How to Find the Best Divorce Lawyer in Ann Arbor Michigan?  - Ann Arbor Divorce Lawyer

It’s a trick question. You don’t want to locate the greatest divorce lawyer in Ann Arbor, Michigan There are a lot of divorce attorneys in Ann Arbor that will do a just as great effort for you. It would be out of the question to figure which one is the “best.”

The correct concern for you, the Ann Arbor divorce buyer, is precisely how to identify one of those Ann Arbor top divorce lawyers at the right levels of representation and price for the facts of your unique scenario – while staying away from every one of the typical, and sometimes unsafe, pitfalls of the Ann Arbor divorce lawyer hiring choice.

If you recognize what those pitfalls are (I will inform you in this short article) and if you have the proper attitude, namely that you want to make your Ann Arbor divorce lawyer fit your situation and not enable the lawyer to require your situation to fit his/her stiff practice profile, after that you increase greatly your chances of nailing the Ann Arbor divorce lawyer employing choice. Getting you through that choice efficiently is the intention of this article.

First, let’s specify the 4 factors to stay clear of:

1. Avoid Do-It-Yourself Divorce:

It is feasible, repeat POSSIBLE, to acquire totally free family law documents from Michigan’s judicial council or family court websites. Those totally free divorce documents are going to be blank, of course. You can then attempt to finish and file the documents at your regional Washtenaw County divorce court on your own without expert assistance. This is possible – however extremely improbable, extremely difficult, confusing, discouraging and exceptionally slow.

DIY divorce would certainly be practically unattainable, and not smart even to try, in any kind of  complicated or disputed family law action. It would certainly be extremely improbable to be a success if you have minor children of the marriage or have any kind of assets or financial debts to be itemized in the case or have custody, visitation or assistance arrangements in your case. It would absolutely be foolish in a matter entailing domestic physical violence. DIY would certainly also be difficult if you work or if you position any kind of worth on your own time. Family law forms and procedures are made by lawyers to puzzle you to ensure that you hire – a lawyer.

Please excuse me if I don’t invest too much time on the do it yourself threat. My experience on the cutting edge of California divorce for the past 40+ years is that individuals that begin the divorce process with the intent to attempt to obtain a cost-free divorce are going to  attempt DIY divorce no matter what. Somehow, most likely economic, there is nothing I‘ve had the ability to discover to convince them not to.

DIY in Family Law is typically false affordability. You WILL almost certainly screw it up, and screwed-up cases are far more challenging and expensive to deal with and conclude. Don’t play this game. The system is made by lawyers to puzzle you and require you to employ a divorce lawyer. There are currently cost-efficient choices readily available– see listed below. Don’t go it alone in Divorce or Family Law.

2. Avoid Traditional Ann Arbor Family Law Attorneys if Your Case is Likely to be Uncontested:

An uncontested divorce is merely one in which the participants will not be disputing any kind of concerns, including the divorce itself. The participants don’t have to be cheerful and they don’t have to care for each other. They are either entirely or mainly in agreement on all concerns and are smart enough to recognize that conventional full-representation divorce lawyers (with substantial retainers and billable hrs) would certainly be the only victors if they disputed reasonably trivial concerns in their divorce.

Conventional complete representation by a neighborhood Ann Arbor divorce lawyer is when that lawyer will represent you in all facets of your divorce case. It is extremely likely to be a very good service, however it is way over-priced.

If you have a disputed matter, a complex matter, a high-value matter or a matter that involves domestic violence or the threat of domestic violence, complete representation by a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer is NOT to be evaded. It is a requirement.

A disputed matter means that you and your spouse/partner are disputing ANY issue in the matter. A complicated matter contains legal intricacies such as tax concerns, current business concerns, a special needs child of the marriage or any one of countless additional complicated legal issues. A high-value case indicates that your marital estate is large. There is no particular dollar limit. Absolutely, if you have a high 7-figure net marital estate or greater, that is a high-value matter.

If you think that you have a disputed,complex or high-value matter, you do. Employ an experienced and high priced Ann Arbor divorce lawyer for complete conventional representation. Search for a certified Family Law specialist. You will not be sorry you did.

