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Seven Ways To Survive and Settle Your Divorce or Separation As Soon As You Can And Still Protect Your Legal Rights At The Same Time

by: Thomas O’Malley
Jurisdiction: Ontario (Canada)

Many of the tens of thousands of Canadian who separate or divorce each year fear they cannot settle their cases without a long drawn-out court battle.

“You don’t have to fear in most cases that you cannot settle your separation or divorce in an orderly and reasonable fashion,” advises experienced family law and divorce lawyer, Thomas O’Malley, author of Canadian Divorce and Separation Made Easier and the Easy Canadian Divorce Kit. “You just have to make sure that you follow some key principles that will help you reach a friendly settlement with your spouse.”

O’Malley offers the following tips for settling your separation and divorce as quickly as possible with a reasonable outcome for all parties involved:

• Hire an experienced family law or divorce lawyer immediately. Most spouses procrastinate or delay in trying to settle their separation and divorce legal issues because they don’t understand their legal rights. An experienced family law lawyer will explain your options so you can take action to resolve your case without delay.
• Create a game plan or blueprint. Figure out what you want–what kind of custody arrangements make sense in your situation? What do you need financially? The old expression, “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”, applies.
• Educate yourself and ask your family law lawyer good questions. The more you know about family law and separation and divorce legal issues, the more you can work effectively with your lawyer to get reasonable results and a good settlement.
• Get full financial disclosure from your spouse. You cannot get a reasonable settlement unless your spouse clearly revealing the nature and extent of bank accounts, business interests, stocks, bonds, properties and so on.
• Start by negotiating a separation agreement. This is a private contract between you and your spouse that settles all family law issues, including custody of your children, child support, spousal support, and property issues.
• Set time lines for this negotiation-your lawyer can help with this. In most cases, you will get a reasonable settlement with your spouse sooner rather than later when you have established a time frame for the process.
• Use court as a last resort. Go to court only when your spouse persists in pursuing an unreasonable position on an important issue, such as child custody or spousal support.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 12:18 am and is filed under Family Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.