How to Find the Best Tampa Divorce Attorney
By Thor Hartwig, a Men's divorce attorney in Tampa, Florida
How to Find Your Tampa Divorce Attorney
Going through a divorce can be a tumultuous experience, but it doesn’t have to be. Picking the right attorney can play a big role in how your divorce plays out. Often, once there are attorneys present on either side of a case, then even a relatively straight-forward divorce without complicated issues can drag-on far longer than necessary and cost much more than is reasonably required.
That is why it is imperative to pick the right attorney in your divorce or other family law issue. When I went through my own divorce, I made several avoidable mistakes that came back to bite me. If I had to do it all over again, here are several things I would keep in mind when looking for the right divorce lawyer.
A Tampa Divorce Attorney That Can Relate to Your Case
For me, the biggest thing I would look for in a Tampa divorce attorney would be relatability. I would want to know that my attorney has been through the divorce process himself and can personally empathize with the situation. I would also want the attorney to have had minor children when he went through his divorce.
Unless the attorney can personally relate to what you are going through, then you simply aren’t going to get the same type of representation. Not that an attorney would do a bad job because he hasn’t been there personally, or doesn’t have kids, but he wouldn’t understand the full extent of what is on the line.
For example, when in mediation and discussing ongoing timesharing, I have heard many attorneys (mine included) say to their client something to the effect of, “it’s only one day a week, that’s not much. I think you should take the offer.”
One day per week may not sound like much to concede when you don’t have children or haven’t been divorced, but that is 52 days per year you are not spending with your kids. To any father, that is a lot of time to give up just to settle a case.
Unless you have children, you cannot know what it means to be a parent. Unless you have been through a divorce personally, you don’t know what it is like emotionally. That is why I would want my divorce attorney to be able to relate to both of those issues personally.
But just because an attorney can relate, doesn’t mean that there aren’t other considerations.
Custom Parenting Plans
One of the thing I have noticed in family law is that many Tampa divorce attorneys create boiler-plate Parenting Plans. 90% of the plans are the same and only the bare minimum is changed to tailor an agreement to the parties’ individual needs. This does not need to be the case, especially when it comes to the timesharing schedule in the Parenting Plan. This can be drafted with wide latitude and can be customized to accommodate almost any circumstance, or contingency.
The problem is that most Tampa divorce attorneys simply do not put in the amount of detail necessary to create a Parenting Plan that will function in the real world.
Again, a lot of this ties back into the attorney’s ability to relate first-hand to the divorce process. In my own divorce, I got a boiler-plate Parenting Plan that did not address many real-world possibilities that could very easily come up. For example, my ex-wife up and moved from Brandon to St. Petersburg without much forewarning to me.
I looked at my Parenting Plan and there it was: a boiler-plate paragraph in the “relocation” section. It referenced a Florida statute regarding relocation with minor children. Nothing else. This statute basically says that unless one parent moves more than 50 straight-line miles away, then they do not need to petition the court to do so.
For anyone that lives in Tampa Bay, they know that if one parent moves 20 miles away then it might as well be on the other side of the moon, let alone 50 miles. Moving from Brandon to St. Petersburg basically rendered our timesharing schedule impossible to perform.
This resulted in more time, money and effort thrown at the issue when it could have been addressed initially with a Parenting Plan that specifically addressed a relocation within 50 miles.
The bottom line is that most family law cases in Tampa are resolved out of the courtroom, so it is vital to ensure that any Tampa divorce attorney you pick will customize a Parenting Plan to fit your needs.
Don’t pick an Overly Litigious Attorney
In divorce, there is a fine line between cooperation and confrontation. It is important to ensure your Tampa divorce attorney can do both. Again, most cases will be settled outside the courtroom, so you want to make sure that any attorney you pick can work well with other attorneys to be able to settle your case upfront.
This will greatly reduce the overall cost of your divorce. But all too often, many cases drag on unnecessarily simply because the attorneys involved do not get along. It becomes almost a personal point of pride to not concede anything in order to settle. Do not let this happen. When the egos of the attorneys get involved, it simply means things will drag-on unnecessarily and end up costing you more money in the end.
This doesn’t mean you need to concede too much in order to settle your case; on the contrary, when it is time to dig your heels in , you want an attorney that can go from cooperative in the mediation room to adversarial and aggressive in the courtroom.
But until that point comes, you want an attorney to be able to effectively work with the opposing counsel to help you settle your case while not conceding too much.
Mediation
One of the best traits a Tampa divorce attorney can offer is the ability to give realistic expectations to clients. Mediation is the best way to settle your divorce without going to trial. But in order to do this, you need to have a realistic sense of what is likely to happen if the case goes to trial. In a divorce settlement agreement, both sides will have to concede something. That is just the nature of the beast.
If you walk into a mediation with the expectation of walking out happy, you probably aren’t walking in with the right mindset, and your attorney didn’t properly frame the reality of the situation.
With that being said, it is also very important to give mediation a fair shake, even in the most contested and heated divorces. In order to do this, avoid the court-appointed mediators. Simply put, they have a very hard time settling cases in the two-hour time slot they are allotted.
While it is cheap, that is the only thing going for the court-appointed mediators.
Instead, try and get a private mediator that is also, or was, a practicing divorce attorney in the area. This will cost a lot more, but it is worth it and could end up saving you thousands by avoiding trial.
An Attorney with a Reasonable Retainer and Hourly Rate
Finally, a competent divorce attorney does not need to cost an arm and a leg. A large retainer and a $450.00 hourly rate doesn’t necessarily mean a better-quality attorney. It does mean that you will spend a lot more on your divorce, though.
My mentor, most likely the first men’s divorce attorney in Tampa, has been practicing for well over 30 years and charges a rate that is probably much less than the average hourly rate in Tampa for divorce attorneys, and he is a top-notch attorney.
Don’t be afraid to shop-around and ask attorneys what their hourly rate and retainer is. Don’t be fooled by the cheap up-front retainers, though. A $1000.00 retainer billed at $400.00 an hour is not as good as a deal as it sounds, even though it will be less money up-front.
Conclusion
Finding the right divorce attorney in Tampa can be challenging, as everyone has different ideas about what they need, but for men with minor children that need a Tampa divorce attorney, the above advice is pretty sound. And I’m speaking from personal experience.
Thor Hartwig is a men’s divorce attorney in Tampa, Florida.
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