5 Reasons Why Divorcing May Require An Attorney

Divorce is a complex process, but it can be life-changing in many positive ways. That doesn’t mean that you can handle the process on your own, however. No matter how amicable you and your former spouse are toward one another, there are many features of divorce that are best handled by a legal expert.

Your divorce attorney in St. Louis, Missouri, can help you to get the right divorce settlement for you and your family. There are lots of things that need to be handled in a divorce that require specific legal attention and most people are not aware of the ins and outs of the divorce process. Getting the settlement right is critical to protect your assets, income, and time with your kids.

Reasons That You Need to Hire a Divorce Attorney

1. Complexity

The divorce process is complex, and it is easy to miss some of the steps and stages along the way. You need to be able to take care of the various parts of your assets and requirements through legal processes in order to get a divorce that will hold up in a court of law and protect your rights. Complexity is part of every divorce, no matter how many things you own together or whether or not you have kids with your former spouse.

A legal team usually works on a divorce because of the number of moving parts involved in any divorce. Thinking that you can handle all the work that a team usually does on your own is not very realistic.

2. Lots of Emotions Involved

There are always a lot of emotions involved in a divorce. It can be hard to be clear-headed or even reasonable about your demands and needs during your divorce. You are simply going to be too close to your own feelings about the divorce and the process itself.

Having too many feelings about your divorce can make it impossible to work through the process without the help of a legal expert. Having an objective person working on your divorce is important to make sure that you get a divorce that makes sense for your needs in the future, not just in the moment that you are in when the divorce is fresh.

3. The Actions of Your Spouse

At the end of the day, you can only control what you yourself do during a divorce. You will need to be sure that you are not counting on your former spouse to act in any specific way at all. If you are planning on them being reasonable, you might be shocked in a bad way. Many people think that they can go ahead and handle a divorce directly with their spouse, but then this plan goes out the window when their spouse doesn’t decide to be nice anymore.

Your spouse will have all of their own desires and demands in mind when they get involved in the divorce settlement process. Your spouse’s actions are not something that you can count on, and you should not think that you and your former spouse will be able to work together happily throughout the divorce process.

4. Alimony and Child Support

Considerations like alimony and child support are pretty much impossible to set up on your own without legal support. Spousal support and child support are determined based on the income of both spouses, the number of kids they share, medical considerations, and more. Trying to come up with a settlement amount for either spousal support or child support on your own is not really realistic.

Your lawyer will be able to help you come up with the right amount of child support and alimony if these considerations need to be part of your divorce. Modifying these payments is costly and often very difficult. You want to get these things right the first time to make sure that your divorce doesn’t have to be reassessed, reopened, and re-adjudicated.

Children also need to be considered, and a parenting plan needs to be made alongside taking care of determining child support. Former spouses will usually share custody of the children if possible. Considerations for holidays, birthdays, and more are all tied up in the parenting plan. You need a lawyer with experience in this kind of legal process to help you get the right alimony plan and the right parenting plan for everyone who is impacted by the divorce.

5. Correct Documentation

There is a lot of paperwork that is part of a divorce. Without education in legal processes, it can be completely impossible to actually complete a divorce. You need to be sure that you don’t forget all of the various documents and legal processes that need to be handled to make sure that your divorce is properly completed and legally binding.

Many people who try to tackle this work on their own miss critical steps and stages of the work, and their divorce needs to be reopened and corrected. This can be costly, and most people do not ever want to have to pay for the entire divorce process twice. You can save yourself time and wasted cash if you just hire a skilled lawyer to handle your divorce from the start and ensure that all the paperwork is done right.

Divorce is a Complex Process, and You Should Make Sure to Hire an Experienced Legal Team

Hiring the right lawyer can make it substantially easier to get divorced. You might think that you can handle this legal process on your own, but the reality is that there are so many moving parts of your divorce that you will likely miss steps and forget important considerations.

Avoiding mistakes, stress, and the need to revisit your divorce to correct errors later are all reasons that you should hire a skilled lawyer to handle your divorce. This is one of the best ways to save money and worry over the course of your divorce, and you should get a lawyer as soon as you know that you are planning to get divorced.