As a divorce lawyer, half of my clients are people who are getting divorced.

"Why won't the other divorce attorney negotiate?"

That's what Barbara asked me.

"Steve," she said, "we've been trying to get them to respond to our settlement proposal that I asked you to draft 2 months ago and that you mailed to them 2 months ago. No response.

We've been trying to get them to attend a four way conference to begin a dialogue. No response.

You call and leave messages for his attorney to call you back. You do not get the courtesy of a return call.

Why can't you get the other attorney to negotiate?"

Barbara is a really nice lady.

She didn't deserve the treatment that her husband gave her.

She knew that he had affairs but she did not want the divorce.

Ultimately her husband left her for another woman.

When I'm representing the person who doesn't want the divorce or who doesn't care about it or just wants to be left alone, I don't get the phone calls like the one that I got from Barbara.

If you are going to file for divorce, you should know that there are nine NJ divorce grounds.

It has often been said that 99 out of 100 NJ Divorce Cases are ultimately settled, and that only 1 out of 100 divorce cases in New Jersey actually result in a trial before a Family Court judge.

The way that a case is most often settled is through the use of a custom drafted document called a Matrimonial Settlement Agreement (also called a Property Settlement Agreement (PSA) or an Interspousal Agreement.

There are many names for the same type of document.

Drafting a Matrimonial Settlement Agreement (MSA) in a NJ divorce case is not an easy task. It is sort of the metaphorical equivalent to what a sculptor faces when he sits down to create a sculpture. 

I'm not a sculptor. I have never tried sculpting from a block of rock.

Yet I imagine that if I were a sculptor, I would start with a square block of stone.

I imagine that I would have a general idea of what I intended my final project to ultimately look like before I started chipping away at that stone.

A very nice woman, frightened out of her mind, hired me recently.

She told me how she had been informed by an email from her husband's lawyer an hour earlier that her divorce case was scheduled for TRIAL in 2 days, gave her the address of the courthouse, but told her that she really didn't need to appear in Court.

Why is it so difficult for even a highly experienced divorce lawyer to predict what your divorce will cost?

Of all of the thousands of people that I have consulted with over the past 28 years as a New Jersey Divorce Lawyer, not one has ever said to me that one of their goals as part of the divorce action was to screw up their kids.

What do you think about the idea of people being allowed to spy on each other using GPS tracking devices or cell phone apps?