Reply To: Woman Lawyer?

[BrainPilotParticipant 7640]

Mr Lame,
This will be a long post, but it will be useful to you and others beginning a divorce process.

This is a subject I have some experience with, and will share. I’m the youngest kid in a large family and have had the chance to learn much watching and learning from the mistakes of siblings and other people. With the set of older siblings that I have, some have joked that I should have an honorary PhD in the mistakes of other people. I have had a ring side seat to almost a dozen divorces. Still, I made one marriage mistake of my own (married for 2 years about a decade ago), but was able to minimize the damage using some of the what I’d learned.

Watching the divorce of a financially successful older sibling get a divorce from a cocaine addict, I gained a couple of insights. The most important, and most difficult thing to do in a divorce is to set your emotions aside and focus on the money. Specifically, there is a very good chance that you will be so p~~~ed off at her that you will make a decision to tell your lawyer to do something to make her life miserable (and I agree she deserves it) when the time comes to make that decision. Try not to do this.

Your lawyer (all divorce lawyers) count on this. The madder you are, the more profitable for the lawyers. You do something like this. Her lawyer counters. Your lawyer agrees that she is a bitch who deserves to suffer and encourages you to do something to ‘get even’ and punish her for the bitchy thing she just did. You respond by doing this, and her lawyer counters again. At some point, watch for a variation of this line from your attorney: “Your wife is the WORST _________ (insert “bitch”, “psycho” or fav insult here) that I’ve EVER SEEN in ALL the years I’ve been a divorce attorney…”. If this doesn’t come before you start to mention how much his legal fees are starting to add up, you can be certain that it will shortly after you make mention of this.

You should also expect that no matter what you offer your ex in the way of a settlement, no matter how generous it is, her lawyer will tell her a variation on the following, “This offer sucks… Your husband is the WORST__________ (bastard, asshole or other of your ex’s fav male insult) that I’ve EVER SEEN in ALL the years I’ve been a divorce attorney…”. He will advise her to counter offer with something that your lawyer will tell you that her offer is the WORST offer he’s ever seen …”. And this will go back and forth at hundreds of dollars an hour until 1) all the money has been soaked up in legal fees and there is no money left to fight over 2) both of you realize that the attorneys are a bigger threat to whatever each of you hoped to salvage from the divorce.

Remember that divorce attorneys in any given city generally all know each other. It’s a small world they inhabit. They are not enemies just because your clients are. Though they will genuinely fight for your side in court, they are very well aware that the longer the fight lasts, the more profitable for both of them. Divorce attorneys have bills just like the rest of us. Do you see the picture I’m trying to paint here?

SET YOUR EMOTIONS ASIDE AND FOCUS ON THE MONEY.

When my older sibling explained his situation to me, he was CEO of a national company. I knew he was a smart guy, but I could see him thinking emotionally (p~~~ed off) instead of focusing on the money, a mental attitude I had never seen him display before. Knowing she was a broke cocaine addict, my advice to him at the time was, “put $50,000 in 20 dollar bills in a suitcase with papers with whatever terms you want. Show her the money, show her the papers and give her the pen and she’ll sign and you’ll be rid of her…”. His response: “I’m not giving that bitch 50 cents…”.

Two years and $220,000 later in legal fees, the lawyers still had a few details to argue over that hadn’t been decided yet.

It should not have been a 2 year fight. At the beginning, he had the best, most expensive divorce attorney in the state. She had no money to hire a lawyer, having spent hers on cocaine. At the very first hearing, her attorney, who had agreed to take her case on contingency, entered a motion to the judge that her legal fees (his fees) should be paid from “the family’s assets…” until such time as “the family’s assets” were distributed by the court. I was in the court that day that her attorney argued this motion against the most expensive attorney in the state. I figured it would be a slam dunk, but it wasn’t…

I saw and heard every word of the arguments, and I was not very impressed with the resistance to this motion that was put forth by the most expensive attorney in the state. The motion was approved by the judge (we can all wonder now about the campaign contributions that judge gets from the two law firms in his court that day. My understanding is that some states limit the amount that one person or one law firm can donate to a judge’s campaign. Other states don’t.) The judge approved that motion after an argument between the two attorneys that couldn’t have lasted even 5 minutes. Once that motion was approved, her attorney was as well financed as my brother’s. So later, when my brother’s attorney would send over a settlement offer, her attorney would tell that cocaine addict that it was “the worst offer he’d ever seen in all the years he’d been a divorce attorney…etc etc”. The lawyers kept getting paid….and kept coming up with new things to argue about…

No need for you to go down his road.

