Getting divorced, like getting married, can be a major life stressor. In theory, it should be a simple process. Two partners did their best to create a successful partnership, but for reasons they may not fully understand, things didn’t work out, and now they’re going their separate ways to a better future. In theory, they should come apart from the way they came together— with only the utmost respect for the other.

But the reality is complicated, and that makes divorce more complicated too. Many people though going through it have bad feelings towards their spouse, and these feelings cloud the way they think about their spouse and the choices they make in their divorce.

Urgency, anger, and fear can drive decision-making, making it hard to think clearly about finding the right divorce attorney to guide you through the maze. Most people just take the path of least resistance—hiring the best attorney they can afford and hoping for the best. But that doesn’t always go well.

In my practice, I have taken over many cases for clients who were seduced by pricey “Top Dog” attorneys, thinking they’d get maximum efficiency and firepower against their spouse by paying top dollar. What they found was that their divorce was not ending as quickly as they expected and that as time went on, their marquee-name attorney was no longer representing their best interest because he or she was distracted or had pawned them off to an associate who, although better priced, wasn’t providing the effectiveness they needed.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have worked with many people who stepped into their divorce overconfidently, believing that they had a simple uncontested divorce so there was no need to invest their resources (time, energy, emotion, money) in the process unless things went awry.

Not knowing what they didn’t know, they believed there was no need to be tactical in how they approached the divorce. For instance, they didn’t speak with an attorney before moving out of the marital home even though they wanted primary custody of the children, not realizing that the move could negatively impact their legal positions if things went south.

I agree that taking a wait-and-see approach to finding legal counsel may work if you can make a clean break in your divorce, a “walk away.” But if you will have post-divorce issues to work out, such as sharing children or financial-support obligations, then, unfortunately, as much as you want to “cut bait and run,” doing that may not be helpful to you in the long term.

If you are one of the many people who will need to resolve post-divorce issues, the decisions you may make now—such things as where you live, what you say to your spouse, and how you handle your children—could impact your divorce and post-divorce life. You need guidance, and you need to make sure that you are hiring the right type of attorney for you.

I say for you because the attorney-client relationship is a very personal one. You most likely will reveal things to your attorney that you might not even tell your best friends—your dark secrets, the intimate details of your finances, and much more. You have to feel comfortable doing that. That’s why there is no one-size-fits-all approach to choosing a divorce lawyer.

But I’d like to share a couple of basic guidelines based on what I’ve seen in my 20-year career: In a difficult divorce, I’d strongly advise you consider hiring a trusted advisor over an expert for hire and to choose a wise dog of an attorney over a bulldog divorce attorney. Let me explain what I mean.

Expert for Hire v. Trusted Advisor

You want an attorney to give you advice that’s in your best interests, which means that the advice is both sound and affordable for you. But expert-for-hire attorneys skimp on affordability. Given a choice between a simple, efficient solution to your problem and one that will eat up court and preparation time, the guns for hire will choose the one that runs up the clock so they’ll make more money.

This is common because the system is set up to reward selling time, which can be given a specific value, but it doesn’t necessarily reward providing good advice, which may be priceless. Fortunately, there are also skilled attorneys who will put you first, look past their own financial self-interests, and tell you the truth, unvarnished.

How do you recognize those trusted advisors? By the questions they ask and the straight-on way they talk with you about your priorities, your tolerance for risk, and your divorce budget—how much time, money, energy, and emotion you are willing and able to invest in the divorce. They’ll talk to you directly about the costs, risks, and trade-offs involved in the choices they offer you, and they’ll show you that they know what’s most important to you.

Trusted advisors truly get to know you, learn about your interests, goals, and personality, and they use their legal expertise and personal understanding of your unique situation to give you the best solutions to your problems based on your risk tolerance and budget.

These attorneys are as astute, kind and clever as a waiter who sees two poor college sweethearts come into his restaurant—the most expensive one in town—to celebrate an important milestone (3rd date, ha!) Recognizing that they don’t necessarily have the money for the experience, he tells them: “The chef is so honored that you have chosen our restaurant for your night out that she wants to cook you the same meal she gives the people closest to her, if the couple will allow her such honor.” The price for the two of them, the waiter adds, will be $40 including wine which is not even the price of one of the entrees at the restaurant.

The college couple revels in the special treatment and enjoys their dinner in the restaurant’s amazing ambiance, not knowing that their feast was the same one given to the restaurant staff earlier in the day.

The astute waiter and chef have “lost money on the deal,” but with their kind, resourceful solution, they have created clients for life.

That’s the human, long-term perspective they share with the trusted advisors.

Bulldog v. Wisedog

When the media portray the best divorce attorney to retain, I often hear them talking about stereotypical “tough guys”—the sharks, the barracudas, the pit bulls. When you face them in your divorce, those are the lawyers who pile on aggressive, high-pressure tactics from the get-go, fighting every issue, compromising on nothing, working to pulverize your credibility, all so you’ll just cave in and agree to a settlement that gives them everything they want (which is everything).

I often go up against this type of attorney, and if a divorce is resolved in the first phase, before the rule of law imposes its will, I would agree that their “shock and awe” approach to litigation gives them a distinct advantage—it scares most people into submission.

But—and here is the big but—divorce cases have two phases. If you can weather the shock-and-awe storm, a judge resolves your divorce, and when this happens, I would bet on a wise dog of an attorney any day of the week. The reason is simple: they do only what is necessary to get the job done.

To see what I am talking about, think about the 2017 boxing match between a bulldog mixed martial artist—Connor McGregor, arguably one of the best MMA fighters of all time—and a wise-dog boxer, Floyd Mayweather Jr., arguably one of the best boxers of all time.

In the first phase of that boxing match, if you include all of the publicity, promotion, and first few rounds of the fight, it is fair to say that bulldog Connor McGregor “won” with his “shock and awe” theatrics.

But as in a divorce, there was a second phase to the boxing contest. McGregor had counted on his pre-match bravado and bullying to faze and cripple Mayweather early on for an easy knock-out, and he spent all his energy there. But he realized to his dismay that to win, he’d have to go the distance with Mayweather. He wasn’t prepared for that, and Mayweather calmly out-boxed him in the second phase to take the contest.  

This is usually what happens in most of my cases. The other spouse hires a name-brand, aggressive bulldog of an attorney who believes that my client will cave based on a shock-and-awe approach to litigation, and when that does not work, we move to phase two of the proceedings. This is no fun for the other spouse, who is paying top dollar to the bulldog and has racked up a towering pile of bills for a failed strategy. Now the spouse gets more reasonable, and I can calmly bargain for and get what my client needs. My ego would like sometimes to repay the bulldog in kind for the bruising first-round attacks by being nasty, brash, and aggressive, but experience tells me that the best attorneys are classy, tactical, and shrewd. They’re wise dogs.

What separates winners in a difficult divorce is just a few points here or there, and you are giving yourself the best chances of doing that if you can be composed and if your attorney can be composed too. That’s why you want the wise dog attorney. When the wise dog is your trusted advisor, you’re in very good hands.