Minnesota Family Law Info
Minnesota Divorce: Not always ' til death do us part
With the ever increasing pace of modern society we have come to see an equally skyrocketing mortality rate of undying love. Nothing is forever, it seems. For whatever reason, good people can no longer occupy the same marital relationship and determine they were better friends than spouses. You never know somebody until you live with them. Or perhaps you never really know somebody until you divorce them. The good news is there is in fact life after marriage, or at least there can be. Divorce is very much a quality of life issue, and the decisions you make in deciding how to end it can be absolutely the most profound life choices you'll ever make. I've got a file cabinet full of people who second that one.
As a legal matter, dissolving your marriage is the easy part. All you need are:
1) A valid marriage, and
2) one of the spouses, for whatever reason, simply does not want to be married anymore.
The law has concluded that there is no societal interest in keeping husbands and wives together when one of them wants to end it. The plot thickens when you get to the other issues to be decided along the way: What do we do with the kids? What do I do with me? Who gets the house? How to do we split the property? Who pays the what bill?
Court is rarely a pleasant experience for anyone, as some of the most unhappy contestants in the family court arena actually won at trial. In our 20 years of practice, our office has discovered that there are most definitely things you can do to minimize the time, the anguish, and of course the financial consequences of ending your marriage.
When spouses finally hit that final impasse, what you want is an attorney that can offer you a range of choices. Do you feel like a trial will be unavoidable? Maybe so, and we are very, very good at that and we’ll be with you at every turn. But more often than not, we can help you find enough common ground with your partner to at least minimize the number of issues that have to be put to the Court. And keep in mind that we make a point of never selling any more in legal services than clients legitimately need. Most divorces do in fact settle prior to trial, and if the client is happier without the fireworks and courtroom drama, that’s what we’ll do. You end up having it done your way and we end up with clients who don’t feel they were gouged for excessive fees, and come back to my office with their future legal needs. Or sometimes they just come back for coffee and idle chatter.
To read more about divorce and the issues around it, click here.
