How Much Will it Cost?
by Attorney Jes Beard return to Jes Beard's home page

It Depends

My Dad tells a story of how when he was in the service in the the Army Corps of Engineers training school, he and the other enlisted men always had a fail-safe answer when they had been paying no attention whatsoever to the instructor and got called on to answer a question regarding what the best approach would be to put in a bridge or remove mines from a harbor, or clear a field for a landing strip, or do anything else. Their answer? No matter what the question they would respond with assurance, "It all depends on the terrain."

Much the same is true in divorce. You can get divorced by a perfectly competent attorney who does everything you need and takes care of all of your concerns for a few hundred dollars, or pay $10,000 and still be nowhere close to having it resolved.

The total expense is going to depend entirely on what is involved in the divorce. The number of children, length of the marriage, size of your estate, number of pieces of property are all factors involved... but even more important are factors entirely within your control.

It depends on how much conflict you have with your spouse.
It depends on how you do it.
It depends on how complex your affairs are.
Most importantly, though, it depends on whether you stay in control.

It depends on how much conflict you have with your spouse.

The more you and your spouse fight over things in the divorce, the more it's going to cost you. Period. Fighting is expensive. Some couples only stop fighting in a divorce when they run out of money and can't afford to pay their lawyers to fight any more. If that is what you want, lawyers are generally more than happy to oblige.

But there are reasons other than the cost to hold conflict between you and your spouse to a minimum. The greater the level of conflict the less either of you will trust each other and the less likely you will be able to negotiate any of the differences between you. And if you can't negotiate a settlement you are going to leave decisions to a judge who does not know either one of you, does not know how much either of you actually values any of your belongings, does not know when each of your families gets together at Christmas to know when it would be best to have children with each of you for the holiday... and what's more the judge really doesn't care. The judge may try to care, but there is no way it is as important to the judge as it is to either of you. Leaving decisions to the judge generally assures neither one of you will be happy.

And when you and your spouse are unable to discuss anything civilly between yourselves, all of your communication has to go through your lawyers... meaning you'll be discussing things your lawyers want... at your lawyer's pace... when convenient to your lawyers... and at your lawyers' hourly rates.

It depends on how you do it.

No-lawyer divorces (do it yourself) will result in no legal fees... though they often end up with mistakes layers later have to clean up and with mistakes in dividing marital assets and debts that cost far more than any legal fees for the divorce ever could have.
Uncontested divorces have low legal fees because you and your spouse have worked out the terms of the divorce and attorneys essentially simply make sure you've addressed everything and that the paperwork is in order, and perhaps to offer some advice of certain things.
Mediated divorces cost more than uncontested divorces where you have already worked everything out between yourselves, but still far less than when you are fighting things out and eventually end up trying the case in court.
Adversarial divorces are the Cadillac of divorces... even though you may have a parking space only big enough for a sports car. Don't get me wrong, Cadillacs are great cars, but they really are not for everyone, and for some people they are actually the wrong car to get... and they not only cost an arm and a leg to buy, they really get poor mileage.

It depends on how complex your affairs are.

The complexity of the financial issues involved in your divorce will ad a certain amount to the cost of your divorce, because it is going to add the the time your attorney will have to review or keep track of things even if all of your affairs are in order.

But the real added cost from money issues in a divorce comes from having to dig for the needed information. If you and your spouse can produce this yourselves, it will save both of you a lot of money. To help you get together the needed information, check the following pages and working through the suggested items: 2J-Taking Inventory -- List Assets & Debts; 2J1-Inventory Form -- Assets & Debts Worksheet; 2J2-Budget Form -- Income & Expenses Worksheet; 2J3-Personal Information Worksheet; 2L-Divorce Checklist; and to generally look at 2K-Divorce Manual (from the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers, long, download & print).

Ironically it is often those with the least to fight over who do the most fighting, running up their legal bills up far beyond where they have any business being.

It depends on how much you want your attorney to do.

If you want your attorney to serve as a friend, personal advisor, shoulder to cry on, legal advisor, private investigator, and attorney.... you're going to have an extremely expensive divorce. But there are ways to hold down your legal fees, even when using an attorney in a contested divorce.

Instead of calling your attorney every time you have a simple question, or anytime you or your spouse say anything to each other, wait until you have a few questions you can review at the same time, and make notes on what happens between you and your spouse so you can talk them over all at the same time, when you have an appointment scheduled and your attorney has your file out and is focusing on your case. If you call an attorney five different times with six different one minute questions, you are going to be billed for six different calls, even if the five calls only totaled five minutes. For attorneys charging in minimum billing units of a quarter of an hour (this is a common billing practice), then the six calls will end up with a bill for an hour and a half, even though you could have asked them all during an office appointment and added only six minutes to the time of the appointment, probably adding nothing to your bill. If you call your attorney at midnight to say you just saw your spouse out with someone new headed to a motel room.... well, get ready to pay a premium for calling your attorney at home.

If you don't get addresses to your attorney and your attorney has to track people down, well, that will also add to the bill. So will endless changes in the language of a Marital Dissolution Agreement or efforts to track down marital debts and assets. The more you can do to collect needed addresses and get needed financial records, the less your attorney will add to your bill for this work.

The more determined you are in making sure you can show the court that your spouse was having an affair (something that often makes little difference in the outcome) and then in having that argued in the courtroom, the more expensive your divorce will be.

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