What’s the goal?

Once you’ve booked an appointment with a family law attorney, you’ll want to prepare for your meeting.  Start by thinking long-term.  What is your goal here?  What do you want your life to look like in a year?  Think concretely about it.  Visualize the outcome.  Knowing your destination is essential to starting the journey, right?  So start there.

How will you get there? 

Once you have a goal in mind, consider what the journey will look like.  You may have to make compromises or sacrifices to achieve your goal – whether that’s a divorce or a new custody arrangement.  What are you willing to give up to make it happen?  What will you absolutely not give up?  What matters the most to you?  Our attorneys can help you understand what is possible – or impossible – in the current court system. 

What is your financial big picture?

On a more practical level, assess your financial situation.  Do you own a house?  Find out who is on the mortgage, and who is on the deed (these don’t always match).  Pull your credit report and make a list of all of your debts.  Get recent statements for credit cards, bank accounts, and retirement accounts.  In a divorce, the goal is an equitable division of assets, so you want to have the big picture in mind regarding assets and debts. You can check your tax returns for you and your spouse’s annual income – each party’s income is an important part of the picture.  Pretty much everybody that comes in needs to have their financial information at hand.  If you’re not coming in for a divorce, assets are less important than income, which is the primary factor in child support calculations.  You don’t need to provide these documents at a consultation, but you’ll use the information to fill out our Client Information Sheet.

What documents should you provide?

We may need you to send a few documents, depending on the reason you’re coming to see us.

• If you’ve already been to court, we need to see the orders currently in place.  If you have lost your hard copy, you can get copies of them for a modest fee from the clerk’s office of the court that entered your order.

• If you’ve been served papers but have not yet been to court, we’ll need copies of those.  Closely read the instructions on those documents.  Deadlines to respond start running from the day you were served.  You may also have been served with a pretrial or status quo order that tells you what you can and cannot do regarding financial accounts, payment of regular bills and expenses, and even visitation with the children.

• If you’re coming to discuss a post-divorce matter, we’ll need your Judgment of Divorce and any other subsequent orders that have been entered if you have already been back to court after your divorce was final.. 

• For custody and child support matters involving never-married parents, we’ll need your current orders (if any).

• If you’re coming for a Prenuptial or PostNuptial Agreement, be sure to talk to your partner ahead of time so you have a good idea of what the terms will be.  You’ll still need the financial details for these. 

• If your spouse has presented you with a proposed divorce agreement that they want you to sign, we need a copy of that so we can properly advise you.

Sometimes people want to send us hundreds of files of evidence of their partner’s wrongdoing, or all of their documents from a previous court case, or a report from a private investigator, for example. We don’t need all of that at a consultation, so just hang onto that information until later in the process.   

If you don’t have access to a scanner, you can use your cellphone camera to scan documents and convert them to a PDF file either directly through the camera app or by downloading a free scanner app.  Places such as Office Depot and the UPS Store can scan documents for you. Your local library probably has scanners you can use, as well. You’ll want to confirm that with your nearby branch. However, most phones have a scan option.  Sending scans is much better than sending photos.  Please don’t send photos!  They are often hard to read, and are usually much larger files than .pdfs.  For Androids, use your Google Drive app.  For iPhones, use the Notes app. 

Fill out your pre-appointment information!

At Herlihy Family Law, we send every client a Client Information Sheet in advance of their consultation.  You’ll use the link in this form to upload the documents mentioned above. 

We require that it be filled out by the day before, so that the attorney you are meeting with will be able to review this before your meeting.  You only have an hour, so give us the information ahead of time and the attorney will spend it giving legal advice, not reading your documents or having to ask you the questions that are on the information sheet.  We understand that you may not have all of the information to hand, but fill it out to the best of your knowledge.  Know that everything you tell us is absolutely confidential. Sometimes people are uncomfortable with sharing financial data, and we get that.  We wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t essential.   

Prepare to be truthful. 

On that note, plan to be open and honest at your consultation.  We may not have heard it all, but we’ve heard a lot. Don’t be embarrassed about difficulties in your relationships.  We certainly don’t need all of the details, but if something led to the rift between you and your partner, let us know.  That might be an addiction, infidelity, or abuse, for example, but of course sometimes people just don’t want to be together any more.  We can help, either way.  Rest assured, we will absolutely not be sharing your private information.

What questions do you have?

Once you’ve got your destination in mind, your information gathered, and your forms filled out, you need to start thinking about what questions you have.  Start a list – on paper, or in your phone, whatever works for you.  Keep that list handy so that you can add to it as questions arise.  Bring your list to your appointment and bring something to take notes with – again, paper, phone, whatever you are most comfortable with.  We can’t promise to answer all of your questions in your first meeting – legal questions are often answered with the phrase, “It depends.”  We should be able to answer a lot of them, though. There also may be other blog posts here on the website that answer your questions.  Take a look at those, and check out our new podcasts. 

Move forward!

Sometimes it’s hard to make that first phone call to book a consultation.  It’s a first step in a complex process.  If you want to call, we can get started on the phone, but if it’s easier to fill out a form, use the “Request a Consultation” button on the homepage to start the process.  We’re here to help you move forward.

Author: Jill Chancey

Jill Chancey is a New Orleans native who has called Mobile home since 2019.  She attended Trinity University in San Antonio, majoring in Art History and English.  She also has an MA and a PhD in Art History.  After earning a certificate in Paralegal Studies, she pivoted to the legal profession after several decades as an art historian.  In her free time she enjoys science fiction, art museums, and collecting and reselling vintage design.