If you do NOT have a disputed, complex, high-value or domestic violence case, you do NOT require conventional complete representation by a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer. In fact, under those conditions, complete legal representation by a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer ends up being a danger to your economic position. Steer clear of it.

Naturally, if you call or email a conventional Ann Arbor divorce lawyer, they will not tell you that you do not require their complete representation service. In fact, they will attempt to terrify the crap out of you by advising you that you undeniably require their service which your case will get screwed up without it.

That could well happen– even in a non-DIY case. I’ll share with you next how to steer clear of perhaps 90+% of the prospective threat of getting your case screwed up if you don’t go DIY and you DON’T employ a conventional Ann Arbor divorce lawyer on a complete representation basis.

Your case could likewise perhaps get screwed up if you DID employ a complete representation Ann Arbor divorce lawyer. That’s likewise not probable, but it could possibly occur.

Nevertheless, what will DEFINITELY occur if you employ a conventional complete representation Ann Arbor divorce lawyer to handle your uncontested divorce or family law case is that you will get screwed economically. Your case may be dealt with effectively, but you will overbuy needless services and you will pay too much for them.

There’s no requirement for that to occur anymore. Your parents had few other choices on their family law employing choices. Your grandparents had no other choices. You have numerous valid choices to make your Ann Arbor uncontested divorce lawyer employing choice based upon the nature and truths of your case, not upon the BMW payments of Ann Arbor divorce lawyers. Keep reading.

3. Avoid Unqualified Unregulated Online Divorce Mills:

This is without a doubt the biggest danger you face in your employing choice in terms of damage to your future legal and economic security. Non-lawyer online divorce is a big market. And it is exceptionally unsafe to your legal and economic future.

Online divorce mills provide slick sites, wicked-cool divorce software, costs lower than MOST lawyers, no legal recommendations, no legal understanding, no professional licensing, no legal education, no code of ethics, no malpractice insurance coverage, no understanding of Washtenaw County divorce procedures, no local understanding about Washtenaw County rules of court, local Washtenaw County forms, local practices or the policies of specific local judges in the Ann Arbor region and no expert interest in you or your case. And all within a completely unregulated Wild-West market rampant with all sort of incompetence, price fraud, and up-selling.

Online divorce mill costs average about $300, but what you get for that $300 charge is extremely little– just prepared Michigan divorce documents. Any other services offered are all up-sold on the basis that as soon as they’ve got you hooked, what are you going to do – leave money already invested? You are at their mercy and you are entirely unguarded. And they recognize it!

See the Online Divorce Association of America’s site for a good assessment of just a few of the more common scams and up-sells to be found in the online divorce market.

If you choose an online divorce mill, you’ll always be contending with low-level, untrained, indifferent, high turn-over personnel, call center employees and folks in India, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Mexico or some other state. Nobody will perform any kind of analysis on your case to secure you and any minor children from future legal or financial damage. Client assistance will be dreadful due to the fact that it doesn’t have to be anything else. You will never be able to meet with anybody at an online divorce mill as it is most likely that none lie in Ann Arbor and even in Michigan

If you hire an online divorce mill thinking you will conserve yourself a few dollars and you and your household end up spending for their mistakes for many years, that is NOT an inexpensive divorce!

4. Avoid Me-Too Lawyer Advertising Platforms:

Me-Too Lawyer Advertising Platforms are online lawyer directory sites like Avvo, FindLaw, LegalZoom, Justia, Google Screened, Google Business Profile (formerly GMB) and now even Yelp. This is the newest mistake to stay clear of in your Ann Arbor divorce lawyer employing choice.

Nevertheless, the prospective damage here is not huge– nowhere near the damage done consistently by non-lawyer online divorce mills or indeed the damage likely to be done by you to your own case with DIY divorce.

If you hire a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer you found on a mass-lawyer finder platform, you’re going to pay too much to some extent, depending on how much the lawyer is paying the lawyer finder platform, but not as terribly as if you had hired a conventional complete representation Ann Arbor family law lawyer directly.

Clearly, you don’t wish to employ a conventional complete representation Ann Arbor divorce lawyer you discover on a mass-lawyer platform. That would compound your over-payment, but the important element here is that you don’t wish to employ a conventional complete representation Ann Arbor divorce lawyer to handle your basic uncontested divorce, no matter where you discover that lawyer!!

