The advice I give when someone asks how to pick a lawyer
If you are getting divorced either way, the single most useful thing you can do is find a lawyer you are comfortable with who is willing to tell you no.
Not a lawyer who tells you your case is strong. Not one who agrees that what the other side did was outrageous. You do not need a lawyer to merely amplify your feelings, but rather someone who will advise you through this system from an empathetic but detached perspective. You need a lawyer who will sit across from you and say, that may not happen, and here is why. So let’s try this other approach that takes care of your needs and can work.
Why the lawyer who agrees with everything is the expensive one
It is very easy to sell someone what they already believe. In a first meeting, when a person is angry and frightened and has told the story a dozen times, agreeing is the path of least resistance — and it closes the sale.
The bill for that arrives later. You spend months and a great deal of money pursuing something that was never realistically available, and you find out at mediation or at trial, when your options have narrowed and your money is gone. The lawyer who told you what you wanted to hear got paid the whole way.
An early no is cheap. A late no is not.
You want someone who gives you advice, not affirmation. The two feel very different in the moment, and only one of them is worth paying for.
Two routes to the same place
Everyone in a divorce is going to the same destination: a signed decree. You will get there. The only real questions are which route you take and whether the money lasts the trip.
One route runs on emotion. Every provocation gets a response. Weak allegations get chased because they feel important. Positions harden because someone is angry, and the anger gets fed rather than managed. Each of those choices carries a price — a hearing, a round of discovery, another exchange of letters — and the fees climb faster than anyone expected. The money runs out before the decree is signed.
The other route ends in the same place. The emotion is real and gets acknowledged, but it does not drive. Money is spent where it changes the outcome and not where it does not. And what you have is enough to finish.
Here is the part that makes this a fair criticism rather than a cheap one: you cannot price those decisions, and your lawyer can. You have no way to know what an aggressive letter costs you, or what chasing an allegation you cannot prove will add to the bill. Your lawyer knows precisely. A lawyer who lets a client spend into a fight they cannot afford to finish — or encourages it, because the client is upset and agreeing is easier — is making a decision with information the client does not have.
That is what we mean when we say we will tell you no. It is not caution. It is getting you to the same place with the resources you actually have. How the money itself works — and why a retainer is not your total fee — is set out separately.
Do not walk in fixed on an outcome
Most people arrive with a picture of how it ends. A specific schedule, a specific number, the house. That picture is usually assembled from what happened to a friend, what they read, and what feels fair.
The problem is not that the picture is wrong. It is that it is a position, and positions are brittle. Underneath it is something more durable — the actual thing you need. Stability for your children. Not having to sell the house while they are still in school. Not being financially dependent on someone you no longer trust. Being able to stop thinking about this.
Those are your interests, and they are what matter. Once we know them, there is usually more than one arrangement that serves them — and some of those arrangements are better for you than the one you walked in describing, because they are easier to reach, cheaper to get, and more likely to hold. Fixation on positions limits creativity.
That is the real reason to hire someone with experience. Not to argue harder for your picture. To know the options you have not thought of, and to see and work to avoid the problems that show up in year three.
Why I work from interests rather than from the courthouse steps
Some lawyers approach every case as a risk calculation against trial: here is what a judge might do, here is the probability, negotiate from there.
That analysis matters, and I do it. What a court is likely to order is the floor under every negotiation, and a lawyer who does not know that floor is negotiating blind. But building the whole case around it misses something obvious: very few cases actually go to final trial. The overwhelming majority resolve, most prior to or during mediation. A strategy designed for the outcome that almost never happens will cost you a great deal on the way to the outcome that usually does.
So the work is mostly this: figure out what you actually need, find the arrangements that deliver it, understand what a court would do if we could not agree, and use that knowledge to get there without going. Trial is a tool. It is not the plan.
What this looks like in practice
It means the first meeting includes things you did not want to hear. It means we will ask what you are trying to protect before we ask what you want. It means that if what you are asking for is not available, you will be told in September rather than the following June.
And it means that when we do push, we are pushing on the things that actually change your life — not on every point available to us. We choose our battles.
It also means being clear about what a first meeting is and is not. Our page on what happens at a free consultation sets that out plainly.
If that is the kind of representation you want
Bring your questions and your situation, and expect a straight answer. David Eaker has practiced family law in North Texas since 1999 and can help you. Consultations are free. Call (972) 772-8005.
