Divorce in New Jersey: Part I (Transcript of 9/19/19 Webinar)

THIS IS PART I OF THE TRANSCRIPT FROM OUR WEBINAR ON SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 ABOUT DIVORCE IN NEW JERSEY.

Good evening. Welcome to our webinar “Divorce in New Jersey”, presented by Netsquire Previte Nachlinger. I’m your presenter, John Nachlinger. I’m an attorney and a co-owner of Netsquire. I’ve been practicing divorce and family law for about 15 years exclusively. I’m a certified matrimonial attorney, which is a designation that less than 2.5% of all the attorneys in New Jersey have. I’m also a qualified divorce mediator, which means I’ve been through a variety of training on how to mediate divorce cases. I’ve handled either as an attorney or a mediator, over 1300 divorce and family law matters in my career and I’ve been recognized as a New Jersey Divorce Super Lawyer from 2012 to present by the New Jersey Monthly Magazine.

A little bit about Netsquire. We were founded in December 2014. We exclusively handle divorce and family law matters, so that means we’re going to handle child custody and parenting time disputes, alimony and child support disputes, a distribution of any assets and debt adoption and adoption. We do step-parent adoptions, private adoptions, and adult adoptions. We do all those sorts of adoptions, domestic violence cases, enforcement and modification of any prior orders of divorce judgements that, um, you might have any kind of grandparent rights cases. These are situations where grandparents be denied access to a child.

In terms of our firm, what sets us apart from other firms is number one, we really focus on solutions. I mean, you see that in our name. So, what that means is we try to find a creative and personalized solution to all of our client’s legal problems because we do not believe in one size fits all. It’s not fair to our clients. It’s not fair to their wallets. It’s unfair to their kids. It’s not fair to their family. We believe in honesty. From the very first time we talk to anybody, we are very clear that we will not tell them what they want to hear. We’re going to tell them what they need to know in order to make a good decision on how to move forward. If you’re just being told what you want to hear, which I suspect a lot of attorneys do, just to get your business. It doesn’t do you any good. I mean, it doesn’t do you any good to leave an office thinking that you’re going to yet, you know, this entire array of things only to find out later on that you were never entitled to them to begin with. And finally, we have a lot of experience in our office. We have five attorneys who have a combined 85 plus years of experience. So we know what we’re doing. We practice divorce and family law exclusively.

Let’s talk about solutions to divorce. There are three buckets of solutions that we like to offer to a divorce. Again, one size does not fit all. First thing is litigation. Now litigation means you file a complaint for divorce without having an agreement with your spouse. And that’s where you just go to court, you file a complaint and the game starts so to speak. And this is, we’re going to go through the court process and the court process involves court appearances that you have to go to, involves documents that have to be filed. There’s a lot of things that go on in the core process that the attorneys do not control for the most part. So, it can be very expensive and time consuming, and in most cases is not really necessary. This is the least preferred way you should proceed. And just to summarize it, this is where you proceed without trying to resolve your case and without trying to get an agreement, and you just file a complaint for divorce and go through the court process. Obviously, sometimes it is necessary but more times than not it is not necessary and not the way you should go.

The second bucket of solutions we offer is mediation. Now, mediation is a very generic term, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about what that actually means. But really at its core, mediation is trying to reach an agreement without involving the court. And even more specifically it is trying to reach an agreement before anyone files a complaint with them. It can take a lot of different forms, but, more often than not mediation the form it’s gonna take. Mediation is where you go to a third party and they help you resolve your case. Now sometimes you’ll go to a mediator with your attorneys. Sometimes you’ll go without your attorney. Whether you go with or without, you really need to get some advice before you go. This can be very inexpensive. I handle divorce mediations quite regularly and more often than not, people only have to come in one or two times to resolve their entire case. That’s how quick and inexpensive a can really be, so it is certainly a lot less expensive than going through litigation.

More often than not, mediation keeps your emotions down. I always tell people whenever it’s John versus Beth, all of a sudden because of that “versus”, you become adversarial and it really makes it more difficult to resolve your case. So really keeping your emotions down and focusing on the fact that really it’s a business transaction for the most part that you’re dealing with. So, obviously, this is the most preferred way of proceeding and it’s really something that you should consider always when you start a divorce. It’s the one way that we tell people they should really try to get divorced, which is don’t involve the court until you’re ready to get divorced. In other words, until you have a signed agreement and you’re ready to get divorced. The beauty of doing it in this way through mediation is that you get to dictate the schedule. You decide when the mediations occur. You at, you decide when they start, when they stop. You know, when you go to court, you’re told when you have to go and how long you have to be there. So it’s really a preferred way to proceed.

The last that we offer is consulting. This is where an attorney isn’t actively representing you. They’re just giving you advice. So, you’re just calling them up or coming into the office. And just getting advice on various parts of the process or discussing your rights with an attorney who really is only there to give you advice. That’s obviously very inexpensive because the attorney is not really doing anything, but it really can be dangerous because you don’t have an attorney actively representing you in the moment. You’re getting maybe advice before you go to court or before you go somewhere. Um, but that can be dangerous. Also, attorneys are not allowed ethically to ghost write things for you. So, you can’t really go to an attorney and say, draft all these things for me and then I’m going to send them to the court under my own name. That’s not allowed. So, for all those reasons, consulting is really the type of solution that is really limited in terms of who really would benefit from it. There certainly are people that would benefit from it. But, more often than not, we see people looking for consulting when they can’t really afford even to have an attorney represent them in the most basic way to mediation.

COME BACK SOON FOR PART II OF THE WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT……..