April 14, 2023

Divorce Court is Confusing, You can get help

Tailor divorce help as you want it.

Let’s face it, Divorce court is confusing.

Years ago, you would walk into a courthouse and you could get a package of forms given to you. You would fill them out and walk into the court to get things going.

Not anymore.

Now, it is all online. You have to get the right forms, fill them in correctly, upload them through a portal, serve them, then upload them onto another cloud based system and upload them again on the first portal.

And that just starts things off. That has nothing to do with further forms, court appearances and trying to figure out which ones are by video on the internet and which ones are in person.

On top of that is trying to figure out what law even applies to your situation in the first place. It’s scary. Often overwhelming.

That’s where we can come in.

We are lawyers. We know this system. We are able to answer questions on every aspect; what forms you need to complete, how to do that, what law applies to you and even how to talk to a judge when you do have to go to a court appearance.

Our service is “un-bundled” or pay-as-you-go, or on a limited-scope. Meaning, no big retainers – in fact no traditional retainer. You are not retaining us in any traditional sense. You are hiring us only to do what you want to get done. You control your spending and time we spend doing something for you. If you want to pay for a 1/2 hour of time, then that’s it. No hidden fees or costs. Just that half hour. If you want us to give you feedback on how you prepared a draft of a document and you want us to spend no more than one hour doing that – we will do that. Our service to you commits to staying within the parameters you give us.

This saves you money.

We can guide you on how to do something on a low cost, then you spend the time doing it at a zero cost to you. A traditional legal retainer would mean you hand all of it over to your lawyer to do, and that is where hours and hours of legal time are used up. Which leads to significant legal expenses for you, especially in court. There was a 10 day trial in Ottawa last year, in a family court case and each litigant (meaning each spouse) spent $245,000 in legal fees for their whole case. Trials are not cheap. Court is not cheap. However, by using un-bundled services you can seriously take a chunk of those fees and reduce them down.

You are in the court system because you can no longer negotiate with your spouse. That is why you are asking a judge to decide the issue. Hopefully your spouse will determine that reaching a settlement is a better idea than going through the whole process to a trial. That saves both of you time and money. Typically, 96% of all court cases do settle and do not go to trial. Hopefully, yours will be one of those. We can help you through it. Just book a consult and ask what you need to know. We look forward to helping you.

 

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