Do you think there’s ever been a divorce filing where the mother claims the father was a great guy, fantastic husband, loving father but they just need to go their separate ways with true “irreconcilable differences?”
I doubt it. How could a family lawyer burn through your retainer in that dynamic?
The family lawyers hired by women have a playbook and this is how it starts.
- Defame the father’s character under the legal guise of litigation privilege.
- Put the father on defense on Day 1.
- Cause his own attorney to question if the allegations are textbook, or actually true.
- Make him sweat it out and think that he may never see the child again.
- Eventually, make him crawl to the table and beg her to accept a large financial settlement that on some occasions may be lot more than was required in a pre-nuptial agreement.
- Reject his offer and stop engaging.
- Three to six more months, they’ll accept a larger settlement offer from the husband while none of the other material items change and he’ll be forced into paying for the increased hours for the wife’s lawyer.
By the time this all happens, you’ve wasted tons of hard-earned money that could have gotten you the same results twelve months ago, but now you’re stressed, pissing off friends, co-workers and family members who are tired of hearing about it.
The lawyers are charging you enough to pay for their children to attend post-graduate school at Ivy League universities, and you can barely function at work because you can’t remember the last time you’ve seen your child or even had a call/facetime session with them.
This happens every day to regular guys, not just celebrities and professional athletes.
What’s worse is that your lawyer knew this was going to happen, didn’t inform you, and now you both hate one another so much, but you also need him to get this over the finish line.
Your suspicion about his intentions will eventually turn into acceptance as it becomes blatantly obvious that he’s always treated you like a number. No matter how much time he said he cares about you and your relationship with your child, you realize it was all part of the con.
That feeling of anxiety is not paranoia; you just became self-aware of your reality.
When he’s telling you that your wife is a piece of shit, he’s really talking about you!
Your own lawyer knows that her lawyer has put the screws to you, and that he also has your balls in a vice along with a large balance waiting to be paid or he won’t finish the settlement. He also refuses to do anything to put pressure on her because that’s not part of the playbook if they want you to cave into her unreasonable demands and draw out the billable hours.
They’ll even pretend that it’s not in your best interest if you really want to “get this done.”
All the while, you end up hating your attorney more than you hate hers, and you can’t switch attorneys at this moment, or it will all fall apart (at least they’ll con you into thinking that way).
Any common-sense adult and especially those in business know that drafting this agreement is simple and should only take a few hours. In fact, the form used by most attorneys is based on a template created by the state bar or state supreme court.
Somehow both attorneys find ways to prolong it by months in between vacations, trials, depositions in other cases and a general desire to make eccentric edits and failure to communicate with the other attorney for weeks.
Your attorney doesn’t have an answer and tells you to calm down while you’re wondering how your child is doing and when this nightmare will be over.
Getting angry at the two lawyers and letting them know you’re angry only feeds into their agenda; it’s doesn’t solve your problem.
And, if you buck them and go into court, you’ve already been labeled “abusive” so opening your mouth in a court-room and being passionate about your child will get you perceived by the judge as an father with “an anger-management problem” that will have you falling into her lawyer’s trap, putting you on the couch of a therapist doing a court-ordered psychological evaluation.
All of those machinations will prolong the settlement by another six to twelve months even if you don’t need to hire an expert to appeal and reject the findings of the court-ordered evaluation by a shrink who you later find out is on the payroll for your wife’s attorney.
By the way, the judge won’t even care when you expose the skullduggery; they just see it as par for the course and think that anyone in a contentious divorce is an asshole, regardless of fault.
Can you imagine being a high-profile individual like Tyreek Hill and having to manage with the public relations component of your divorce in addition to the legal aspects and desire to be a father?
What about being a businessman and having your wife’s attorney interfere in your business relationships by deposing clients or vendors to assess your financial picture which they are allowed to do under most state laws.
And what if you can’t afford the right attorney to fight it all because you don’t have the assets of Tiger Woods or Tyreek Hill?
That’s why you can’t afford to enter this fight without the right attorney and a political divorce consultant on your team.
If you’re a nice, upstanding citizen, then you’ve never had to think about litigation, let alone how your life can be turned inside out and upside down by lawyers who took an oath to act with integrity and intentionally do not.
You can either play the game by their rules (which is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette) or flip the whole thing on them in a way they couldn’t see coming.
Lawyers “follow” the law; family lawyers work from within a box because they’re not “litigators” like you’d use in corporate litigation.
Strategists provide tactics and a plan for a victorious outcome.
What do you think will serve your interests when the cards are stacked against you from the start?
