropriate whether a small amount of help is needed or if there are significant issues standing in the way of agreement. Even if your situation seems relatively simple and a DIY divorce seems possible, you should consider hiring a mediator anyway. A mediator may help you explore better options and avoid misunderstandings or mistakes. If your situation has more complexity or conflict, mediation may help you avoid an extraordinarily expensive and damaging court battle.
You can go to mediation before any papers are filed, with a trial right around the corner, or anything in between. It is never too late to seek an out-of-court resolution, and it happens all the time, even in seemingly impossible court battles. Don’t assume your spouse or ex-spouse is too angry or unreasonable to settle. Nearly everyone in the court process wants it to be over.
Many people consult with an attorney after they’ve reached a tentative agreement, before the agreement is submitted to the court. Some consult with an attorney throughout the mediation process. If needed, neutral experts can be hired to help with specific issues (such as valuing a home or pension).
Pros and cons:
+ Much less expensive than a contested divorce
+ Certainty: You decide the outcome, not a judge. Nothing will happen without your agreement.
+ High success rate
+ Building your own solutions feels good
+ The process of building solutions directly with your spouse or ex-spouse tends to lead to a better working relationship and fewer disputes going forward, which can have a positive lifelong effect on friends and family (particularly children) too.
+ Mediation is private.
+ Because the parties make the decisions, with full understanding of their consequences and alternatives, they are more likely to be satisfied
+/- Can go as quickly as the parties want. However, the flip side is that mediation can go no faster than the slower party is willing to go. Still
- Like any out-of-court settlement process, there is no guarantee of a resolution.
My role:
1) I can be the mediator
2) I can be your attorney while you go through mediation: It can be helpful to have an attorney review a tentative settlement agreement, or to get legal advice and make sure you understand your rights and options as you go through the process.
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Collaborative law/collaborative divorce
Each spouse hires an attorney that is trained to work collaboratively. Your attorney still works for you, but the attorneys will have a good working relationship—they will not be bulldogs that create or escalate conflict. In fact, collaborative attorneys are forbidden from participating in a court battle if the collaborative process fails, so the attorneys have no incentive to see things escalate into a (more lucrative) court battle. As a result, the parties can work toward an out-of-court settlement with the reassurance that neither side is preparing for a court battle.
As with mediation, the parties may hire neutral experts whose expertise and expense is shared. The collaborative team often includes a neutral financial expert that analyzes the parties’ financial situation and helps the parties generate options for moving forward. The team may include a divorce coach skilled in helping the parties get through the divorce process in a healthy and productive way. In a series of meetings, the team works through the problem-solving process of a divorce cooperatively.
Pros and cons:
Most of the pros and cons of mediation apply here as well. Some differences:
+ The disqualification clause ensures a strong commitment to an out-of-court resolution.
+ Great working relationships among the kind and close-knit community of collaborative attorneys and other collaborative professionals
+ Your attorney will support you throughout the process.
+ Your spouse’s attorney will not be a bullying, gaslighting villain in your divorce. You might even like them—how wild is that?
- Tends to take longer than mediation and tends to be more expensive than mediation.
My role: I can be your attorney in the collaborative process.
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Attorney negotiation
Here, each party hires an attorney and the attorneys pretty much take it from there, negotiating directly with each other and consulting with their clients as needed.
Perhaps there is an active court process, with negotiations taking place while the court process chugs along toward trial. But ideally, negotiations take place before any papers are filed.
Pros and cons:
+/- For better or worse, you are depending more heavily on your attorney, the working relationship between the attorneys, and both attorneys’ level of interest in avoiding court with an out-of-court resolution, which is much less lucrative than a messy court battle. Some attorneys are good at battling it out in court but are bad at lowering the temperature and finding common ground. These are very different skill sets.
+/- You do not have to deal directly with the other party. This may seem like a positive, because it can be uncomfortable working with your spouse or ex-spouse, but something is also lost when the parties take a less active role in building the solutions that best meet their family’s needs.
- People tend to feel better about solutions they take a more active role in building, and often those solutions are more custom and creative than the solutions imagined by judges or attorneys.
My role:
1) In limited circumstances—if I think negotiations are likely to be productive and court is unlikely—I can be your attorney in an attorney-negotiated divorce.
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DIY (do it yourself)
Some people negotiate directly with their spouse (or ex-spouse), write up the agreement, and file it with the court without any help from an attorney or mediator. Like any DIY project, your results will depend greatly on whether you know what you’re doing. It is hard to know what you don’t know.
Pros and cons:
+ Inexpensive (no help means not paying for help!)
+ Certainty: You decide the outcome, not a judge
- Risk of flawed or incomplete agreements. Do you know what you’re doing? Could you have come up with a better agreement with experienced help?
- Risk that one or both parties do not fully understand the agreement or its consequences
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What is best for you and your specific situation can be explored during a free consultation. Click here to find an available appointment slot and sign yourself up.
Please also feel free to email, text, or call if you have any questions or are having trouble finding an appointment time that works for you. See my contact information below.