I had a frank and enjoyable exchange of email messages the other day from Joy, a prospective client. She said “we hope we’re ready to meet with you, but we’re not sure, because we keep disagreeing on things.” I told her what I’m about to tell you.
As you know by now, my work is focused on couples who are able to be reasonably cooperative. That means that if you and your spouse know you need to divorce and are able to be reasonably cooperative, I’m a good choice for you. If that’s not the case, you wouldn’t want to waste your hard-earned money on me. You may not believe this, but I really don’t want you to use me if I’m not right for you. That’s why I included the Uncontested Divorce Quiz and put it here on Divorceinfo.com. I developed it several years ago, and it’s (still) quite accurate at gauging whether you should use me for your divorce.
One thought for you: my experience is that people who are in the place where I can help them generally know it; they have little or no uncertainty about their commitment (or their spouse’s commitment) to divorce, and they are comfortable that they have agreed or will be able to agree easily on the issues that need to be resolved. So the lesson in that for you is that if you’re NOT certain you’re ready to meet with me, you’re probably not.
Here’s another thought that might be helpful: about 30% of the people who pay me to prepare their divorce documents end up not getting divorced with me, at least not yet. Now some of those people have reconciled, and some of them just haven’t gotten around to finishing yet. But most of that 30% is composed of people who thought they were ready to do a cooperative divorce but were mistaken for same reason.
I bet you already know this by now, but Joy and her husband are going to talk some more before they spend money on me. Maybe I’ll hear from them next week.
Because this page talks about my legal practice, it’s important that I say this: No representation is made that the quality of the legal services to be performed is greater than the quality of legal services performed by other lawyers.