Understanding Contested Divorce: Your Path to Resolution
Are you in the middle of a contested divorce and you want to try to resolve it without going to trial? My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m an attorney with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve been doing family and criminal law for about seven years now and I want to help you make law easy by talking a little bit about how you can take a contested divorce into an uncontested one and hopefully reach a resolution.
Courts don’t want you to be in the middle of litigating a divorce. Every judge that I’ve ever been in front of in the last seven years has always said, and I agree with it, I’ve seen it firsthand, parties are going to be happier with an agreement that or with a decree that they reach by agreement as opposed to a decree that the judge just shoves down their throat at trial. It’s always better, in my opinion, to have at least one hand on the steering wheel instead of just completely giving up control and praying for the best.
The Role of Mediation in Divorce
So a lot of times in these situations the courts will order parties to go to mediation. Mediation is you would sit down with your lawyer, they would sit down with their lawyer, and there would be a neutral third party. Usually, it’s another attorney, sometimes it’s not, but it’ll be a neutral third party that’s going to try to help you identify what the issues are and see what can be done to get creative to solve these problems.
It doesn’t always work, but nine times out of ten it does, and I cannot stress this enough. If you settle at mediation, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get everything that you want, but it does mean you’ll possibly get more than you would get at trial. Mediation, I believe that a good negotiation, a good compromise is one that nobody walks away from completely happy with, but they do walk away from it with something that they can live with.
Why Trial Should Be a Last Resort
As opposed to going to trial, it’s all or nothing. You’re either going to get everything you want or you’re not, and there’s no real in-between there. I tell my clients a lot of times, like here’s the deal, you can either spend a bunch of money taking this thing to trial, I’m going to take that money and I’m going to take my family to Disney World, or you can save that money right now, pocket it yourself, reach a resolution, and then you can go to Disney World.
Usually, when I put it in those terms, I don’t end up getting to go to Disney World because people run the cost-benefit analysis and decide that it’s better to not run the risk and not have to pay for the risk, and to just try to settle something at mediation. It doesn’t always work though, and if it doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that you’ve done anything wrong. It just means that it doesn’t work. Sometimes there’s just no middle ground.
When Mediation Falls Short
I had a case a few years ago where my client and the other side, lived worlds apart, I mean states away. Ironically, we’re arguing about who gets custody and who would get visitation. Ironically, even though there’s geographically just miles of middle ground, just metaphorically there was no middle ground between the two because there wasn’t a whole lot that we could do to negotiate.
I mean, both sides were saying, hey I want the kid, you can have every holiday, but I want the kid full-time. Neither one can budge. There’s no extra visitation that you could offer in that situation, and in those situations, you just have to go to trial and hope for the best. My honest advice though, and I give this to every single one of my clients, is at least try to settle. Try to act in good faith to negotiate something that you can live with.
Schedule a Low-Cost Initial Strategy Session
If you have questions about this, if you want to try to get off the trial track and reach a resolution, or if you want to try to make sure that you don’t even get on the contested track in the first place, absolutely give us a call. My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a family law attorney with Wirth Law Office, and I want to help you make law easy. Call us today at 918-879-1681 to schedule a low-cost initial strategy session.
