Is Your Divorce Lawyer the Problem? Or Are You?

For about as long as there has been marriage, there has also been divorce. And for about that long, there have been some version of divorce lawyers. Which means people have been complaining about divorce lawyers for thousands of years now.

So, if you're wondering whether your divorce lawyer is screwing up your divorce, you are now part of a millennia-old tradition. Welcome. We've been expecting you.

Now, your divorce lawyer may well be screwing up your divorce. Perhaps they're not responsive or taking the time to understand the facts and your goals. Perhaps they're way too responsive and are unnecessarily inflaming tensions through unnecessary and aggressive discovery tactics and racing to court over every little thing. Perhaps they just don't know what they're doing.

All of those topics are for another day, and, to the extent your divorce lawyer is not serving your needs correctly, you do need to take action on that. But the purpose of this article is to take a step back and ask whether the person staring back at you in the mirror might be the one screwing things up.

"Never Work Harder Than Your Client"

A phrase I've heard mentioned in lawyer and mediation circles is along the lines of "never work harder than your client." It's borrowed from counseling and therapy. The idea is that a therapist can guide and diagnose, but can't do the client's emotional work for them. You can debate the merits of importing it wholesale into divorce law, and I think it's better understood as a concept to ponder rather than a clear directive. But there's a lot of truth in it here too.

In the context of your divorce, your lawyer can only push as hard, and as smart, as the direction you give them, and the facts, documents, and other evidence you have to back up that direction. If you haven't done your own thinking and work about what you actually want and why, and what grounds you have to get there, you're effectively asking your lawyer to work harder than you have. And lawyers working hard on your behalf means large monthly bills for you.

The Lawyer's Job vs. Your Job

Your lawyer can't do 100 percent of your divorce while you focus on the millions of things that are more fun and less stressful than figuring out your divorce — doomscrolling, dental work, uploading pictures of that weird new growth to ChatGPT, and the like. Your lawyer's job is to know the law and the process, apply it to your situation, and execute a strategy based on that lawyer's experience with cases like yours. Your job, and your job right now, is to set the priorities that strategy serves, and provide him or her with everything on your end that is needed to execute that strategy. The doomscrolling will still be there when you're done.

A good attorney can tell you what's legally possible, what's likely to hold up, and how to get there efficiently. What they can't do is tell you what you actually want, or why you want it. They also can't assess the facts of your case if you haven't provided them the facts and everything necessary to prove those facts. That's on you, my friend. If you're vague about your priorities, or don't provide the facts and evidence to back them up, your lawyer is left guessing, perhaps wrongly, all at hundreds of dollars an hour.

So before asking whether your lawyer is doing their job well, it's worth checking whether you've done yours. Here are three questions to ask yourself.

Have You Given Your Lawyer Your Goals, Facts, and Documents?

I wrote a whole piece on this a couple of weeks ago — the short version is: write down your goals, the facts and evidence behind them, what you'd trade, what you won't, and your rough timeline and budget, before your first real meeting. If you haven't done that yet, that's worth doing before you go any further with the questions below.

Are Your Goals and Instructions Specific?

I've often heard people say some version of, "All I want in this divorce is for it to be fair." I think this is meant to signal a flexible and amicable approach to divorce. Which is totally cool in theory, but a lot of times what they actually mean is, "I want every f-ing penny I'm entitled to under the law (and hopefully more) and I won't stop until I do." Which is not as cool, and in fact often a recipe for disaster (and something I will discuss further in future newsletters).

But aside from that being a potentially disingenuous statement, giving your lawyer the instruction "I just want things to be fair" or "I just don't want to get screwed" is kind of useless. While certainly true, it doesn't really give them anything to work with or act on. And I'm going to guess that no client in the history of divorce law has wanted an unfair outcome that screws them over, so you can safely assume your lawyer understands that aspect.

Specific goals and instructions, on the other hand, give your lawyer somewhere to go. For example, "I want to keep the house, and I'm willing to give up an equivalent amount in retirement assets to do it. I'm willing to waive alimony if that means not going to court. I'm okay with a one-week-on-one-week-off custody schedule as long he's required to live within the same zip code as me." That's clear and it gives your lawyer not just a vision of what's "fair" to you but also a roadmap without guessing.

Are Your Goals and Instructions Reasonable, or Ego-Driven?

This one's trickier, because ego-driven instructions often sound perfectly reasonable on the surface. "I want 50/50 custody on a 2:2:3 schedule" is a specific, legitimate-sounding goal. So is "I want to make sure I'm not paying anything over $1,500 a month in spousal support with an end date in five years."

But are you asking for 50/50 because you genuinely believe it's best for your kids, or because anything less would feel like losing or somehow telling the world that you're not a good parent if you have less than 50% time? (Note: People will admit to pretty much anything in divorce, but almost never to being a bad parent.) Are you fighting an extra $250 a month on spousal support because the money actually matters, or because conceding it would mean admitting your ex has a point that your income is artificially low because of personal expenses that you are treating as business expenses?

Your lawyer may not be able to tell the difference from the outside. A lot of the time, they will fight for what you tell them to fight for. Which means if the instruction is ego dressed up as strategy – and it ends up being a bad strategy because the facts don't support it or because your spouse will never agree to it short of an expensive trial that is more trouble than it's worth – then your lawyer isn't the one making that mistake. You are, and you're paying them by the hour to help you make it.

So, Who's the Problem?

Sometimes it really is your lawyer. Bad communication, bad strategy, bad fit. If that's what's happening, it may be time to find someone new.

But if you've read this far and recognized an issue on your end — vague goals, lack of facts and evidence in your lawyer's hands to support your goals (whatever those might be), an instruction that was really just wounded pride wearing a legal argument's clothes — the fix isn't a new lawyer. It's doing the work your current one has been waiting for you to do: get specific, get honest about your motives, and stop asking your lawyer to work harder than you have.