How to Pick the Best Family Law Attorney for Your Divorce

Deciding which  you should have represent you in your family law case is an extremely important decision and one that can be the difference between getting a fair result or a poor one.  Here are some criteria that will allow you to improve your chances of hiring the best attorney for your case.

Experience and State Bar Board Certification

There is no substitute for experience when it comes to divorce attorneys and you should only consider hiring an attorney who is very experienced in the field of family law.  Frequently people will hire a general practitioner, thinking that divorce cases are routine and uncomplicated and that any lawyer will do.  This kind of thought is a major error.  Ideally, you want a lawyer who is board certified in family law by the State Bar.  This is a certification held by attorneys who have, by experience and knowledge, established that they are worthy of acknowledgment as experts in the area of family law.  In most states this is an highly difficult certification for a lawyer to obtain.

Satisfied Previous Clients

The best way to decide which lawyer is right for you is to hear from that lawyer’s past divorce clients. If you know someone who has been a client of a particular lawyer they can tell you what it was like to be represented by that attorney.  The fact is that some attorneys are simply better at satisfying their clients than others and the only certain way to find this out is to hear from previous clients. 

A Plan for Handling Your Case

It is usually an error in a family law case for a lawyer to apply a “one-size-fits-all” approach.  In other words, some lawyers use the exact same approach on every single case, disregarding the facts or nuances of your particular situation.  This is generally a mistake.  What you want is a lawyer who, at the outset of the case, creates a personalized plan for how your case will be handled.  You wouldn’t use a shotgun if you were trying to kill a mosquito and you wouldn’t use a flyswatter if you were trying to kill a bear.  You would use the best tool for the given situation.  Your case should be handled in this same way.

Are You Comfortable with the Attorney?

Last but not least, you should be comfortable with and have a good relationship with the attorney.  If for any reason you sense that you cannot communicate effectively with the attorney, then this is not the right lawyer for you and you should keep looking until you encounter the right attorny for your situation.  It is of the utmost importance that you employ an attorney that inspires your confidence and that you are certain will keep your best interest at heart.

Joseph Carter
http://www.articlesbase.com/law-articles/how-to-pick-the-best-family-law-attorney-for-your-divorce-717497.html

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7 Responses to “How to Pick the Best Family Law Attorney for Your Divorce”

  1. tim1717 says:

    Read this and tell me if child support needs reform…?
    Imagine you’re a divorced father driving to your court designated trade off point to pick up your son for the weekend. You make it there on time, but your Ex is a good 30 minutes late. When she finally arrives, you notice she’s driving a brand new SUV. You glance at your chevy (over 10 years old and falling apart) and you feel a small twinge of anger at the base of your skull. You squash it back down because today you have bigger fish to fry.

    Ignoring the SUV, you ask your Ex if you can have your son on Father’s day. This year, it doesn’t fall on your weekend, but you’d still really like to spend it with your son. Your Ex hems and haws and tells you that she needs to check her calendar because the ‘new’ family might be in Miami that weekend. Vaguely, you wonder how they manage to go to Florida every summer when you haven’t had a vacation in 10 years.

    After awhile, you realize that you’re begging her. You’ve had to beg to see your own son for years since the court made you a visitor in his life, but you try not to think about it like that. Later that evening, when you make it back to your crappy apartment, your carefully brainwashed son curtly explains to you that he’s decided to call his Mother’s new fiancé ‘Dad’ instead of you. All of the fighting, the money, the shame and the humiliation that you swore to yourself would be worth it in the end is instead being rewarded with this:

    You’ve just been reduced back down to Roger.

    This story is so common nowadays that it’s almost a cliché. Is it any wonder that some of the weaker Dads are running like hell? The attorneys, the money, the non stop fighting….and in the end, they lose anyway. America’s laughable version of family court sucks every ounce of joy out of a father’s life and turns his kids into hopeless burdens who will never understand the full extent of what goes into getting those 96 hours a month. Faced with knowledge like that, you have to wonder if Scott Peterson was onto something.

