Belinda
Rachman, Esq.
Enough people have experienced a nasty divorce
so that I am preaching to the choir when I talk about the financial
and emotional devastation that usually goes along with a divorce.
When emotionally vulnerable people hire divorce attorneys, they
are often unaware of how the system works and how their lives
will be turned upside down by entering the adversarial arena.
I was a child of a litigated divorce. I taught emotionally disturbed
children from dysfunctional families for many years, I was a divorce
attorney for eight years, and now I only do divorce mediation.
Having witnessed our legal system from all sides, I can safely
say that the whole context of how family disputes are settled
in court today is not in the best interest of families. This is
a call to arms. I am not even going to pretend this is an unbiased
"news" article.
We who fight on the front lines on a daily basis,
working with the emotionally vulnerable who feel as though the
rug has been pulled out from under them know that the last thing
a family in trouble needs is the "assistance" of counsel
who could be throwing gasoline on the fire in order to line their
own pockets. Most of you probably don't know that family law attorneys
are the ONLY kind of lawyers in California whose fees are statutorily
protected by the equity in the family home. Divorcing couples
may not be aware that they agreed to a lien on their homes and
a possible forced sale at the end of the case when they sign their
lawyer's fee agreements. People need to know that they will get
more and lose less by cooperating with their ex-partner than by
litigating the matter.
Most people know what assets they have. No matter
how much they earn, many people live paycheck to paycheck and
there are usually no issues of hidden Swiss bank accounts. While
this is the norm, any couple with equity in their home who both
engage lawyers will soon see why the average contested divorce
in our state costs $20,000 in attorney fees PER SIDE! And that
is just an average. Most often, the more equity your home has,
the higher the fees. Read Charles Dickens' Bleak House and you
will see little has changed in the past 150 years.
First, the lawyers will engage in expensive discovery
procedures, serving interrogatories and subpoenas for production
of documents. There will be depositions and then the hiring of
expensive forensic accountants and other experts, just to keep
the case going. When couples trust their attorneys, it's hard
for them to see they are being manipulated. It does NOT have to
be this way!
Society needs to demand that divorce court be
replaced by the more family friendly solution of divorce mediation.
My own practice demonstrates what a sham the adversarial alternative
is. I have a 100% track record with over 150 couples. When a lawyer
has a powerful intention to help people find their bottom line
fairly, efficiently and economically, cases settle without the
expense, drama and irreparable harm to children and their co-parenting
relationship, harm that is most always the result of a bloody
and adversarial battle. Lawyers who are paid by the hour have
no incentive to wrap it up. There is an inherent conflict of interest
between the attorney, who wants to earn more money, and the client,
who wants to save more money. When you are working on a flat fee,
there is motivation to help couples come to a reasonable resolution
without dragging it out.
An experienced attorney will usually have a good
idea of how a judge will rule on a case. This is a community property
state, and everything that falls into that category is evenly
divided, and separate property is also well defined by statute.
It just isn't that complicated. Now there may be cases where a
business requires a forensic accountant to value, but you don't
need to have a battle of the experts to testify why the husband
or wife should get more or less money.
We have all seen the critical mass theory at work
in our own lifetimes. For those unfamiliar with this theory, the
simple explanation is that when enough people (thought to be somewhere
between 3% - 5%) move in a certain direction, the rest of the
population follows. Think I Pods, cell phones, recycling, health
food, ending the war in Viet Nam, etc. It takes some time for
the tipping point to be achieved, but whether it is 5% or 20%,
at some point, when enough people get behind something, the change
manifests throughout society. We can create a transformation in
the way legal services are delivered not only in the area of family
law, but all across the board. Mediation is applicable to every
area where people have disputes.
As with anything unfamiliar, it takes a certain
amount of education to show people the possibilities before they
are willing to get on the bandwagon. But if law schools taught
would be lawyers to encourage cooperation when marriages break
down, more and more couples will hear the message of peaceful
divorce and not necessarily think that divorce = court fights.
We need more divorce attorneys who take their responsibility to
protect their client seriously. I have never understood how these
"zealous advocates" can justify draining a client's
college fund for their kids so that the attorney's child can go
to private school while the client's child is lucky to have lunch
money. When people are informed and demand better than what is
currently available, more and more law students will study mediation
and develop a skill set that supports working with people who
are breaking up.
It is my mission to help transform the way people
get divorced in this country. Our children are depending on adults
to join this crusade. Encourage your friends and family to work
together if they have to get divorced. You can split a pie two
ways or if lawyers are involved, 4 ways. Which way will you get
more? Do you really have to pull the child apart? Don't you think
YOU are in a better position to say how your child should be raised
instead of lawyers, judges and other "experts." You
don't want to start World War III with the parent of your children!!!
Your child needs to be your primary focus, not how much money
you can get out of paying or not being there when dad comes to
pick up the kids. That kind of high conflict drama is totally
unnecessary. Not only do consumers need to demand a new kind of
divorce, but more lawyers need to recognize the damage caused
to families by the legal practice as it is set up now. I hope
more attorneys will walk away, as I did, and say, "NO MORE!"
We need judges to recognize who the most egregious
of these attorneys are and sanction them, instead of holding them
up to young lawyers to emulate. We need an informed public to
tell their legislatures that it is NOT OK to give the Family Bar
the right to drain the family home of equity through litigation
that only comes to an end when there is no more money to be made.
The system is broken, and we need to fix it. Generations of children
have been caught in the middle of fighting parents who are often
encouraged to fight by lawyers who stand to gain. The more we
focus on and promote mediation as the rightful solution to family
law issues, the more momentum we will build. Who is with me?
Article Directory: http://www.articlecube.com Ms. Rachman has
been a family law attorney since 1996 and is convinced our adversarial
legal system destroys families. She left a successful adversarial
law practice and now only does divorce mediation. To listen to
an audio program that goes into more detail on how mediation differs
from litigation, go to www.divorce-inaday.com
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