Divorce is for the divorce lawyers. The divorce system is a set up by divorce lawyers for divorce lawyers.
If you have a divorce lawyer, ask the questions you need to have answered. Hope is not a method. Make sure you get satisfactory answers – with supporting detail. Ask to talk to prior clients about their results.
Be aware. Be careful.
My observation is that there is a standard process for dads in a divorce that is followed by divorce lawyers almost regardless of the facts. The process involves losing most of the time with your children while being told things like “being a good parent isn’t about time” and paying a lot of money in legal fees while wondering what was done of value for all that cost — and then paying a lot of money in support for years to follow.
My observation is that part of process involves the dad being prepared by his divorce lawyer to fail his children and at the end and at some point in the case to accept that failure as inevitable. (I think the process for the divorcing wife is that her divorce lawyer incites her to “fight for her children” by some combination of agreeable “oh my goodness that is horrible” disparagement of the father and telling of “wife wins again” stories to show what “is usually done” in divorce.)
Don’t be in that process if you can help it unless you want to fail your children. (You don’t fail alone.)
Understand that if you try to not be in that process you will get all sorts of resistance those in the from the divorce industry.
Bucking the process means no easy path.
People will want to witness you fail and become weak if you don’t do it their way.
My divorce lawyer during the case would tell me about situations/recent cases where a dad had suffered a crushing and unreasonably unfair result in a divorce.
Between that and his billing but lack of attention/effort to my case/situation, it seemed like he was trying to demoralize me. I was demoralized but I was not going to give up on my daughters.
He became increasingly frustrated with me as the case proceeded as planned (but I did not give up). In the week before I fired him in a Freudian slip he angrily told me “you are indomitable”.
Right. He had worked me to the point where I was supposed to give up — which I think comes when the divorce lawyer feels that just about as much as can be billed to the father has been billed. He was a divorce lawyer with over 35 years of divorce experience. He knows when he has worked a dad to the point where the dad should give up and accept a bad result. He had reached that point. He was done with me at that point — the point where the typical dad would be convinced to give up.
I was not going to give up on my daughters.
The billed legal fees at that point (and there had been only one hearing in the case) were over $43,000. There had never been the mediation that I had requested over and over again. I was doing most of the work on the case. He had no intention or expectation of having to do any significant work on the case; the process for dads is that you work the case and then when the dad is weakened, you settle the case. The effort is not on case preparation, it is on dad weakening.
Few things can weaken you like huge legal expenses from your own divorce lawyer (combined with unsatisfactory results and a loss of hope). Having bills you can’t pay while looking at substantial future financial obligations and losing half of your assets is weakening.
Why isn’t that weakening happening to your wife?
Because that is not how divorce works. Remember that divorce is by divorce lawyers for divorce lawyers.
My observation is that divorce lawyers in the cases where they represent the fathers will bill more while in the cases where they represent the wives they will bill less — because that is how they can keep the cases going. The wives typically want the money and if they see it leaking out the door to divorce lawyers they may capitulate and settle the case and that does neither divorce lawyer any good. The divorce lawyer for the wife may “discount” fees to her while helping the divorce lawyer for the father run up full-freight fees on the father. (The divorce lawyers I suspect know how to get it back somehow, perhaps by being divorce lawyer for father in this case, for the wife in that case.) Dragging out the case for months and years also helps the divorce lawyers — the longer the case goes, the more billing (spread over more time). For the wife, the divorce lawyer billing may be back-loaded, with the final most substantial legal bill for then ex-wife coming at the end of the case after she has “won”. (The divorce lawyer for the ex-wife when he sees the “win”/case end on the horizon may step up billing, working the case more heavily at that point, for example, billing needless time “preparing” for a trial that will not happen because the case will settle.)
Be aware.
But don’t be weakened.
Be strong. Be strong enough to succeed for your children. You’ll be glad you did that for them and so will they.
Be indomitable. (Your divorce lawyer may not like it. Too bad.)