Lawyers

As I said in my previous post, I wanted to handle my uncontested divorce via mediation, rather than as adversaries. Since my wife wanted nothing to do with this, we each had to get lawyers. I interviewed about 6 or 7 of them before deciding on the one I used. Based on my interactions with my lawyer over the past year, plus what I have learned by talking to others who have gone through the divorce process, I would have to agree with the general perception that the lawyers are basically in the game for themselves, and they manipulate the situation in order to maximize the amount of the bill they can hand you.

My wife's attorney sent me hundreds of interrogatories which asked all kinds of questions, some relevant to our case, but many not. Some of these were ridiculously irrelevant; so much so that it would have been funny if it had not been costing us so much money. In some cases, there were typographical errors which made it clear that the documents had been prepared for another case, and then inexpertly adapted to our own. I believe that many of the 1,500 pages of photocopied documents I had to supply to respond to these were simply ignored, and just requested as a formality.

I believe my wife's lawyer was more of a bill-padder than my own. In addition to charging $350 an hour for his services (compared to $300/hr. for my lawyer), he billed everything his office did at his rate. My lawyer charged only $60/hr. for work done by a paralegal, and $40/hr. for work done by a secretary. My lawyer's interrogatories were far more concise and directly relevant to the case, and were far fewer in number.

Having said that, his services were far from perfect. While he was more efficient in his billing, I do have to admit that his office was not terribly well-organized and didn't always respond to my attempts to contact it, whether it be by phone, fax, or e-mail. I don't really think this made much of a difference in terms of the outcome of my case -- based on discussions with a number of lawyers, the eventual settlement would probably have been pretty similar no matter what lawyer I had or what we did. It seems that awards of alimony and property distribution are largely formulaic in New Jersey -- in other words, while the law does not prescribe or regulate property distribution as tightly as it does child support, the lawyers, mediators, and judges in the system all use rather similar formulas and methods to arrive at their rulings and recommendations.