The recent, ongoing news about coronavirus certainly has a lot of us concerned. Though it’s not yet officially a pandemic, it is the type of disease that can definitely get to pandemic status. There are still questions to be answered about its severity and its fatality rate, as well as how to best fight it and recover from it should you contract it.
But even though the information might be changing as more cases come to light and as more and more scientists accumulate more and more hours studying the disease, one of the things we should all be mindful of is to listen to the experts.
Americans will find a way to meet any challenge they must face. We are a country of true grit, and we will unite to support each other, and strangers’ families, in times of a threat to the entire country.
In dealing with a potentially big public health crisis, especially in a situation where a lot of advice is being given by people with varying degrees of knowledge and expertise, it’s best to trust the experts. When I’m getting my coronavirus updates, I’m looking to the WHO and CDC and other officials who specialize in public health.
Though it’s not as potentially life and death as coronavirus, divorce does have a major impact on the people it’s happening to, whether it’s those in the process of divorce or those who are adjusting to their post-divorce lives and their divorce decrees. As you’re going through your divorce, you might have a “hunch” about what you think you should do, or close family and friends might, or people who have gone through divorce before might. It can feel helpful to listen to those people. They might, you reason, have ideas that can help you in your own divorce.
But divorce is a situation where you should also listen to the experts. In this case, the best expert is a family law who is licensed to settle divorces in your state, who you hire to protect your interests and advocate on your behalf.
You might hear about something you should do or some law that you believe might apply to you, but might find that when you talk about it with a family law, it might not actually be the way to go. For instance, you might have heard about a law in a Michigan divorce that doesn’t work in Texas law, or a legal strategy that worked in 2006 but was affected by a 2013 law change. Texas family lawyers will be up on the Texas Family Code and what’s changed in it.
A family lawyer will let you know what you can’t do in your specific case, but will also let you know what you can do — and you might learn of options or approaches to settling your divorce that you wouldn’t have known about by just talking to friends or family. The Law Office of Lisa A. Vance does a great range of divorces, so they can help with traditional, litigated divorces, or mediated divorces, or collaborative law.
They can even give guidance in so-called “kitchen table” divorces, which, while it’s the family law equivalent of giving yourself surgery, can work if you have agreement with your soon-to-be-ex-spouse about how to settle your divorce, and if you have a lawyer overseeing the agreement and helping you to actually get it to the judge who will finalize it.
Doing a kitchen table divorce by yourself can mean delays in finalizing your divorce, if you don’t do it right or file it right. It also means you might not be accounting for something that you do need to lawyers to help you with — for example, if you are treating inheritance like community property and it should be separate property, that could certainly be something worth listening to experts about and heeding their advice.
Serious matters, like disease and divorce, deserve the expertise of people who make it their lives to be as informed and as up-to-date as possible. And, as people who might be affected by big, potentially life-changing matters, you deserve to hear their expertise and make informed, principled decisions.