Some Divorces Are Actually Very Amicable
Video Transcribed: My name is Ryan Cannonie, I am the Tahlequah family attorney for Wirth Law Office in Cherokee County. And unfortunately, one thing about being an attorney is that, absent some extra certification, you don’t usually get to marry people, but you do end up filing for divorce for people a lot.
There’s some questions I’ve had over the past couple weeks here about divorce, and specifically, your spouse and you have decided to get a divorce, but where do you start? What’s the number one spot there? How does it work?
The first question, when people call me, I ask them about is, is this contested or is this going to be an agreed divorce? When you are doing a divorce, if it’s contested, that means that you guys are not in agreement, that there’s a fight over assets.
A lot of times, these are the divorces that you hear about where things get bitter and there’s lots of fighting and it can take a while to get to the core because there’s just a lot of hostility. Those are one type of divorce, but not all divorces are that way.
Some divorces are actually, in fact, a lot are very amicable. The people just realized, “Hey, we’re not good together. Maybe we make better friends than spouses. Or we decided that this is just not our thing, and we tried and it didn’t work out.” And there’s no shame in that. When you have an agreed-on divorce, it actually makes things a lot simpler.
Your options, I’m going to go through some of our options we give people when they contact us about a divorce. The first thing we do as a firm is we can just draft the papers for you. We will draft up all the divorce papers, we will sell them to you for $500, is how the retainer fee works.
Basically, you’re paying us to draft the papers and that’s it. We don’t go to court with you, we don’t file anything, we don’t represent you in court for it. We just give you the papers and let you do it on your own if both of you are in agreement.
Drafting papers for divorce works when there’s already been a full split of the property and the assets, and a lot of times there’s not many assets there. It’s people who maybe kept their own bank accounts, people who are in agreement with it, they’ve already split everything, the house, property, cars, bank accounts, everything’s already been divided. Or there’s an agreement to divide everything a certain way, and both parties are fully onboard with that.
One of the things that can complicate matters when you just want draft papers is when there are children involved, unless there’s a really good in-place agreement. One thing that I saw one time was the father of the children, the husband, he did offshore oil work. He was gone for months at a time. He was like, “Look, I fully understand. I cannot be responsible for the children. All I ask for is I want some type of visitation whenever I get back.”
And wife/mother, totally in agreement. In fact, they were still friends. When he would come back, I think he stayed in the guestroom or maybe the garage apartment of the house, something like that, when he was back. Because he was gone so much for work, they just realized that they weren’t happy together as a couple, but they were both really good parents.
Something like that is a situation where you could do contested or better, an agreed divorce. So, an agreed divorce is a next step from that. It’s where we would represent one of you. So, let’s say the wife comes in and says, “Hey, we want a divorce. We’re all in agreement. We just want to see what the cost is.”
Well, my response would be, “Well, I can represent one of you and the other person can say, ‘Look, I understand you’re not my attorney, but I agree to talk to you.'” And then we can go through all the paperwork, go up to the courthouse, get a date in front of the judge, and go ahead and go through the process and go through it that way.
The last type of divorce is that one I mentioned earlier, that contested divorce where there’s just so much hostility that you have to have attorneys in there to negotiate for you, because when you are very close to a situation, a lot of times it’s hard to be logical, you’re very emotional. And even though you can be emotional in the other types of divorces, when you’re talking about contested divorce, sometimes people get stuck on one thing.
There was a joke when I was in law school. One of the attorneys talked about they could get an agreement on every single thing except for some collector’s cups or collector’s plates. I don’t even know if it was a real story.
It’s probably just one that’s been passed around with attorneys for years. But they had these back when Arby’s did the Christmas glasses, some type of small collector’s item that wasn’t of very much value, maybe 100 bucks at most, maybe 200, if that.
And they divided the house and everything else, but that was the hill they were prepared to die on. So their attorneys had to come in and really be the counselor part of being an attorney of just, “Hey, is this something you want to…
You’re going to waste hundreds to thousands of dollars fighting over something that’s worth 50 bucks. Let’s look at this.” So having an attorney in a contested divorce is great for you because it not only helps you keep some perspective, but also an attorney will help fight for your interest in a contested divorce.
Those are the three types of divorce. I’ll make some other videos about it, but that’s really where you want to start, is to decide what type of divorce you want. Do you want just paperwork and go up and handle it yourself? Maybe you’ve been in the court system enough that you are familiar enough with how it works that you think you can do it.
Is it a divorce where you want an Tahlequah attorney there with you, but you don’t necessarily need a whole trial or anything like that? Or if you’re in that last category, which you’d definitely need help there. So, if you find yourself in any of these three situations, please come and give us a call and we can help with your Tahlequah divorce.
