With Tamara A. Marshall, PC, Zanck, Coen, Wright & Saladin
Divorce, Family Law, General Civil Ligation Lawyer
Considering whether they should do an adversarial or nonadversarial process, I like to give them an example of how, court, the adversarial process, is often times not very helpful at all. So let’s so somebody felt that petition for dissolution; mom, wife files a petition for dissolution and dad, husband has served a petition and dad is the breadwinner and he decides he is going to move out and not give mom any money. Well here is what the process looks like in the court system.
If I am mom’s attorney I file a petition for temporary relief, it will take me a few weeks to get that on the court’s calendar and then dad’s attorney will go to court the day I present the petition for a temporary relief and a temporary relief means temporary support and they will ask for at least 21 days to respond to that and then they would get 21 days, that’s just standard operating procedure. So now we have six weeks that have gone by where mom isn’t getting support and so when the other attorney asks for those three weeks to respond, the judge will look at their calendar and then they will say okay three weeks after that I have time on my calendar to hear this case.
So now we’ve gone nine weeks, we have done absolutely nothing and mom is not getting support and the retainers you gave your attorneys are probably gone, which is probably about $5000 by this point. And then I will go to court and I will sit for two hours and if you are lucky your case will get heard that day or perhaps the judge has had too much going on that day and he has to send us home and we have to come back another three weeks later.
So this is the example I give to let people know that you truly are giving up control when you choose to take these very personal and important issues to court and have a judge decide these things for you.