What happened with last night's Floyd Mayweather/Logan Paul 8 round exhibition fight was like the results people sometimes experience in divorce court.
Many people felt that they “knew” in advance what the outcome of that fight would be: Mayweather was going to win by knocking Paul out.
That was a “guarantee.”
To many, the only question was “which round would it happen in?”
After all, could it really be hard to predict what would happen when Floyd, a retired pro boxer who had won all 50 of his professional fights, entered the ring against a novice “boxer”?
Mayweather and Floyd fought for all 8 rounds.
But there was no knockout.
How could that be?
Well, there are many explanations I guess, but my point is that this result is similar to what happens when a divorce case goes to trial.
You never know what the outcome of a divorce trial will be until the case has been decided by the Judge.
Have you ever experienced a situation where you “knew” that something was going to happen only to find out later that you were wrong?
I’ve learned as a trial lawyer with 35 years of experience that even obsessive preparation of a case does not guarantee that I will get what I want or what seems like a guaranteed result if the case goes to trial before a judge.
Sometimes judges just don’t decide a given case the way that I “knew” that the judge would decide it.
More than once I have seen two lawyers leave a courtroom after fighting it out, with both of them shaking their heads in the hallway saying something along the line of “how the hell did THAT just happen?”
Well, judges are people, and people sometimes see things differently.
The same thing is true with criminal trials.
Take the OJ Simpson murder case.
Most people felt that they “knew” that the jury would return a guilty verdict against Simpson. The evidence including the bloody glove, Detective Mark Fuhrman, the motive…all of it.
But that jury did not convict Simpson.
Rather, they found him to be “not guilty.”
The moral of the story is that if you have a divorce case pending, work hard at trying to settle it fairly in a way that both sides can live with the results. There are too many uncertainties for you to be able to feel that you “know” what the outcome of your case will be if it goes to trial.
The fact is that you don’t know what a judge will do. And neither does your lawyer. And neither does anyone else.
And about that lawyer who guarantees you that she “knows” what a judge will do if the case goes to trial?
My advice is don’t hire her.
Rather, get a lawyer who admits the uncomfortable reality that no one knows what a judge is going to do.
Ever.
And that’s why you want your lawyer to fully prepare for trial but fight like hell to settle.