The threat with employing a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer that you discover ONLY on a mass-lawyer platform is that you’re working with an uninspired Ann Arbor divorce lawyer– a drone who just stands in line with all other Ann Arbor divorce lawyers and HOPES that s/he will get your trade but does nothing to differentiate himself or herself from the Ann Arbor lawyer-crowd. That lawyer does nothing to influence you that s/he is the standout solution to your case. You don’t want to have that lawyer.

You want to have a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer who is imaginative, vibrant, one-of-a-kind, classy and business-savvy. In fact, why would you hire a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer to safeguard your own legal and economic interests when s/he does not even look after his/her own business interests strongly and decisively? You’re trying to find a divorce lawyer who purposefully sets himself or herself apart from the Ann Arbor lawyer-crowd and does NOT blend in by joining Avvo and doing nothing else.

Mass-lawyer finder platforms like Avvo are completely free to join, which is why every divorce lawyer in Washtenaw County will have joined. So you must not disqualify a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer only because s/he has an Avvo account.

Nevertheless, you must not assume that such a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer is extremely smart or business-savvy either. The problem is that while these mass-lawyer platforms are completely free for the lawyer to enroll in, the lawyer will need to then begin to pay constantly increasing costs on a bid-basis, always contending against other local Washtenaw County divorce lawyers, to be seen on the leading page of the platform’s site. If that lawyer doesn’t pay more, s/he’ll be on page 3 or 5 of the mass-lawyer site in even a medium-sized town. If that lawyer doesn’t keep bidding up his/her costs, she’ll not get enough business to stay in business.

It’s a winner-take-all system with the leading extremely few lawyers in each town taking almost all clients– based upon how much advertising costs they can pay– not based upon how excellent they are or on how they have actually configured their offerings to suit your case. The barrier to that me-too lawyer getting your business is the quantity of money s/he is prepared to pay to get it, not the quality and skill of his/her service offerings.

If that me-too divorce lawyer in Ann Arbor pays more to the mass-lawyer finder company and keeps paying more, s/he’ll get a highlighted position on the platform’s site and will get more sales, but his/her costs of acquiring cases will continuously increase while his/her costs are reasonably fixed by the flat demand for consumer law services such as divorce.

The Ann Arbor divorce lawyer who plays the Avvo pay-to-play scheme will always require more and more lower revenue cases just to stay on top of business costs. You don’t desire that business-foolishness in somebody you will trust with your legal and economic future.

And yes, that lawyer is going to use the same brain to look after your case as s/he utilized to screw his/her own business into the ground.

How to Find the Best Ann Arbor Divorce Lawyer – Ann Arbor Divorce Lawyer

So above are 4 things to keep clear of: do it yourself divorce, conventional full-service lawyer representation in basic uncontested cases, unlicensed and unregulated online divorce mills and boring me-too drone lawyers who are truly bad at business.

So what do you actually look for in a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer?

Before I inform you, I wish to set the stage by offering you two amazing data that I did not accept when I first saw them. These are game-changers in the legal profession and you need to maximize them in your Ann Arbor divorce lawyer employing choice:

1. There is a glut of lawyers on the market and it’s serious. According to the ABA National Lawyer Population Survey, in 2017, the whole legal profession lost some 1400 jobs while almost 20,000 brand new lawyers have been added – just in 2017. And the ABA has just certified a huge new law school down in Texas. And this has been trending for years. And all of this surplus of supply while the demand for legal services has been flat or, as in the case of family law, diminishing because of DIY divorce and the overwhelming success of fraudulent and incompetent online divorce mills (both caused by the Internet).
2. From 1988 to 2012, the average solo lawyer practitioner’s yearly income, after adjusting for inflation, dropped from $70,747 to $49,130. Read that last sentence again. This is based on published data from the IRS compiled from solo lawyer practitioner tax returns for the years specified. The legal profession is in serious economic decline. More so in areas of consumer law, like uncontested divorce, where the Internet has reduced the knowledge gap between lawyers and consumers.

What to Look For:

Business-savvy lawyers who want to participate in the divorce industry are under considerable price and business-model pressure right now. Take advantage! You want to hire a Ann Arbor divorce lawyer who has responded to this professional crisis in the following ways.

