By Ryan Byers,
Rammelkamp Bradney, Attorneys-at-Law
With several studies now claiming that between forty and fifty percent of first marriages in United States will end in divorce, there is a growing industry which seeks to provide individuals with "do-it-yourself" divorce forms and instructions. I am occasionally asked what advantage there is to hiring a lawyer to handle a divorce as opposed to using these do-it-yourself materials.
The answer to that question is that there are many benefits to ensuring that your divorce is handled by an experienced legal professional. The first and most obvious benefit is that no do-it-yourself divorce kit can provide instructions or necessary forms for every situation. The laws that govern divorce cases and the forms that must be filed in those cases are different in every state, and some do-it-yourself resources provide generic forms that attempt to apply across the entire country. Even when a do-it-yourself kit has attempted to tailor itself to the specific requirements of the State of Illinois, most ignore the fact that Illinois is divided in to several judicial circuits, each of which encompasses several counties. These separate judicial circuits and even the counties within them can and do enact their own requirements for forms to be used and procedures to be followed in divorces. Using do-it-yourself materials risks violating a local rule, whereas retaining a lawyer who practices in the county in which you will be divorced ensures that all local requirements will be satisfied.
Also, individuals seeking divorces should keep in mind the fact that the law is constantly changing. On a quite regular basis, new statutes are enacted by our legislature and new opinions are issued by our courts. Relying on a resource that was published several years or even several months ago creates the possibility that you will not be following the law as currently enacted. Lawyers have a professional obligation to remain informed about changes in the law, and working with a competent legal professional guarantees these recent changes will not be ignored in your divorce proceeding.
Finally, many individuals who attempt to pursue their own divorces without professional assistance do so because they feel that the matter will be relatively simple or that they will be able to easily reach agreements with their spouses on issues such as child custody, division of property obtained during the marriage, and payment of debts that are in the names of both spouses. However, the end of a marriage is a time at which emotions run high, and several divorces which seem to be amicable when they begin become more contentious as they move forward. Hiring a lawyer to handle your divorce from the beginning avoids the situation in which proceedings are initiated and an attorney must later be retained to "clean things up" when new disputes between the husband and wife result in the do-it-yourself divorce being impractical. When a lawyer is called upon to enter proceedings that have been ongoing for a period of time, the result is often that extra time and effort need to be expended to inform the lawyer of the facts and to correct earlier mistakes. Expending this extra time and effort can be avoided if a lawyer is contacted as soon as a spouse feels that he or she is ready to file for divorce.
An individual's decision that he or she cannot continue in a marriage is never an easy one, and the stress associated with making the highly personal decisions that are involved in every divorce can be helped greatly by the involvement of an experienced divorce attorney who will employ his or her best efforts in obtaining the most desirable outcome for his or her client.