The first time anyone meets with any divorce attorney, the first thing you will be asked is wether you have any kids. No one is going to spend $100,000 in legal fees arguing over a $100,000 house. But people with kids will spend their last dollar, and borrow more to finance a fight over their kids. The reason men don’t get custody of kids is that there are federal matching funds given by the federal government to the state governments to help states collect child support from the non-custodial parent. I think these are called Title 9 funds. Others reading this may have more details info on this than I do.

These matching funds are based on how much child support the state collects every year. State judges are paid a salary by the state using, at least in part, the federal matching funds. So, the state judges (who decide which parent will get custody and who also decide how much the child support of the other parent will be) are financially incentivized to maximize the amount of child support that is collected. There is a realistic limit to how much child support anyone can pay. The more they earn, the more they can pay.

Since men fathers generally out-earn mothers, the state and the state’s employee (the judge) is then financially incentivized to award custody to the mother (lowest earning parent) and thereby maximize child support collected, and the Title 9 funds that go to the state. This is why fathers have so little chance of winning custody.

The second thing that any divorce attorney is going to want to know at that initial meeting is a list of the “family’s assets” that are going to be fought over during the divorce. By now, you should realize that this is not so that the attorney can start to formulate his legal strategy to help you win all these assets. It’s so he can estimate what the case is going to be worth. The third thing a divorce attorney will want to know is who the attorney is that will be representing your soon to be ex. No need to explain why that would be of interest…

You mentioned that your soon to be ex is on meth. As a doctor, I can tell you that meth is more addictive than cocaine (by a long way) and the odds of your soon to be ex recovering from that addiction are very, very long. A psychiatrist I know who specializes in addition recovery told me once that in 20 years of practice, he’d never seen anyone successfully recover from meth. But this is her problem, not yours. And I’m not getting sore fingers trying to help a woman with any problem…

You might consider trying to make the cash offer to your meth addict wife before she gets an attorney. Catch her at a time when she is withdrawing and she may go for it for the short term cash. An alternative suggestion: You mentioned that she is still living with you. If you believe that there is ANY meth at all in your house, go to the police yourself and ask if they can bring a dog to find it. Search laws vary and change from state to state, but if you own the house and believe there are drugs in it, it should not be difficult to get the police to agree to do the search. No meth addict calls the police on themselves, so it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out who it belongs to. The problem is that meth, like cocaine, is so addictive the addict usually consumes it as soon as they get their hands on it. I don’t know enough about the mechanics of its use to know if a residue can be left behind. But any criminal arrest or evidence (rehab facility history etc) at all that this person has a drug addiction pretty well eliminates their credibility in divorce court.

A divorce attorney (friend, not hired by me) admitted once after a few drinks that when two people go to divorce court, only one of them needs to be unreasonable (as a result of greed or anger) in order to make the process hostile, drawn out and expensive. Of course, if both parties were reasonable and realistic, they probably wouldn’t need attorney’s, and could probably work out the differences in their marriage so as not to even need a divorce. When I asked him what the usual fraction of the ‘family’s assets’ that ended up as legal fees, his response was “about a third”. Basically, if you go into a divorce with a combined worth of $10,000, you can expect that the sum of the legal fees is going to be about $3,000. It really just comes down to a 3 way split between the two spouses and the attorneys. The judge will decide finally how the remaining 2/3 will be split between the two divorcing spouses. But the attorneys will not advance the process to the point where the judge decides until they’ve billed out that 1/3 of the family’s assets arguing over crap like which judge is going to decide… what day the hearing will be on… drafting up offers by each spouse that the other is going to advise his/her client to reject and rewrite… etc etc etc

There is one other way this could play out. If you are interested and key master is ok with it, I’ll send to him and he can send to your email address, because I don’t really want to post where feminist lurkers might see it and broadcast to all the prospective gold diggers out there. Or, if you’re willing to create a throwaway email address and post here for a one time email from my throwaway email address?

It’s a mistake commonly made by drug addicted and otherwise not so smart women who overestimate their positions, and can be of some help to you. It worked once for me many years ago, and may work for you as well.

In any case, try to set your emotions aside, along with any present wishes to ‘get even’ or otherwise make her miserable (as she probably deserves) and just focus on the money, and the most financially efficient way to get from point A (married) to point B (finalized divorce). Focus on that because nothing else matters as much here.

Look, it's not my fault that tornado dropped a house on your sister. Now get back on your broom and get your ass out of here... and take your monkeys with you