Day in the life of a divorce lawyer

Family Law Practice Insights

Practice Insights: Family Law

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Family law is a practice area that encompasses the many legal issues that families may face. Some of the issues they may cover include divorce cases and spousal and child support issues. They may also work with:

• Child custody
• Division of assets and liabilities due to divorce
• Adoption
• Termination of parental rights
• Paternity
• Dependency and child neglect
• Protection from abuse

Practicing in the Area of Family Law

In family law, you can be more than a lawyer assessing and advising a client on their legal rights. You can help an individual through one of the most stressful experiences in life. It is very rewarding to know you've helped someone through such a difficult time.

While rewarding, it can also be quite difficult to go through these events with your clients. One of the biggest challenges for attorneys is when one or both parties are set on making the process as difficult as possible in a self-defeating attempt to hurt the other party.

A Typical Day or Typical Tasks

There are no typical tasks in family law. Each day brings a new issue from the clients that must be resolved, from a missed custody exchange to a dispute about how to handle custody over a holiday to one party taking money out of a joint account.

New issues arise daily. It can make getting through your to-do list quite challenging. Generally, you will spend your day returning phone calls, negotiating small issues, drafting correspondence, preparing pleadings for court, and going to court for hearings and motions.

In family law, you spend a fair amount of time in court for hearings ranging from ten minutes to two hours in length. Occasionally you have trials that can last several days.

Employment Opportunities in the Field of Family Law

The family law field is, unfortunately, growing, The growth is for two reasons. First, more people are getting divorced. The other reason is that it is difficult to stay in this field, so there is a decent amount of turn over. It takes a certain type of attorney to practice primarily family law.

Skills Needed to Practice Family Law

Family law attorneys must possess the skills of a litigator and negotiator. Time management skills are a must as well, as the practice of law in the family area is very driven by the interruption. It is very helpful to develop counseling skills, as you will be dealing with people going through a very emotional time in their lives.

A basic understanding of accounting and financial matters is a must to both advise your client and to present financial issues to the court. People skills are important, particularly oral communication. You are constantly in contact with people; whether it be your client, opposing counsel, or court personnel, so there is always someone with whom you need to effectively communicate.

If interested in the field, you should take courses in law school in family law and intern at organizations such as Kids’ Voice and Family Legal Services. Be persistent. If you can't find anything right away, try again.

Latest Trends in Family Law

Collaborative Law is a structured process that provides divorcing parties and parties involved in other family law disputes an alternative to litigation. Although developed over 17 years ago, it has yet to reach all areas of the country.

Collaborative Law allows the parties to keep control of their destiny by hiring attorneys committed to a process of including the parties, by use of group meetings, in all negotiations and discussions in a collaborative effort to resolve the matter without going to court. The Collaborative Law attorneys agree not to represent the parties in court should either party decide to litigate their differences. This process has successfully achieved satisfactory results for divorcing parties and is much less stressful for the attorney.

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If you are going to be any type of attorney or lawyer, you already know that much of your day is going to deal with law. If you are a divorce attorney, it means that you are going to be one of the attorneys who are helping people deal with their divorces. Being this type of lawyer means that you are going to need to have some extra training and be willing to work in these situations.

When you want to be one of the attorneys who deals with divorce, there are going to be specific things that you are going to have to focus on with your workday and with the world around you. First of all, of course you are going to need to have passed the bar exam, so you need a good college degree and you also need to have graduated from a good law school, which will both qualify you to pass the bar exam and to be able to have the information that you need to be a regular lawyer.

Of course, however, all attorneys are going to need to specialize in something so that they can be successful with the career path that they have chosen. Therefore, as a divorce attorney you are going to need to take classes and do work with marriage law and with other rules and regulations that go along with law and marriage. This, of course, is going to require you to study the various marriage practices in different states, and to know where you will be practicing and what the various laws are there.

Once you know that you have the right set of credentials and you are ready to get down to work as a divorce attorney, you can begin to be sure that you are doing what it takes to get a practice. Once you are hired, and have become a divorce lawyer, your days are going to consist of many things.

First of all, as a divorce attorney, part of your day is going to be gathering clients and having your first meeting with them. This will usually happen on its own, as people will probably come to you to hire you. When you are first starting out, you might have to spend part of your day trying to get clients, or, at the very least, advertising who you are and what you specialize in. However, after you have a bit of a reputation built up, you will probably be able to spend less time worrying about that and more time on other tasks.

Part of your day as one of the attorneys that specializes in divorce will be meeting with your clients. This is going to be for many reasons. In some cases, you will meet with them to talk about their marriage and their spouse and to plan how you want to proceed with the divorce. You might need to have meetings dealing with property, children, and assets. Part of your day might require you to be in meetings with your client, your client's spouse, and that spouse's lawyer as well. These meetings are all going to lead up to the divorce being finalized.

Also, as a divorce attorney, part of your day might require you to be in court, or to be present when papers are signed. Keep in mind that as a divorce attorney, you are probably going to have several clients at once, so you might want to think about how you can manage your day and do what you need to do for each of them.

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