If you are going to start a divorce in Illinois, and you expect there’s going to be some disagreement, you’re going to need to understand divorce dynamics to make the right decisions.
Divorce can evolve many trade-offs. Understanding them can help you make strategic decisions.
You want to prove something, but that takes work
Going to court is about proving things. It’s not enough to convince your lawyer that what you’re saying is true. A lawyer does not have any type of superpowers to brainwash a judge in two believing what you’d like. The basic building blocks of a case evidence, and it takes work together evidence.
Here are some examples for you:
- Do you want to prove your spouse is wasting money on an extramarital affair? Then you’re going to need to take a close look at bank records, and credit cards. You might have to track locations of associated with cell phone usage, and maybe find some unexpected trips to hotels.
- Do you think your spouse is hiding money? If you’re lucky, you can find money taken out of account you know about. And even better, the money taken out might be in big chunks. But what if a couple hundred dollars is taken out every once in awhile, and $1,000 here in there? How do you prove where that money went to? Doing that can be hard. But one thing is for sure, it’s going to be a lot of work and increase the expense of your divorce.
- Do you think you’re supposed to cheating on you? Repeated it to her lawyer a hundred times isn’t going to accomplish anything. So you might feel very frustrated, but there’s something very important you should understand. The judge really doesn’t care if someone you are married to have sex with someone else. Churches only care about whether or not marital money was wasted on the extramarital affair. It’s a financial matter. So you’re going to need to reconcile your feelings about what happened with the need to move ahead with something productive in your case.
- Does your spouse hide money? When people get divorced, they must divide marital assets. For the most part, That means dividing all assets acquired during the marriage, except for gifts or inheritances. However, many times what is obvious to a client may not be something that’s provable without significant work. Many times, it actually is needed to prove someone has hidden money. Or maybe a forensic accountant is necessary. If you are going to claim that your spouse your money, then you need to prove it. And sometimes, proving it requires more work than you might initially think is necessary. So what you need to do is wave the cost of gathering evidence against what you have to potentially gain.
- Do you want to show your spouse is not a good parent? Maybe you are a better parent than your spouse. But guess what? A divorce case is not really about proving who is the better parent. More often than not, the parent who has done most of the parenting in the past will continue to do so in the future, regardless of whether or not the other person actually has better parenting skills. Is that absurd? Yes, I think so. But that seems to be the Practical impact of the law. What this means is that if you want to prove that there’s actually something severely wrong with the other person’s parenting, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Just some of the things involved include the appointment of a guardian ad litem or a child’s representative. Furthermore, a psychologist or psychiatrist might be appointed to evaluate your situation and write a report that will be given to the court. Needless to say, all this can become expensive.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it makes sense to fight for your kids. But you have to understand what type of evidence is actually useful. One thing I do is to help my clients understand how to gather the best evidence against the other parent. Often, a little documentary evidence goes further than does a bunch of he-said-she-said accusations.
Do you want to get the same type of results your friends got?
Many times people hire me and they tell me about the cases of their friends and family. The here with their friends and family got, and they are convinced that they should get the same thing. However, but you need to understand is that all cases are different. That may seem simplistic, but it’s true. Facts vary from case to case. Further, different cases have different judges. So it’s not really possible to predict exactly what will happen in a case. You simply cannot look at someone else’s case and draw the conclusion that because you feel the other cases similar you will get the same result.
Getting started
That everything I’ve said in this article will be pleasing for you to hear. But part of my job as a divorce lawyer in Illinois is to tell it like it is. I don’t need to get business by blowing smoke to people.
If you wan to start a divorce in Illinois, you can contact me here or at (312) 554-5433. I represent people in the counties of Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, and McHenry.