You want as many of the following factors as you can find in one Ann Arbor divorce attorney:

1. Licensed local Ann Arbor divorce attorney (not an unlicensed out-of-state online divorce mill);
2. Offers unbundled services in uncontested cases– this suggests that you just buy the legal services your case actually requires. You will usually do your own filing of docs at court and schedule the service of filed docs on your spouse/partner. The divorce lawyer will review your docs before they are filed, identify problem issues in your case and recommend the best choices based upon legal recommendations and local understanding. If you call a lawyer and ask about unbundled services and you can see that they don’t understand or don’t desire you to understand, just hang up. They don’t yet get it. Move on. Don’t educate them.
3. Uses online divorce software that enables you to log into a client portal and inputall of the information in your case.  This not only saves time and money, but it actually empowers you in your own case. You are the source of all informationin your case. Likewise, there’s no 50-page hard copyone-size-fits-all questionnaire for you to complete in the lawyer’s waiting area.
4. Uses other cloud-based software and apps – listen for buzz phrases like “client portal” and “virtual law practice.” Ask about e-filing and listen closely to determine if the lawyer even knows what it is.
5. Doesn’t have a fancy office in a downtown high-rise or across from the courthouse. You don’t want to pay those rents. This is even more so during C-19. You’re looking for a lawyer in a strip mall or even one who works at home and has one or more shared office arrangements for client meetings. Don’t use a lawyer who has obviously big expenses – YOU pay them!
6. Look for a competitive edge. Look for a lawyer who understands what is going on around him or her in his or her chosen profession. The practice of law is legal education, knowledge and experience attached to a business model. If you call a lawyer and ask about unbundled services or online divorce interviews and they act like law practice is ONLY a noble profession and not a competitive business, hang up. Don’t educate them. They don’t yet get it.
7. Specialization – You don’t want to hire a lawyer who is a jack-of-all-trades on the basis that s/he might get hired for something. There are many different areas of law practice. They are very different from each other. Specialization is the name of the game today. Look at the lawyer’s website. It will tell you whether s/he is trying to get work in numerous areas of practice. It doesn’t matter if the lawyer handles maybe 2 areas of law, particularly if they are both areas of consumer law, such as divorce and bankruptcy. However, if you see that the primary practice area is DUI or personal injury or criminal law and family law appears to be an add-on, move on. Don’t explain.  Just move on. They do not handle enough family law to be any good.  They use family law as an unwanted add-on.  They will not be experienced enough and they will have to charge you a lot because you will be one of very few family law clients. Also, personal injury law paydays are huge and criminal law cases are critical to someone’s personal freedom. Where do you think your family law case will fit into that lawyer’s busy day?
8. Look for a spark – You are looking for a lawyer who has positioned himself or herself in such a way as to convince you that s/he is the unique local divorce lawyer in Ann Arbor that is best suited to resolving your case and your specific problems. This is hard to define, but you will understand if that lawyer makes this connection with you. If there is no such spark on the first exposure, there never will be. Move on.
9. Look for Unique Action – Obviously, this does not involve ONLY standing in line with every other lawyer at Avvo or similar me-too lawyer platforms. Avvo owns all of that attorney’s blog posts and may control his or her entire marketing outreach. Avvo takes money from that lawyer in order to sign up more lawyers in Ann Arbor lawyer-crowd. You’re looking for someone with style who stands out, not melds in. 1-800-DIVORCE is exclusive in Ann Arbor. There is only one 1-800-DIVORCE lawyer in Ann Arbor. Check here or complete the web form below to see if Ann Arbor has a 1-800-DIVORCE.

Divorce and Other Family Law Services Are Available Through 1-800-DIVORCE in Most Medium to Large Cities, Including the Following Cities, As Well As in Ann Arbor:

Farmington Hills, Detroit, Warren, Sterling Heights, Toledo, Lansing, Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, South Bend, Akron, Dayton, Erie, Chicago, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Naperville, Joliet, Pittsburgh, Elgin, Buffalo, Green Bay, Rockford, Madison, Louisville, Lexington, Springfield, Davenport, Evansville