    In the end, it’s all about money. Over two thirds of the divorces are initiated by women who were promised that they can have it all: The kids, the house, and a nice paycheck every week to ease the agony of their oftentimes flippant decision to destroy their families. What they don’t know is the only reason they are so often encouraged down this path has nothing to do with what’s ‘best for her family.’ The family concept could be repaired if more people were willing to work on it instead of cutting and running the second things got a little rough. Divorce, on the other hand, is a business that is keeping thousands of people in a new Lexus every year.

    Let me say that again in case anyone missed it: Women are encouraged towards divorce because the system profits when their families implode.

    Your divorce keeps the judges, the lawyers, the file clerks and the security guards all in jobs. Court appointed therapists and counselors benefit financially when you’re forced into programs with little substance designed to make you feel better about being in a broken home. The main benefactor is the child support agency who takes a 2% cut out of every child support check for as long as the child is in the system.

    Oh, they didn’t tell you about that?

    The reason there’s no child support reform is because a fair system would ultimately give them less opportunity to skim money off of the top. Furthermore, over 80% of custody cases end up with the Mother receiving sole physical custody. Why do you suppose that is? Are 80% of the Fathers in this world incapable of loving and nurturing their own children? Or are the courts just banking on the Father having more earning power than the Mother? Simply put, it has nothing to do with Mothers being automatically considered the ‘better parent.’ The courts are awarding women the children because they are hoping that a Father can earn a bigger paycheck…..which means a bigger cut for them.

    I know a family where the Mother filed for child support, but only asked for a very small amount. She was making good money on her own and didn’t really need much. The judge chastised her for asking for so little and insisted that she didn’t have a right to decide how much money she received. This was her child’s money, not hers, and how dare she try to cheat her own child? She responded that she had worked out an arrangement with her Ex where he’d be taking care of their son during certain week nights while she went to school. She wanted to make absolutely sure that her Ex had enough money to make his home just as comfortable as hers since their son would be spending so much time there. The judge repeated the same tired mantra about it being her child’s money and awarded her 5 times what she was asking based on some arbitrary formula in a notebook. In the end, she cashes her check every week and gives the majority back to her Ex. No one cares, not even the judge who chastised her so harshly, because it wasn’t really about what was bes

  2. guru says:

    Remove custody from both parents.
    References :

  3. laughter_every_day says:

    Much of your rant is nonsense and seems to be dependent on weird notions of a parent’s duty to his children. Nevertheless, one comment requires a response. You mention that 80 percent of the time women get primary custody and then you question why. You seem to suggest that because you don’t know the answer, there can be no answer. Nonsense. The primary reason why women get custody most of the time is that the parties agree to it most of the time. When evaluating only disputed custody actions there is practically no distinction between men and women.
    References :

  4. J M says:

    You are full of it.

    6.4 million kids in this country do not get a penny of child support from their fathers.

    A lot of those kids are living below the poverty line.

    Yeah we need to reform child support. Men who fail to support their children need to go to jail.

    Most men do not try to get custody of their children. When they complain about child support, they are never interested in taking responsibility for the kids, they just want to get our of paying support.
    References :

  5. ou812 The hate returns pt3 says:

    You forgot to tell everyone that if you pay the court ahead or more than the amount, it is considered A GIFT.

    OR that if your ex is having financial trouble and your son is about to be evicted and isn’t eating that if you write a check to her for 5000.00 dollars that when you got to the court with carbon copy in hand they explain that it is A GIFT.(THAT HAD A LOT OF THATS)

    I wish you were making this stuff up.
    References :

  6. gregg says:

    You ran out of space, didn’t ya? First of all, she’s 30 minutes late. that goes against her; you can report it to your lawyer. And that would be all that you have to do.
    References :

  7. George McCasland says:

    http://tinyurl.com/BirdNestCustody2
    http://tinyurl.com/ChildSupportTrustFunds

    Would solve the problems.
    \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
    References :

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