Over the last 5 years of providing our divorce service in California, I have noticed, and commented before, that as we get closer to the Holidays that the amount of divorce cases that are filed slow.
It makes sense that going into Thanksgiving and through Christmas and the end of the year that people decide to put their problems on hold so they can have some semblance or normalcy during the holidays.
In fact, while the new divorce filings go down, we see many of our clients wanting to finalize their divorce paperwork a few weeks prior to Thanksgiving so they too can have a somewhat normal holiday and not have to think about divorce.
I used to wonder why the divorce filings slowed and the first year thought it was possibly my marketing or something like that. But over the years this has happened each and every year. I have spoke to several family law attorneys as well and they too get slower over the holidays.
I am able to track my website visits during November and December and we see an approximately 50% drop in visitors to our website.
Now this year, I have noticed that this has started a few weeks earlier than normal. For instance, in years past, I would notice it start to slow down around the middle of November, right around the 15th through the end of the year. In fact, I have placed a calendar popup for this year on the 15th of November to remind me that business would naturally start to slow.
What was interesting is that it had already started slowing closer to the the 1st of November, 2 weeks earlier than last year.
The only thing I can thing that is different is the 2016 Election. I think that a lot of people are keeping their eye on the election and are concerned for whatever reasons they have to be concerned about.
In any case, it is not as if by not filing for divorce during November and December reduces the amount of cases filed. All it does is cause a lot more people to file for divorce when January rolls around, which another trend that people in the divorce business call, “Divorce Season” which then really kicks off starting with Valentines Day when we see a huge uptick in divorce filings.
