To Make Divorce Preparation More Efficient and Effective, Use Timelines
Lawyers rarely have a financial incentive to be efficient. They bill by the hour, so they usually prepare slowly, and you may wind up paying them more than you need to.
One way to get the most value from your lawyer’s time is to identify highly valuable tasks your attorney can handle and take more low-value items, such as gathering information, yourself.
What you’re both trying to do is turn the facts of your life and your spouse’s behavior into a compelling story or argument, but unfortunately, many people collect information in a scattershot way that makes pulling together a story difficult. They send facts to their attorney as they happen. For example, they text their attorney if a spouse cancels parenting time or email if a parent misses a dental appointment.
If your attorney doesn’t have systems for organizing these bits as they come in, when it comes time to use them to build the narrative you’ll present to the Court, they’ll have to sort through their inboxes to sift out this information, which has been sitting there for weeks, if not months or longer.
It takes time to do this, and it’s not high-value time. Fortunately, there are simple tools that can help you easily do some of the preliminary gathering and sorting yourself.
One thing you can easily do to optimize your lawyer’s time is to create a timeline that helps both of you visualize information.
Making information accessible and organized this way increases the chances that your attorney will be able to see patterns and more easily create an argument that becomes a significant theme in your case.
One tool that I have found helpful for years is an online timeline maker called Preceden, designed by Matt Mazur. He’s a former lieutenant in the Air Force, so you know he is one orderly guy.
What I like about Preceden is that it is easy to use and online, so it’s accessible from different devices. You can try out the product for free, and by the time you’ve added a few events to a timeline, you’ll have a feel for the simple interface.
If you’re visually oriented, you’ll appreciate the way Preceden allows you to create “layers” on the timeline that help organize similar information in your chronology. (The colored “stripes” on the sample above show what that looks like.)
You can have one layer for background information such as marriage dates, birth dates, etc. You can have a layer for settlement information to track the timing and frequency of offers. You can also have a layer for bad acts to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks when you’re preparing for a hearing.
It’s as quick to add information to a timeline like this as it is to fire off a text or e-mail, and you wind up with something many times more useful.
A low-tech tool like a timeline can keep you on top of information, aid your attorney, and let you become a more effective team in achieving what is important to you during your divorce. I highly recommend giving it a try.