Hi Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. And this is a 2nd video where I’m talking about the use of private judges, when you shouldn’t, when you should, and what the differences are.
Specifically this particular case was a client who became a client but who called me after having a consultation with a divorce attorney who basically sold her a bill of goods essentially. And this is what they were told.
They were sold on the fact that they should use a private judge for their divorce and were told specifically that if you go through the normal divorce channels that your divorce is going to take 2 years through the court system. And they had an amicable uncontested divorce case so the information that they were provided by this law firm was absolutely incorrect.
It does not take 2 years to get through a divorce, especially when it’s amicable, we generally will do a case that is amicable or parties have all their agreements in place in a matter of hours, in fact people will come in we’ll get through their entire divorce case in a matter of hours.
Of this other client who signed up with me he said Tim we have all our agreements how soon can you get your paperwork done and I said how soon can you get this too me? And he sent it over and I said I’ll get this done before end of business today.
Now procedurally through the court process I can get it through the court in 1 to 3 months that the faster with court processing time frames that we can get through even though there’s a 6 month cooling off period, we can still get the paperwork done quicker.
So, it’s not taking 2 years. Here was the issue, here was the reason they were explaining this, this client was told if you use a private judge your divorce can be done in a shorter period of time more like 6 months as opposed to 2 years.
So, what they were doing was, hey if you go this route it’s going to take 2 years, use our service for a private judge and we’ll get you through faster. That’s a bad sales approach, that’s all there doing. That’s their little sales gimmick, it’s going to take you 2 years but hire us to do your divorce and hire our private judge and we’ll take care of all the paperwork and get you through the system faster.
I don’t care how fast you guys come up with your agreement you cannot circumvent procedure. You still have to file the case, serve it, do your disclosures, do all the things that have to get done in order to finalize your divorce and using a private judge, that judge cannot then go to court and say here we’re not going to serve it we don’t need to file it, we have an agreement, you can’t circumvent it.
So, a private judge is very much like mediation in that they’re going to make a decision or mediation is more they are going to help you come up with your agreement. Whereas the private judge is a judge and make rulings on your case. But I don’t think it’s a good way to go unless you like I was reading this article from another law firm, unless you have, there’s pros and cons just know that.
If you have a case where you don’t want to go through the public venue of the court system and you want it to be heard by a private judge that would be the way to go. But not for any reasons of speed, not for any reasons of cost effectiveness, none of that.
So, this gal had actually already signed up with the service and she said, why would you think they would tell me this and I’m starting to feel like they made it sound so difficult that they put me into this higher package pricing service that they had with a private judge under the auspice that it would be faster. And that’s how they were selling their bill of goods.
And I just think it’s a bad way to go. In fact, she canceled service for them and hired us because we’re going to have her case done this week. No private judge and one 5th of the cost and we’re going to get her paperwork done in just a couple of days and then we’re going to put it through the court system. Not going to take 2 years, probably going to take 30 to 60 days to get her judgment processed with the courts.
So just be careful what your listening too I really love like this client that just signed up with us, they had done all her homework, watched our videos, our podcast, read our blog, read my book just about everything I didn’t have to say a word, she basically was talking and then you said this on this video, this on that video and my job was done, I said your hired because she knew everything I knew.
And that’s perfect, that’s exactly what you should be doing when you are about to go through a divorce process, because there’s a lot of bad information out there and unfortunately while we like to put a lot of information to education everybody there’s a lot of people are using that information and using it to sell you a bill of goods.
Tim Blankenship with divorce661.com. Feel free to call me for a free consultation and you could do so by scheduling it right through our website at divorce661.com.
