Should I do my own divorce?

So, “can I do it myself?”?Divorce lawyers do in fact get this question a lot, whether it's divorce, or custody matters, or whatever type of issue you're dealing with, family law related. We are used to the “do it yourselfers” in every aspect of life. As an attorney, we have a vested interested in having you hire attorneys.?And that might seem disingenuous at times.?But there really are a lot of reasons to hire an expert attorney when you are facing a divorce or family law matter, depending on the specific legal issues that you're dealing with.

There can be a lot of things that happen in your divorce case, and decisions will need to be made, and the mistakes that you make can't always be fixed later, after things have become final and permanent.. There are certainly counties right now where there's no way we could recommend trying to do this on your own, it's just too much to navigate their system, they’ve made it impossible between the paperwork, the system, and the process required.?Certainly there are some parts of it that you can do, but mistakes can happen, things that you would not want to see going on with a do-it-yourself divorce.

Here is an example of a client that we met with recently.??He got divorced twelve years ago. He's now looking to retire, and his divorce judgment had language in it about dividing his pension and the language is absolutely wrong. The divorce judgment language, which was written by his ex wife’s attorney,?makes an incorrect assumption about his pension, and basically it states that his ex-wife gets half of the entire pension. But that was not what was intended.?The judgment incorrectly assumes that his entire pension was from during his marriage but that wasn't the case.?He was married fifteen years, but he then worked another seven years after that.?So typically what you would do is say that his ex wife gets half of the pension from during the marriage, or what is called the “marital portion.”?However, based on how the divorce judgment is worded, his ex wife now has a right to half of the entire pension. That is a large difference, she's getting an extra seven years of pension that she's not entitled to, and should not be getting.?Can a lawyer help him now??Maybe, but it was written up by her attorney and his attorney would not have worded this way, had he had a divorce attorney at the time. Either they made a mistake, or they took advantage of him.

One thing is for certain, even if he can fix this now, it will cost him time and money. We see far too many mistakes made in divorce judgments where either the husband had no attorney, or he had an attorney who did not specialize in divorce.?And then they are stuck with the results of no lawyer, or bad lawyering.?All property agreements are final, so they need to be done right in the first place.??

There are a lot of examples of pitfalls and mistakes that can be made with child related issues.?College expenses is a good example, you can put in a divorce judgment that you're going to pay part of your child's future college expenses, but there's no law requiring you to pay for college, and if you reach that agreement and it’s in your divorce judgment, now you're stuck, now you have to pay for college because you agreed to make it mandatory, it’s now court ordered. You don't want to be the guy who's stuck paying college expenses when you can't afford it.?You would want to leave something like that out of your judgment in the first place, but without proper advice how would you know this?

Custody and parenting time agreements are another good example of pitfalls in divorce agreements.?Custody and parenting time orders have a way of being final, even though they seem like they will be modifiable.?It's very hard to modify a custody agreement after an order has been entered, after the judgment of divorce is done, after the custody order is done.?You have to assume these agreements cannot be modified in the future.?